Ari Rastegar's Largest Development Includes Land Donated for a Public School

In February 2023, the Hays school board voted to accept 11 acres of land carved out of a still-mostly-empty subdivision south of Austin, land that would become the district's 17th elementary school. The subdivision was INF1NITY Square, Ari Rastegar's 318-acre master-planned community in Kyle, Texas, and the vote is a matter of public record: Community Impact reported it the same week it happened, complete with the board's own back-and-forth over how much acreage the developer should hand over.

Ari Rastegar's INF1NITY Square in Kyle, Texas, including the 11-acre school land donation, development timeline, financing, and community plans.

Six Years From Raw Land to Rooftops

The land under both the homes and the school was never a quick flip. Rastegar acquired the site in two separate purchases, in 2019 and 2021, then carried it through zoning approvals that required coordinating city infrastructure before a single lot could be platted, according to Commercial Observer. Rastegar broke ground in March 2023, the same month the school board took up the land-donation request.

The project carried a working name, Inf1nity Estates, before it became INF1NITY Square. Discussing the site with the Austin Business Journal that year, Rastegar called it a model of "futuristic suburban-ism" just north of San Marcos, according to an August 2026 Austin Business Journal report that traced the project's history. The elementary school land sits inside that same 318-acre footprint. It isn't a separate gesture bolted onto the project; it's acreage the district negotiated out of the same land the homes and retail sit on.

The Largest Project in Rastegar's Portfolio

INF1NITY Square sits on 318 acres about 21 miles south of downtown Austin, and it is the biggest single development Rastegar Property Company has undertaken. The plan, once complete, calls for roughly 1,000 single-family homes, 1,400 apartments, 185,000 square feet of commercial space built around a town square, and 61 acres of green space tied into Kyle's citywide Vybe trail network, according to REBusinessOnline.

The first phase alone accounts for 329 single-family lots. Rastegar Capital financed that phase with a $31.7 million construction loan from Trez Capital in 2024, a deal its co-CEO John Hutchinson tied directly to the region's growth: "We look to do loans in cities that have high population growth and high job growth," he said.

How the Donation Actually Got Negotiated

The Community Impact account of the February 2023 board meeting is worth reading closely, because it isn't the clean version a press release would produce. Hays CISD's chief operations officer, Max Cleaver, told the board the district had originally hoped for 13 acres.

That figure matched Sunfield Elementary, which had opened in the district on that footprint in August 2022. City of Kyle feedback on the site plan brought the number down to 11. "We're in a position where we're a donee and not a purchaser, so that's what I was able to negotiate," Cleaver said.

Not every trustee was satisfied. Courtney Runkle pushed for more. The arrangement benefited the developer too, she said: "I'm of the opinion that I would like to continue to have that conversation of additional acreage donated." The board approved 11 acres anyway, and going forward, Hays CISD set its own standard higher: 15 acres for future elementary sites, 30 for middle schools, 100 for high schools. 

From Vacant Lot to a 900-Student Campus

The land sat as acreage on a site plan for two years. By the 2025-26 school year, it was Lamont Ramage Elementary School, a 117,611-square-foot campus at 575 Gristmill Road built to hold 900 students, funded through the $367.8 million bond Hays County voters approved in May 2023, according to Community Impact's coverage of the opening. It held its ribbon-cutting on Aug. 1, 2025, as the district's 17th elementary campus and 28th school overall, named for a former Hays CISD board president, justice of the peace, and mayor of the city of Hays. Rastegar Capital's own account of the donation calls it a reflection of "a belief that sustainable development begins with investing in the next generation." 

The Rest of the Green Space

The 11 acres are the smallest and most specific piece of a larger open-space commitment. INF1NITY Square's plan sets aside 61 acres of green space beyond the school site. That acreage threads into Kyle's Vybe trail system rather than sitting as isolated landscaping around the homes.

The commercial component is built the same way: rather than a standalone strip of retail, the 185,000 square feet of commercial space is organized around a town square meant to function as a shared center for the neighborhood, not a drive-through amenity. For a project built around roughly 2,400 residential units, that split, a fixed-use civic parcel, a connected green network, and a commercial core designed as a gathering point, reads as site planning done before the first house sold, not amenities added to make a later press release easier to write.

For the single-family and multifamily buyers the project is now courting, a school built into the master plan rather than added after the fact is also a practical selling point. Master-planned communities routinely market proximity to schools as part of the pitch; INF1NITY Square is one of the few in the Austin area where the district's board minutes show exactly how that school got there.

Construction Has Caught Up to the Concept

For most of INF1NITY Square's life, the school donation was the most concrete thing about it: a real campus standing on land that had only ever existed as renderings and phase maps everywhere else. That gap closed in 2026.

Homebuilders CastleRock Communities and DRB Homes are actively marketing for-sale homes in the project's first phase, with listed floor plans starting in the mid-$200,000 range, according to the same Austin Business Journal reporting cited above. A filing with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation shows the community's amenity center on track to finish construction in March 2027. Rastegar's team is now working through the second of five planned development phases, according to Tyler Fan, who is listed on Rastegar Capital's site as director of investments for Industry Fintech, the outside firm the company uses to administer investor capital.

"We want to get people living there, and then the commercial and the multifamily will all come after that," Fan said. "The overall plan is still the same."

That sequencing, homes first, commercial and multifamily to follow, mirrors how the school donation played out: a civic commitment locked in years before the surrounding rooftops existed to justify it.

What a School Donation Tells a Diligence-Minded Investor

A land donation to a school district is a specific kind of public record. It shows up in board meeting minutes, in bond-funding documents, in a building with an address and an enrollment number, and in a ribbon-cutting date that a reporter not working for the developer chose to cover. That is a different category of evidence than a company blog post describing itself as community-minded, and it is harder to overstate or walk back later.

Set against the same standard, INF1NITY Square's other markers hold up the same way: a construction loan from an institutional lender who does its own underwriting before it closes, and a homebuilder roster now selling actual listings rather than concept renderings. None of that requires taking Rastegar's own description of the project on faith. Hays CISD's board minutes, the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation's construction filings, and Trez Capital's own underwriting are the kind of records a due-diligence process would pull regardless of what the developer says about itself.

There's also a timeline to check the story against, and it holds up. Two land purchases in 2019 and 2021, an entitlement process before a groundbreaking in March 2023, a school board vote the same month, a construction loan the following year, a campus open by the following fall, and homes for sale by 2026 describe a project that has kept moving through each stage a diligence process would check for, on a schedule long enough that shortcuts would have shown up by now.