A village for The Villages? Leesburg, Florida, wrestles with explosive growth.

The city of Leesburg sits on the western border of pastoral Lake County in Central Florida. The county is known for some of the few rolling hills on the Florida peninsula, once covered in the orange groves that fueled the Sunshine State’s economy.

A wave of post-pandemic growth is reshaping the community. Leesburg's planning map shows more than 40,000 residential units — including single-family homes, condos and apartments — approved for development. If every residence were built and filled with the average American household of 2.5 people in the next five years, it would triple the city's population by the next census count.

It’s a vision that angers Brian Hibbard, 56, who moved to Leesburg when he was 5. “There’s only so much room,” he said from a stool at Wolf Branch Brewing Co. on Main Street, the short avenue of shops and restaurants that make up the city's quaint downtown. “The only people coming in who think it’s going to be a great place are Northerners.”

But city manager Al Minner said people take the planning map too literally, arguing that most of the approved developments will never actually come to fruition. “The ones that are actually swinging a hammer are few and far between,” he said.

Squeezed between The Villages, a mega retirement community to the west, and the expanding Orlando market to the east, Leesburg’s future rests on a razor’s edge between development pressures and resident concerns.

Since 2020, the population of Lake County has risen 13% to 424,462, according to Census Bureau estimates, with four communities seeing rises over 30%.

Leesburg grew about 40% in that time, from 27,000 in 2020 to 37,815 in 2024. The population jumped 18.5% from 2023 to 2024 alone, making it the third fastest-growing city in the U.S., according to the Census. Only the Texas cities of Princeton (30.6%) and Fulshear (26.9%) were faster.

Marvin Puryear, a senior broker with Central Florida-based Saunders Real Estate, said the growth is “multifaceted,” coming from every direction and for various reasons.

To the east, metropolitan Orlando has also exploded with growth, adding more than 144,000 new residents since 2020, according to the Census. (Some of that includes growth in Lake County.) Developers seeking less expensive land for bedroom communities have pushed west into Lake County, where new highway connections have made commuting the long distances more reasonable.

The largest contributor to Leesburg’s growth is its western neighbor, The Villages, a massive, high-profile retirement community. Maryland-based RCLCO Real Estate Consulting named the deed-restricted development the best-selling master-planned community in the U.S. for the third year in a row in 2024.

Of the 40,000 units on Leesburg’s development map, 14,185 are in The Villages of West Lake, land The Villages bought from the city in 2017.

But its impact is not simply the addition of more Villages homes. Much of the development in Leesburg, especially the new apartment buildings, is to house the service and healthcare workers needed to staff operations in The Villages, according to Puryear.

“You’ve got everything that comes with it,” he said. “Service comes with it. A lot of those people [who serve The Villages] can’t live there,” either because they can’t afford it or because they are not old enough to buy a house in the retirement community.

Frank Stivender, the manager of the Leesburg Historical Museum who also worked in banking in The Villages, sees the relationship as more symbiotic. "When you throw a rock in a pond, you get ripples," Stivender said. "That's what Leesburg is getting from The Villages."

Many of the city's businesses, especially restaurants, get regular customers from The Villages, people who never cook for themselves, he said. "The biggest waste of space in The Villages is a stove."

He estimated that 50% of Leesburg residents work at The Villages or with Villagers in some capacity.

A representative for The Villages was unable to provide comment for this story.

Evander and Calvin Lee settled in the area in 1857. Sick of making the arduous, roughly 40-mile, preinterstate journey to Ocala, the nearest city with a dry goods purveyor at the time, Calvin went to New York to create a supply chain for a new store in the burgeoning frontier land. When asked where to ship the goods, Calvin wrote the new town's name as "Leesburg."

That's according to Stivender, the great-great-grandnephew of the Brothers Lee. (His great-great-grandmother was their sister.) His great-grandfather was the first town marshal. "Only worked one month," Stivender said. "He quit. There wasn't any tax revenue to pay him."

The need for growth was an immediate concern from the outset. Stivender doesn't know whether the Lees raised crops or ranched to survive because the main focus was populating the town. "[Evander] was more into encouraging people to come down here," he said.

Leesburg's first claim to fame was as the watermelon capital of Florida, holding a festival for the fruit from 1930 to 1957. The town also had many of the orange and citrus groves that were the economic driver for Lake County. For most of the 20th century, Leesburg was the largest municipality in the county.

The county’s transition from agriculture to a suburban service economy began with a series of devastating freezes in the early 1980s. After that, citrus greening — a fruit-killing tree disease — started wreaking havoc in the industry, beginning in the mid-2000s and continuing to this day. Stivender said he recently had to remove a seven-acre grove from his property because of the disease.

The original 320-acre homestead Evander purchased for $3,300 is now home to a health campus from the University of Florida. (Gainesville, the home of UF, is about 75 miles north.) The property is just off U.S. 441, a busy corridor of one-story strip malls, stores and offices, still with undeveloped grassy gaps sporting moss-covered live oaks, palms and wetlands.

