Riverstone, Texas - A Local Area Guide
A 3,700-acre community wrapped around 200 acres of lakes, split between two cities
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Riverstone stretches from State Highway 6 on the northeast down to the Brazos River on the southwest, and unlike most communities in this part of Fort Bend County, it doesn't belong entirely to one city. Most of it sits in unincorporated land split between the extraterritorial jurisdictions of Sugar Land and Missouri City, with pieces of it actually inside each city's limits. This page is a plain guide to that place. For the full record, the Riverstone page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
A community split between two cities
Riverstone covers 3,700 acres and is meant to eventually house about 18,000 residents across 6,000 homes. About 60% of that land, and most of the homes still to come, sit in Sugar Land's extraterritorial jurisdiction, while the earliest development — roughly 500 homes — went up in Missouri City's ETJ instead. That split even shows up in the mail: Riverstone spans ZIP codes 77459 and 77479, served by the Missouri City and Sugar Land post offices respectively, and some Missouri City properties end up with Sugar Land mailing addresses because of the overlap.
How Riverstone got built
Development began in 2001 under the Johnson Development Corporation, which set the master plan and then brought in multiple builders — including Taylor Morrison and Meritage Homes — to fill in individual neighborhoods over time rather than building everything under one name. That approach kept Riverstone growing steadily rather than in one single push: the community sold 441 houses in 2016 alone, enough to rank it No. 20 among the highest-selling subdivisions in the entire Houston area by 2017, a ranking it still held among the top 25 as of 2018.
The lakes and the levees
Water shapes Riverstone more than almost any other community in the area. Well over 200 acres of artificial lakes run through its neighborhoods, part of 500 acres of total recreational space that also includes walking trails and parks. The Club at Riverstone, the community's central recreational hub, has an 8,000-square-foot clubhouse, eight tennis courts and a water park.
That same closeness to water cut the other way in 2017. Nearly 600 homes in Riverstone flooded during Hurricane Harvey, when heavy rainfall coincided with record flood levels on the nearby Brazos River, which forms the community's southwestern boundary behind protective levees. The response took years: in May 2023, Fort Bend County held a ribbon-cutting for a $9.1 million expansion of the Steep Bank Creek Pump Station, nearly tripling its capacity from 80,000 to 230,000 gallons per minute.
Schools and everyday life
For its first fifteen years, Riverstone had no schools of its own, with students zoned to campuses outside the community. That changed in August 2016, when Anne McCormick Sullivan Elementary opened as Riverstone's first on-site school, named for a firefighter who died in the 2013 Southwest Inn fire in Houston. Sonal Bhuchar Elementary followed in 2023 as the second. Day to day, most residents shop at Stella at Riverstone, a commercial hub anchored by a 100,000-square-foot Kroger at University Boulevard and LJ Parkway.
That is Riverstone: a community built by several different developers over two decades, wrapped around its own lakes, and split down the middle between two cities that both claim a piece of it.