The 26 Acres Selling in South Park and the 200 Still Waiting on a Vote
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
Three houses went up this spring on land south of Jackson that not long ago was still growing hay. The aerial photos the Jackson Hole News&Guide ran in April show framing lumber and fresh sidewalks where cattle used to graze. It looks like ordinary Jackson Hole growth. It isn't.
The land is part of the old Jackson Hole Hereford Ranch, and the family that owns it has tried to build here before. Twice, those attempts went nowhere. What's different this time isn't the family, the market, or even the buyers. It's a zoning line drawn decades ago that splits this single ranch into land that can be sold as house lots today and land that still can't, no matter how badly anyone wants it to.
If you're evaluating land in South Park this fall, that line matters more than the acreage total or the family name on the deed.
The Jackson Hole Hereford Ranch dates to 1928, when Bruce Porter, a Town Square pharmacist, bought his first Herefords with help from his father-in-law. The land itself, off South Park Loop Road, followed in the 1930s. Porter's son-in-law Ralph Gill took over management in 1961 and later served as mayor of Jackson. The cattle operation ran for decades until 2004, when brucellosis, likely picked up from South Park elk, forced much of the herd to slaughter. In the early 2010s, the ranch split along family lines, with Robert Gill and Elizabeth Lockhart each taking a share of what had been a single 900-acre trust.
Since then the two branches have gone separate ways. The Lockharts have kept ranching. The Gills have spent years trying to turn part of their share into a neighborhood, and the record of that effort explains why South Park land doesn't behave like a single market. It behaves like two markets sharing a fence line.
The parcel now called Porter Ranch is small: 26 acres in the northwest corner of the family's land, platted into 79 lots. It carries Suburban zoning, an entitlement that was already in place before anyone drew a single house pad. That zoning is the reason lots there could go to market as soon as infrastructure was in and why, as of early April 2026, 62 of the 79 lots were still listed for sale through the Gills' development company, JHHR Development II LLC, with the rest sold or under contract to a mix of local buyers and small builders.
The rest of the family's holding, more than 200 acres, carries Rural zoning that allows one home for every 35 acres. At that density, subdividing it into house lots isn't legal, so nothing short of a rezoning can unlock it, and rezoning in Teton County means public hearings, commissioner votes, and years of negotiation over what the community gets in return.
That negotiation has been running since at least 1994, when the ranch first floated housing on this land. It hit a wall in 2002, when Jackson voters rejected a referendum to annex a large piece of the ranch into town for 1,850 homes and nearly half a million square feet of commercial space. It picked back up in 2020, when the Gills voluntarily recorded a covenant on the land title requiring that 65 percent of any future lots be deed-restricted for local workforce housing, a step the family's attorney framed as consistent with a history of civic gestures that already included donating land for the hospital and high school. In May 2025, Teton County commissioners approved the resulting neighborhood plan in a 4-1 vote, clearing a path toward roughly 600 homes, most of them reserved for local workers. Commissioner Luther Propst cast the lone no vote, arguing the deal shortchanged the amount of land actually available for workforce housing once roads and school exactions were subtracted. In February 2026, commissioners approved a road easement across the family's land, another procedural step the project needed before construction could begin. At that meeting, the family's attorney told commissioners only that 2026 was the year they hoped to deliver on the plan, not a date that was guaranteed, and said full county approval that fall would still leave roughly a year of infrastructure work before homes could follow.
Two parcels. One family. A twenty-six-acre pocket that's already selling and a two-hundred-acre stretch that's still working through the approvals a much larger, much more consequential project requires.
Brett McPeak, the Jackson Hole Sotheby's broker working alongside family member JJ Gill to sell Porter Ranch lots, put the smaller project in context for the News&Guide this spring, calling it the first development of its kind in nearly three decades and naming Melody Ranch as the last comparable new neighborhood in South Park. That comparison is worth sitting with. Melody Ranch was platted in 1995 on a former cattle ranch, with more than 70 percent of the acreage set aside as common space around homesites ranging from a third of an acre to nearly a full acre. Porter Ranch is a tighter, more conventional grid, closer in spirit to a modern in-fill subdivision than to Melody Ranch's park-like layout, but it's the first true successor in the same corridor in thirty years, which tells you how rarely new, buildable ground shows up in South Park at all.
