400 Homes Coming to Prospect and Handcart, With a Traffic Signal to Match

Stanley Martin Homes is building roughly 400 houses at the corner of Prospect Road and Handcart Road outside Dade City, a project spread over about 130 acres and two phases that the builder expects to take seven to eight years to finish. For families who use Handcart and Prospect as two-lane shortcuts past pastures and a garden center, that means construction traffic first, then rooftops, then a new four-way traffic signal the county has already drawn up plans for.

Pasco County records list the project as Harvest Hills South, with 395 units proposed in plans submitted to the county. Rick Harcrow of Stanley Martin's Tampa office said the work goes well beyond houses: new roads, water and sewer lines, dedicated school sites, and 10-foot-wide multi-use trails running along all of the new roadways.

It is not the only thing going up on that stretch. Casa Fresca Homes is building a separate neighborhood just down Handcart Road, which puts two active builders on the same country corridor at the same time.

What's actually on the books

The county has already put the financing structure in place. Pasco commissioners established the Harvest Hills South Community Development District by ordinance, covering about 332 acres generally south of the Clinton Avenue extension, west of Handcart Road, north of Kiefer Road and east of Curley Road. A CDD lets a developer borrow for the roads, water and sewer up front, then repay the debt through annual assessments on the lots. Those assessments land on the homeowner's bill, on top of regular property taxes, and the amounts are set as the district issues its bonds.

The road network changes too

Handcart Road currently dead-ends at Prospect. Final plans have been completed to push it north from that point, through future villages, to connect with State Road 52. That extension is meant to be the main spine for the wider Harvest Hills area, which means through-traffic that does not exist today.

The signal at Prospect and Handcart is designed as a four-way with pedestrian crossings, according to signalization plans prepared for the county. No construction date has been announced.

All of this sits inside the Villages of Pasadena Hills, the special planning area Pasco adopted years ago to steer growth across more than 20,000 acres between Wesley Chapel, San Antonio and Dade City. The plan divides that land into 13 lettered villages. Harvest Hills South falls in Village H. Developments already approved inside the planning area are expected to add roughly 2,100 homes over the next several years, and the original plan penciled in an elementary school site near the Handcart and Prospect intersection unless the school board decides one is not needed there.

Across the street

Handcart Garden Center and Miss Julie's Cafe both sit near the new neighborhoods. Both are family-owned, and both say they are hopeful the new houses bring more customers through the door.

The reaction around town is not uniform. Residents interviewed at gas stations and grocery stores in Dade City told local media outlets that the growth could mean more jobs and a shot at the kind of large grocery stores east Pasco does not have. Others, several of whom would not speak on camera, said what they expect is more traffic and the slow erasure of the quiet, outdoorsy feel that made them move out here in the first place.

What to watch next

Two things will tell residents how fast this is really moving: when the county schedules construction of the Prospect and Handcart signal, and whether the Pasco County School Board commits to a school site in this stretch of the planning area. Neither has a public date attached yet. Plat and construction-plan reviews for the two phases run through Pasco's development review process, which posts its agendas and project records online at the county's planning and development pages. Anyone who wants to weigh in on the road extension or the school site does it at those meetings, not after the first slab is poured.

We will keep tracking this corridor as phases get platted and the signal gets a start date. For more coverage of what's being built around town, visit Dade City Community Website, follow us on Facebook, and tell us what you're seeing on Handcart Road in our Community Forum. You can read more growth and development stories in our Business & Development section, and more on county decisions in Government & Politics.