Dive Brief:
- HUD has launched a fair housing investigation into the developers of a master-planned community northeast of Dallas that has been marketed to Muslims, saying they may have engaged in religious and national origin discrimination, per a Friday press release from the federal agency.
- EPIC Real Properties and Community Capital Partners have repeatedly said that the East Plano Islamic Center’s The Meadow development, also known as “EPIC City,” planned for the Josephine, Texas, area is open to all. Multifamily Dive reached out to the developers for comment but did not hear back by publication time.
- On Monday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Double R Municipal Utility District No. 2A of Hunt and Collin Counties and its officers after a series of actions “that appear designed to evade state oversight and support the illegal East Plano Islamic Center real estate development,” per an agency press release. Paxton had also filed a suit to stop the project in December 2025.
Dive Insight:
First proposed in November 2024, the 402-acre The Meadow development would include more than 1,000 single and multifamily homes, a mosque, a K-12 faith-based school, senior housing, an outreach center, commercial developments, sports facilities and a community college, KERA News reported.
However, the project has since received backlash from area residents as well as state officials, particularly as opposition to Islam has become a campaign pillar for some state Republicans on the March 3 GOP primary ballot, The Texas Tribune reported.
Last March, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed the Texas Workforce Commission to investigate the project for violations of the Texas Fair Housing Act. Three more state probes have since been filed, as well as a criminal investigation by the Justice Department over claims of religious discrimination.
The federal investigation was closed in June 2025 after the department found no wrongdoing, and the commission resolved all fair housing allegations in September 2025, KERA News reported. Nonetheless, the Commission filed a complaint with HUD, which the agency recently accepted, according to a Friday press release from Abbott’s office.
“I support HUD Secretary Scott Turner's efforts to hold EPIC and its affiliates accountable to our anti-discrimination laws,” Abbott said. “Together, we will hold anyone involved in violating the law accountable. The Meadow will remain just that—an empty field.”
In September, Community Capital Partners had agreed to participate in fair housing training, review marketing and sales materials to ensure they’re non-discriminatory, implement fair housing policies, only use objective and uniform criteria to vet applicants and to submit reports and documents to the Commission over the next five years, KERA reported. It’s not clear why the Commission later sent a complaint to HUD.
HUD said in the release that the Commission’s complaint detailed a “large-scale pattern of religious discriminatory conduct by the developers,” including:
- Marketing materials that promoted the development as an exclusively Muslim community and that it would represent the epicenter of Islam in America.
- Discriminatory financial terms that required lot owners to subsidize a mosque and Islamic educational centers.
- A bias sales mechanism consisting of a two-tier lottery system for lot sales, which granted lot access to Tier One buyers.
HUD’s new investigation comes weeks after it closed a 2021 investigation into Texas’ distribution of Hurricane Harvey aid, finding claims — based on a theory of disparate impact — that Texas officials discriminated based on race or national origin “baseless and unfounded.” In January, HUD proposed a rule to end its use of disparate-impact theory in fair housing and related civil rights enforcement.
Under the Trump administration, HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity also launched an investigation into Minneapolis’ housing plans and policies in January and a probe into Boston’s housing strategy in December 2025, both over claims that they are racially discriminatory to White people.
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