Lots in Porter Ranch are priced between $700,000 and $1.2 million, connected to the town's water and sewer system, and fronted by paved streets. Lot sizes are modest by South Park standards. One 0.28-acre lot, for example, allows a maximum footprint of 3,363 square feet including a garage, which puts these closer to an efficient in-town buildable envelope than to the half-acre-plus lots common in older South Park subdivisions.
The early buyers reflect that. Max and Diana Petrovski, longtime valley renters, bought a lot to build their first owned home. Shane Wilson, a Pinedale-based builder who runs Wilson Design + Build, bought two lots and told the News&Guide the design rules on Porter Ranch aren't especially restrictive, which keeps his construction costs more predictable. He's aiming for durable, well-built homes rather than volume, noting that what it costs to build twenty homes in Sublette County buys four or five in Jackson Hole. McPeak has said most of the new owners are existing valley residents planning to live there, with only a handful of spec builders in the mix so far. That's a different buyer profile than a second-home buyer chasing a Teton view from a large acreage parcel. It's closer to the workforce and professional-family market that has struggled to find any new inventory in South Park at all.
The lesson for a buyer or builder isn't that South Park is suddenly wide open. It's that "South Park land" covers two fundamentally different products right now, and the difference isn't visible from the road.
If you're looking at a lot inside Porter Ranch, you're buying into an entitlement that's already resolved. The zoning fight is over, the infrastructure is in, and the only open question is design and construction cost. If you're hearing about the larger Gill family land to the north, sometimes called Northern South Park, you're looking at a project that could eventually bring hundreds of homes, most of them workforce-restricted, but one that has already taken more than three decades to reach a road easement, with construction still not guaranteed on any fixed date as of the most recent public reporting this spring.
For buyers weighing South Park against established communities like Melody Ranch or 3 Creek Ranch, the practical takeaway is to ask directly what zoning a parcel carries before assuming it can be subdivided or built on in any near-term window. A ranch name, a family with deep local roots, or a broker's confident timeline doesn't change what the zoning map already allows. In South Park, that line has been the difference between a subdivision that broke ground and one that's been debated since before some of today's buyers were born.
Will more market-rate lots become available in South Park soon? The only new market-rate subdivision to reach the market recently is Porter Ranch, and as of early April 2026 the majority of its 79 lots were still available through the family's development entity. The larger Gill family parcel to the north is planned to include market-rate homes alongside deed-restricted workforce units, but it still needs additional county approvals before construction can start, and no firm groundbreaking date has been set.
Why doesn't Porter Ranch include workforce or deed-restricted housing? Porter Ranch sits on a separate 26-acre parcel with existing Suburban zoning that predates the family's 2020 covenant restricting 65 percent of future lots on their remaining land to local workforce housing. That covenant applies to the larger Rural-zoned acreage the family is still working to rezone, not to the parcel Porter Ranch occupies.
How does this affect land values elsewhere in South Park? It doesn't change values so much as it clarifies what buyers are actually comparing. A lot in an established subdivision like Melody Ranch or 3 Creek Ranch carries a resolved entitlement and a track record of resale activity. A parcel tied to the still-pending Gill family plan carries upside if the larger project moves forward, but also years of uncertainty that should be priced into any offer.
Land stories like this one rarely show up on a listing sheet, but they shape what a parcel is actually worth the day you write an offer. If you're weighing land or a lot purchase in South Park, Snake River Sporting Club, or anywhere else in the valley, Sherry Messina can walk you through the zoning and entitlement history behind a specific property before you commit. Schedule Your Jackson Hole Consultation to start with the facts that actually determine buildability.
Trust her to guide you through Jackson Hole’s luxury real estate with expert insight, bold negotiation, and unmatched dedication. With her at your side, your buying or selling journey becomes strategic, seamless, and rewarding.