Highway 6 is paving the way to hotbed of development.(Brief Article)

Tucked away on the southwest side of town is an area generally regarded as remote wooded country. Out along Highway 6, south of Highway 59, residents still have a view of old windmills slowly turning in the breeze.

But these days old farms are dwarfed by nearby wireless communications towers.

Indeed, in the middle of about a 10-mile stretch of Highway 6 sits Missouri City, which has in the last couple of years found itself at the center of a hotbed of real estate activity.

The quietly emerging area of town has been largely overshadowed by its neighbor, First Colony. But that master-planned community recently announced its finish-out after 25 years of residential and commercial building. Now, its neighbors to the east are riding Fort Bend County's next swell of economic development.

Along the southern-most parts of Highway 6 sit country homes nestled in the trees with horses in the yards. But they have new neighbors - bright and gleaming tracts of new homes marked by billboards and flags advertising new homes and a new lifestyle.

"This is the hottest area in town," says Lee Jones, vice president of the land division at Henry S. Miller Commercial.

The bustling area has been on the boiler for quite some time. But only in recent years has growth escalated.

The 1980 census reported a population of about 24,000 in Missouri City, says Wayne Neumann, director of planning for the city. In 1990, the population jumped to about 36,000. Today, just 10 years later, that figure has topped 50,000, he says.

"When you talk about development, it hasn't stopped," he says.

Several factors have fed the fire, according to Neumann, including newly built, as well as proposed, bigger and wider roads, major residential development and the finish-out of First Colony. Businesses, in turn, follow, he …