Live in Kingwood

Kingwood was built as a private venture before it was ever part of Houston. King Ranch and the Friendswood Development Company, an Exxon subsidiary, bought the land in December 1967, opened Trailwood, the first village, in 1971, and sold the place as The Livable Forest: villages with their own pool and park, strung together by greenbelts. This guide uses the City's Kingwood Area super neighborhood, about 19,206 acres including water, which reaches west of U.S. 59 to Sorters Road and north into Montgomery County. The 2020 census counted 65,045 residents on its blocks, 9% more than on the same ground in 2010, and owners lived in 70% of the occupied homes.

Houston arrived at 11:59 p.m. on 31 December 1996. The City began the annexation in 1994, when state law let it proceed without the residents' consent; residents offered to pay it $4 million not to, and sued in federal court. The City took over the water and sewer systems of 13 utility districts and four volunteer fire stations, and the fight is the reason the Legislature rewrote the annexation law in 1999, too late for Kingwood. What stayed the same matters more to a buyer: the schools are still Humble ISD's, the mailing address still says Kingwood, and the deed restrictions are still the village associations', not the City's. Houston has no zoning, so what a lot can become is written in the restrictions recorded on it, which the City Attorney can help enforce.

The water is the constraint. The line runs along the West Fork of the San Jacinto River and the Lake Houston shore, and FEMA's effective maps put 42.7% of the area in the 1% annual chance zone and 24.4% in the floodway itself. Much of that is river and shoreline rather than streets, but 9,130 residents, one in seven, lived on blocks inside the 1% zone in 2020, and 7,375 more in the 0.2% zone. Harvey showed what the map does not: in August 2017 Kingwood High School flooded so badly that its students spent the year at Summer Creek, and it reopened only in March 2018 after repairs Wikipedia puts above $70 million. Wikipedia says the flooding was made worse by the San Jacinto River Authority opening floodgates upstream; this guide has not read the Authority's own account.

The prices sit on either side of the regional median. No index follows the super neighborhood's line. Zillow put the typical home in ZIP code 77345, where 42% of residents live, at $410,195 in August 2026, about flat on the year, and in 77339, which holds 56% of them and reaches beyond Kingwood, at $294,685; the Houston Association of REALTORS' Greater Houston median single-family sale was $330,000. This is not the Houston ISD bill the city pages work out. On a Harris County address with no utility district the 2025 rates add to 2.35932 per $100, and a homestead at the 77345 figure owes about $7,154 a year, against $4,704 at the 77339 figure; the method is on the Houston page. The Humble ISD line is the largest, at 1.1052, but the state's $140,000 school exemption takes a large bite out of it. None of that includes any association fees, and the northern sections in Montgomery County are valued by that county's appraisal district and taxed by New Caney ISD instead.

It is a long way from anything the City runs. The reference point is about 30 km in a straight line from the nearest METRORail station. What Kingwood has instead is METRO's Park & Ride lot on West Lake Houston Parkway, with 1,034 spaces and two routes to downtown in the U.S. 59 HOV lane at $4.50 a trip, and Bush Intercontinental about 16 km to the west-southwest in a straight line. The library is Harris County's, a city-county branch on Bens View Lane.