In March 2024, at a meeting of the Ahwatukee Foothills Village Planning Committee, a Club West resident stood up after watching Blandford Homes lay out its plans for the neighborhood next door. "After seeing your plan and design, I'm very happy to have you as a neighbor," he told the company's land acquisition executive, Tom Lemon.
It was a small moment, but it captured something buyers touring Upper Canyon right now don't always realize. This wasn't a proposal. Nobody on that committee, and nobody on Phoenix City Council, had to approve anything that night. The land had already been zoned for housing years earlier. What Lemon delivered was a courtesy presentation, not a request for permission.
The Zoning Was Never The Holdup
Upper Canyon sits on 373 acres of former State Trust Land at Chandler Boulevard between 19th and 27th Avenues, in the 85045 zip code. The parcel is zoned for single-family residential up to 3.5 homes per acre across most of the site, with a smaller corner set aside for multifamily and commercial use. The single-family portion, which accounts for the bulk of the 1,050 planned houses, carries an entitlement that dates back nearly two decades before construction actually started. The multifamily and townhome corner is on a newer timeline, zoned roughly a decade ago rather than two. Either way, the zoning fight was already over by the time three builders showed up with site plans. For most of that stretch, the land sat quiet while the rest of Ahwatukee filled in around it. It became, without much local fanfare, one of the last unbuilt pieces of a community that has otherwise been fully developed for a generation.
That gap between entitlement and construction matters for anyone evaluating this neighborhood today, because it means Upper Canyon isn't a rezoning fight or a variance request working its way through the system. The public review already happened, decades ago, under different market conditions and probably different neighbors. What buyers are seeing now is a private capital decision by three builders that the market had finally caught up to a zoning entitlement that was sitting on the shelf.
Blandford Homes, D.R. Horton, and Pulte Homes are splitting the build-out between them. The total plan calls for around 1,050 single-family homes, 150 attached townhomes, and 329 multifamily rental units, all behind the same gates. Beyond the homes themselves, the entitlement also obligates the developer to widen South Chandler Boulevard from three lanes to five along the site's western edge, build a stormwater drainage channel, and run a native plant salvage operation before grading. A trail within the development will eventually tie into the Preserve trail system, and the developer has already put $100,000 toward expanding the nearest trailhead on West Chandler Boulevard. None of that happens on a fast timeline. Buyers moving in during early phases should expect a multi-year construction site as a neighbor, not a finished community.
What Three Builders Are Actually Charging
The pricing is where this story gets interesting for anyone comparing Upper Canyon to the resale market around it.
| Builder | Product | Price Range |
|---|---|---|
| D.R. Horton | Single-family homes and duplexes | $610,000 to $723,000 |
| Pulte Homes | Single-story and two-story homes, 1,557 to 3,610 square feet | $659,990 to $1,068,978 |
| Blandford Homes | Single-level and two-story collections | Announced, pricing not yet released |
D.R. Horton and Pulte are both actively pre-selling as of this year, with Pulte showing four move-in-ready homes on its books. Blandford has a marketing page up describing its collections but hasn't released numbers.
Here's the detail that changes the read on this whole project: Ahwatukee Foothills' resale market posted a median sale price of $550,000 over the three months ending June 2026, up modestly from the year before. D.R. Horton's entry price at Upper Canyon starts $60,000 above that. This isn't new construction chasing the bottom of the market to undercut starter resale inventory. It's aimed squarely at the upper half of what's already selling, which is exactly the price band occupied by remodeled four-bedroom homes in Club West and Foothills Club West, the established golf-adjacent neighborhoods that border the site.
That overlap is the actual news here, more than the fact that new homes exist at all. For twenty years, anyone who wanted a newer build in this village had to leave it. Now a buyer choosing between a renovated 1990s home in Foothills Club West and a brand-new Pulte at a similar price point is making a genuinely apples-to-apples decision, on the same streets, for the first time since most of Ahwatukee was built out.
The View Question That's Still Unsettled
The goodwill from that 2024 meeting hasn't held up perfectly since. By January 2026, Ahwatukee's local paper was reporting that Pulte had 15 different home designs on the table, including two-story models, and that the taller floor plans were likely to disrupt mountain views some existing Club West homeowners have relied on for two decades. Nobody has resolved that yet, and there's no zoning mechanism left to resolve it through, because the entitlement that allows the height was locked in long before anyone currently living next door bought their home.
If you're shopping resale in Club West or Foothills Club West right now, that's worth asking about directly. A home whose value has partly rested on an open mountain view for twenty years is exposed to a change nobody voted on. It won't show up in a listing description, and it won't show up in comparable sales from before Upper Canyon broke ground. It only shows up if you ask which lots back up to the new two-story product and walk the site yourself.
There's also a governance question still open. Lemon told the planning committee that Blandford envisions a single master homeowners association covering the community, but it's unclear whether each builder's section will layer its own sub-HOA on top, the way many older Ahwatukee subdivisions are structured. That detail affects monthly costs and architectural review rules, and it's the kind of thing worth confirming with a builder representative directly before writing an offer.
The Ripple Beyond The Homes
New rooftops don't stay contained to a real estate conversation for long. Ahwatukee's local paper reported in January 2026 that Kyrene school officials were weighing campus closures across the district, and that opponents of closing Akimel A-al specifically pointed to Upper Canyon's incoming households as future enrollment that could make that closure unnecessary. Whether that argument carries the day is a school district planning question, not a real estate one, but it's a reminder that a 1,050-home community doesn't just change who's buying and selling nearby. It changes the assumptions everyone else in the village has been planning around.
What This Means If You're Comparing Ahwatukee Neighborhoods
The headline version of this story is "Ahwatukee gets new construction after twenty years," and that's true but incomplete. The fuller version is that the entitlement never went anywhere, the market simply waited until builder margins made sense, and when it arrived, it landed priced against the same resale stock it sits beside rather than beneath it. If you're deciding between new and resale in this part of the valley, the real question isn't which is cheaper. At these prices, they're close enough that the more useful comparison is which risk you'd rather carry: years of active construction and an unresolved view question next to a new build, or committing to a resale home whose backyard view depends on a permit nobody's contesting because there's nothing left to contest.
FAQ
Will Upper Canyon's three builders share one HOA? Blandford's land executive told the planning committee the intent is a single master association, but whether individual sections carry their own sub-HOA on top, similar to older Ahwatukee subdivisions, hasn't been confirmed publicly.
How much of Upper Canyon is for-sale versus rental housing? Of the roughly 1,530 total planned units, about 1,050 are single-family homes and 150 are attached townhomes, both for-sale product. The remaining 329 units are multifamily apartments built for rent within the same gated boundary.
If you're weighing a resale home in Club West or Foothills Club West against new construction next door, or you want a clearer read on how Upper Canyon's pricing compares to what's actually closing in Ahwatukee right now, The Studebaker Group can walk the comparables with you street by street. Schedule a personalized consultation before you write an offer on either side of this fence.
