Six thousand houses in a coal town: a field guide to Ten Trails

Ten minutes north of Enumclaw on SR 169, past the roundabout that is there because of it, a town is being built on top of a town that was built on top of a coal seam. Black Diamond had 4,151 people at the 2010 census. The state counted 7,435 on April 1, 2025. Nearly all of the difference lives in Ten Trails, and the developer is about a quarter of the way through.

If you searched "Ten Trails houses," you wanted prices, builders and a verdict. Here they are, with the story underneath.

What it is

Ten Trails is the marketing name for The Villages, one of two master planned developments Black Diamond approved in 2010. The Villages permit covers 1,196 acres, a maximum of 4,800 homes and 775,000 square feet of retail, office and light industrial space. Its sibling, Lawson Hills, covers 371 acres, 1,250 homes and 390,000 square feet. Together: 6,050 homes and about 1.17 million square feet of commercial on roughly 1,570 acres, which the brochures round to 2,200 with open space. In 2024 Oakpointe added a 157 acre parcel called Miner's Ridge without adding a house.

The developer is Oakpointe Communities of Bellevue, chief executive Brian Ross, which applied as YarrowBay. By September 2024 it reported more than 1,050 homes sold, 176 apartments and 61 rental houses, 40 acres of parks, and called itself 20 percent done. Seattle magazine put it at about 1,600 homes as of December 2025. Lawson Hills has not started; last October Oakpointe filed to cut 54 acres of it into 18 commercial lots.

What a house costs, read September 16, 2026

From the builders' own pages on that date; they will not survive the month.

Lennar sells the most, as Ten Trails Mountain View. Townhomes start at $399,950 for 1,298 square feet on Anchor Avenue SE and top out at $524,950. The Cottage Collection, 1,526 to 2,481 square feet, is $614,950 to $809,950 with several plans sold out. The Manor Collection, four and five bedrooms on 2,238 to 3,137 square feet, is $669,950 to $864,950.

Toll Brothers runs Regency at Ten Trails, 403 single storey houses for buyers 55 and over, with a clubhouse, indoor pool and pickleball courts. Plans start at $624,995 for 1,340 square feet and climb through $684,995 and $744,995 to $1,085,995 for the 2,060 square foot Horizon.

Conner Homes, which built the first house here, returned in July with Village Towns: 53 townhomes of 1,750 to 1,930 square feet, from the $600,000s. Richmond American is listed as a fourth builder but its site blocked our reader, so no price. Pulte is not on the list.

For scale: the average sale was about $525,000 in 2018 and $750,000 in 2021, and a brokerage page showed a six month resale median of $731,075. Enumclaw's median in our earlier piece on moving here was $625,000. A Ten Trails townhome starts well under both.

What is built and what is owed

Open now: Civic Park, 1.2 acres with a stage and free WiFi; trails through retained forest; gigabit fiber; a Welcome Center at 32607 Willow Avenue SE. Black Diamond Elementary, rebuilt and expanded, opened in August 2017 for 430 students.

Under construction: the town center, where Visconsi Companies signed Safeway to a 58,000 square foot store in June 2025 with an opening pencilled in for late 2026, plus a food truck park.

Owed: the development agreement is a ratchet. At 800 homes Oakpointe had to deliver a soccer field, a tennis court and a basketball court and a half. At 3,600 it must have built five of each, a track, a gymnasium and a community center. In September 2024 it said the center would start "coming out of the ground" in early 2025. We found no page saying it has.

Nine years of lawyers

YarrowBay applied in 2009. On August 24, 2010 the council voted unanimously, with more than a hundred conditions. Groundbreaking was projected for spring 2011.

Instead a citizens group, Toward Responsible Development, appealed. A state growth board said in February 2011 that the city had used the wrong process; the Court of Appeals reversed that in December 2011, the month the council adopted the development agreements. The last petitions died in 2012 and 2014.

Then the city fought itself. In 2016 a new council majority went after the consultants reviewing Oakpointe's permits, and that December the developer sued three of them personally, Pat Pepper, Erika Morgan and Brian Weber, alleging 135 open meetings violations at $500 apiece. Ross called it "a dereliction of duty"; Pepper called serving it mid meeting "a political stunt." Pepper was recalled by voters in 2017 and the other two did not run again, and the Courier-Herald reported a 2019 ruling that the three had violated the open meetings law.

On July 9, 2018, Marty and Leyah McFadden got the keys to a Conner house, the first family in. "It feels like that resistance made this a better place," Marty McFadden said. Ross, in 2021: "we've got a solid 10, 12, 14 years left."

The coal underneath

Black Diamond exists because a Nortonville, California coal company sent a man north in 1880. Mine 14 opened in 1884, and by 1900 nearly 3,500 people lived here. Mine 14 ran until 1917 on ten levels to 1,800 feet, about 1,250 feet below sea level, and produced three million tons, a quarter of everything the district ever dug. Bill Kombol, whose family ran the last mines, writes that its workings ran west from Morganville "almost to the east edge of the new Ten Trails development." Almost. The subdivision stops where the tunnels do.

The Pacific Coast Company bought Eugene Lawson's mines in 1898 and the town in 1904. On November 6, 1910 the Lawson mine exploded and killed 16 men, most earning $3.15 a day; five bodies were never brought up. The second master planned development is named Lawson Hills.

City code requires anyone building over old workings to hire an engineer, consult the state's mine maps and grade the hazard low, moderate or severe before the first footing. Oakpointe's 2024 filing for Miner's Ridge, the name is not a coincidence, reported no unstable ground. Ten Trails, the name, does not mention coal at all.

The road, and Enumclaw's stake

SR 169 is the plateau's route to Renton and I-405, and Ten Trails feeds it. The agreement made Oakpointe pay about $10 million for two roundabouts on the highway, at Roberts Drive and Pipeline Road, begun in October 2023. Maple Valley's city manager, Laura Philpot, told Black Diamond's council last October she wanted the plan's rules kept to "help us properly mitigate the transportation impacts both our communities will face." Enumclaw drivers, who share the same two lanes, were not asked.

Schools are where the bill reaches this side of the plateau. Ten Trails sits in the Enumclaw School District, Black Diamond Elementary is full, and the district buses Ten Trails children to Westwood on SE 416th, its northernmost school. In March 2025 it counted 2,780 units in the pipeline, 80 percent in Black Diamond, while asking voters for a $12 million maintenance levy.

The fix came without a bond. On November 24, 2025 the board traded its claim to a school site inside the development for $40 million, with Oakpointe financing up to $25 million more, repaid only from mitigation fees it will owe anyway. Ground broke June 26, 2026 on Ten Trails Parkway SE for Evergreen Elementary, 600 students, opening fall 2027. Ross had said the year before that "the community desperately needs a school." He was also the one who could pay for it.

What the neighbors say

Seattle magazine described "two Black Diamonds side by side," the old town west of Railroad Avenue and the new one. Last November's election proved it. John Adler won the mayor's office by 24 votes; he lost nearly every precinct in old Black Diamond, some two to one, and carried the three Ten Trails precincts three to one. At the current pace, the new town outvotes the old one before the community center opens.

The pitch, in Oakpointe's words, is "urban style and rural simplicity." The realist's version, from a Black Diamond agent in Seattle magazine: "It's rural, but it's not isolated." Both are true. So is this: the plan calls for 6,050 homes, about 1,600 exist, and every one of the rest will drive past Enumclaw's turnoff to a highway built for a coal town of 3,500.