Nearby Clermont overtook Leesburg in population in the 2010s.

Minner, a former manager for the communities of Sebastian and Fort Meade, said that when Leesburg hired him in 2013, the city was trying to regain some of the influence it had when it was one of the largest municipalities in the county.

“A lot of decisions were done … to encourage growth, trying to get the engine going again,” he said.

Puryear, the real estate broker, said residential developers have been “full steam ahead” on buying land in Lake County. “As long as there is demand and market conditions are good, they’ll keep buying,” he said.

Brian Brunhofer, regional president of homebuilder Taylor Morrison, which has several incoming projects in the county, said his company is bullish on continuing growth. "We do continue to believe Lake County in general is a great place for long-term growth, and we will continue to target this county in our strategic plans," Brunhofer said.

Many of the anticipated developments in Leesburg are large master-planned communities. The 1,088-acre Whispering Hills, approved in 2022, could bring in as many as 2,942 homes and apartments and may add 451,000 square feet of commercial space for a town center, according to plans filed with the city. Other amenities in the community are slated to include a clubhouse, dog parks and a petting zoo.

Stivender has felt the growth around him: A subdivision on one side of his 13-acre property brought in 50 homes, while one coming in on the other side is expected to add 75.

Meanwhile, Dix Developments bought 84 acres in Leesburg in July for $6.6 million, according to county records. Plans for that project include 163 single-family homes and 152 twin villas. That will be part of the 752-acre Oak Ridge project by the developer that will eventually contain more than 1,200 residences.

"A substantial addition to our portfolio in a time when few developers are buying, we remain bullish in all areas of our strategic growth plan," CEO James Dicks said in an email to Homes.com.

For anyone hoping growth might be controlled by market forces, expansion from The Villages is much more certain to come in, Minner said. “That’s Villages' growth. You can bank on that. They know [that] when they build houses, they’re going to sell.”

While the city of Leesburg issues roughly 30 certificates of occupancy per month (certifying homes as ready for move-ins), The Villages of West Lake grants 250 to 300, according to Minner.

The community built out more than 3,200 homes in a year, Minner said, but just that development added more than $750 million in taxable value to the city.

“The Villages is going to take over Lake County," according to Hibbard, who worries that city services and resources will get overwhelmed by the influx. “They can’t keep up. You’re destroying Florida, period.”

It’s a complaint, Minner said, the city hears regularly. “We hear it every meeting,” he said. “We’re overloading our schools. We’re overloading our water supply. We’re overloading our sewage capacity.”

Puryear, the local broker, said it's a common refrain throughout Lake County. “All the municipalities in the county are getting tremendous pushback on growth,” he said. “The jurisdictions are getting a lot of pressure not to approve stuff.”

Minner points out that all the development, even though it has been approved, is speculative. “[Land buyers] are going out and putting contracts on these large chunks of land, and they get entitlements to help sell it,” he said. He estimates that only 2 in 10 ever make it to the building phase.

Backing up that assertion, Puryear said interest has begun to slow in the area, adding that some major homebuilders were quietly voicing concerns over falling sales and rising inventory. “Overall, residential development is moving forward, but cautiously and selectively,” he said.

Leesburg’s hands are tied regarding how much the city can tell people what they can’t do on land they own, Minner said. “We value capitalism in the United States.”

He said he has produced several public lectures explaining the limits of the city in denying development permits.

The city doesn’t get enough credit for managing what does go in, Minner said, noting that it has a capacity plan through 2030.

“I can’t stress enough how good a job I think we’ve done with managing the situation,” he said. “I think we’re unfairly being yelled and screamed at, but that comes with the job.”

He said the city requirements for new roads or water usage work ahead to prevent issues. Concurrence rules mean developers must prove schools, roads, sewer systems and more have the capacity before a project is approved.

A 2024 concurrency report from Lake County Schools shows that some schools are operating near, at or above their capacities. Leesburg High School, for example, had room for a mere 51 additional students.

The county opened a new K-8 academy in 2025 and is expanding capacity at several other schools, according to Kelly Randall, executive director of facilities and planning for Lake County Schools.

"Through our school concurrency process and constant communication with local cities and the county, Lake County Schools monitors growth and development from the very earliest stages through issuance of a Certificate of Occupancy," Randall said. "This allows us to forecast areas of high growth and respond by placing projects in our capital improvements plan to ensure we have seats for students when they show up."

Leesburg is also using zoning changes to alter development. In January, the city amended its comprehensive plan to designate 131 acres of downtown as mixed-use to lure development toward the city center and reduce sprawl.

Stivender said that he knows people who have moved to Georgia and the Carolinas because they lament the loss of the town's bucolic character. But he says that's what should happen. "If you don't like it, move," he said. "If you can tolerate it, stay put."

But Hibbard curses the people who moved to the area in an attempt to capture that rustic spirit.

“They’re moving here because it’s quiet,” he said. “It’s not anymore. You think you’re looking for this? You destroyed it.”