Business & Economy
The new Exxon Mobil campus helped establish a second Energy Corridor.
In 1961, a wealthy European family seeking a haven for their investments purchased 2,000 heavily forested acres north of Houston, part of a three-decadelong buying spree in this country. U.S. real estate, the family had determined, was the world’s best hedge against uncertain economic consequences of the Cold War.
That Texas acreage sat vacant for 47 years, as East-West tensions flared and faltered but never mushroomed into nuclear holocaust. Long after the Berlin Wall and old fears fell away, the property remained untouched. The family was in no rush to sell.
Then in 2008, a mysterious suitor with deep pockets came calling.
“We were contacted by their real estate broker, who indicated he was working for an undisclosed client and they had an interest in our property for a major project, and it was a major company, but they couldn’t say who it was,” said Keith Simon, executive vice president at New York-based Coventry Development Corp., which operates as CDC Houston locally.
“We figured it might be worth responding to.”
Indeed it was. The interested buyer turned out to be Exxon Mobil. It wanted to build a massive corporate campus and consolidate the bulk of its Houston operations, as well as divisions from other parts of the country, on the site just south of The Woodlands. The project would generate billions of dollars in development opportunities, both for the corporate campus and an adjacent residential neighborhood called Springwoods Village.
It also was part of a longerterm trend in which the oil giant had led local corporate real estate into new areas.
Shortly after its founding, the predecessor Humble Oil & Refining Co. bought property in 1919 at Main and Polk, which was then outside Houston’s primary commercial district.
“They were moving out of what is the core of downtown, and they have continued to do that at ever bigger scales,” architectural historian Stephen Fox said.
In 1963, it relocated to another remote part of downtown with a 44-story building on a full city block at 800 Bell. While maintaining that central presence, the company expanded into a midcentury complex near Greenway Plaza and built a $25 million addition in 2004. It was an early and integral part of the Greenspoint master-planned business complex developed in the late 1970s by then-subsidiary Friendswood Development Co.
And its parklike Exxon Chemical campus, set between Memorial Drive and the Katy Freeway near Terry Hershey Park, helped established west Houston’s Energy Corridor when it opened in 1979.
None could compare with what was in store for the far northside property.
After a weeklong meeting with designers and planners in August 2008, CDC Houston came up with a plan to develop Springwoods Village. The $10 billion nature-oriented, walkable mixed-use community around Exxon Mobil would provide access to jobs, retail and entertainment, while preserving the ecosystem along Spring Creek in northern Harris County. Doing away with the need for long commutes enhanced its appeal for sustainability.
Exxon Mobil liked what it heard. In short order, the company purchased 385 acres on the northern edge of the property near Interstate 45 and the Hardy Toll Road to create a state-ofthe-art campus to house 10,000 employees. By October 2015, 20 low-rise buildings totaling 3 million square feet surrounding a three-acre common area were finished. In a company report, Exxon Mobil likened the scale of the project to constructing the equivalent of all of the buildings on the century-old Rice University campus in just five years.
The campus, 25 miles north of downtown, houses a huge concentration of the Irving-based company’s 73,500 global employees. The company, the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas company, maintains additional offices in The Woodlands nearby. Exxon Mobil brought in nearly $269 billion in revenue in 2015.
For the first time, people from various offices across the Houston area, as well as divisions in Fairfax, Va., and Akron, Ohio, from research, chemical, exploration and production, support and other areas work together in an environment designed not only to foster collaboration but also to increase efficiency. All of the office buildings have multistory atriums with areas for employees to gather.
Employees have several dining options, a child development center, a pharmacy, dry cleaning, a nail salon, banking, shopping and a 100,000-squarefoot Wellness Center including a basketball court and personal trainers on site.
The Exxon Mobil campus in Springwoods Village helped established the north Houston region as a second energy corridor. Exxon Mobil joined another Fortune 500 company, Anadarko Petroleum Corp., which had moved out of Greenspoint to establish its headquarters in The Woodlands in 2002.
Springwoods Village landed another publicly traded company, Southwestern Energy, and is building a headquarters for the American Bureau of Shipping in the CityPlace mixed-use development across from Exxon Mobil. New residential communities, hotels, shopping centers and a new hospital have opened or are nearing completion.
The impact of the campus reaches far beyond Springwoods Village. Sections of the Grand Parkway extending westward to U.S. 290 and eastward to U.S. 59 opened in 2016, providing access to thousands of acres for development. CDC Houston donated 125 acres of land in Springwoods Village to facilitate it.
“There’s probably little doubt that the Exxon campus helped to create the tipping point for that to finally happen,” Simon said. “... The Grand Parkway not only helps us and Exxon Mobil, but really the whole region in terms of mobility from residential centers to employer centers, and vice versa.”
Jonathan White, Houston division president for Taylor Morrison Homes, one of several residential builders that have become active in the area since the campus was announced, said having a neighborhood anchored by a major company that’s put down roots as deep as Exxon Mobil has provided stability. It makes others more confident.
“Oil can go up and down and sideways,” White said, “but they’ve invested enough money there that they’re not going anywhere.”