Highlands Ranch Neighborhoods

Where the community started. HRCA's timeline puts the first families in new homes in September 1981, and Northridge Park, the Northridge Recreation Center and Northridge Elementary all opened in 1982, the same year the community's first businesses did. The rec center at 8800 S Broadway was renovated and expanded to 62,600 square feet in 2018 and is the one with the covered tennis pavilion, ten racquetball courts, the aqua climbing wall, the diving well, the hot yoga and martial arts studios and a golf simulator. Northridge Park shares the address and has a bocce court, table tennis, plumbed restrooms and the playground.

The Eastridge Rec Center is also HRCA's administrative office, so this is where you pay assessments in person, where the membership office is, and where the Fall Craft Fair (September 12, 2026) and the Holiday Gift Fair (November 14, 2026) set up. A 2013 renovation redid the cardio and weight areas. It has two indoor pools (lap and youth zero-depth) and two outdoor pools (lap, a youth pool with slides and a wading pool), a large climbing wall, two gyms, a steam room, two outdoor sand volleyball courts, and the Camp HRCA and preschool programs.

The high-ceilinged one, just refreshed: HRCA says the Westridge facility refresh is complete. It has the indoor lacrosse and soccer turf field with dasher boards, a cycling studio, six outdoor pickleball courts, five batting cages and the Tiny Tees ball park, two cold plunges and an infrared sauna, and in summer the zero-depth outdoor "whale" pool with slides. Its pool parking lot is where HRCA put its new Friday Night Market in 2026.

The Recreation Center at Southridge is the newest of the four and the one families with small kids talk about: an indoor current channel and lazy river, a warm-water fitness pool, a zero-depth leisure pool with a water play set, an outdoor resort pool, two gyms, five outdoor tennis courts, a golf and multisport simulator, the pottery studio and the Wildcat Mountain Auditorium with its lighting and sound rig, which is where HRCA holds the pottery sale and its community blood drives.

Shea's gated community on the south edge, opened in 2007 on 1,100 acres per HRCA's timeline, with its own HOA (The Backcountry Association) on top of HRCA. Its own site describes the Sundial House at 10989 Sundial Rim Road: a resort-style pool, a weight room and movement studio, the Campus Lounge restaurant and Pikes Pub, an amphitheater for outdoor yoga, movies and concerts, a Discovery Center with a Lost Coffee shop (6am to 3pm daily), lap and recreation pools open Memorial Day to Labor Day, six parks, and 467 acres of South Rim trails inside the larger wilderness area. Sub-association management is Associa Colorado, 303-232-9200.

The neighborhood around the course HRCA's timeline says broke ground in 1997 as the community's second golf course. The course itself is now the University of Denver Golf Club at Highlands Ranch: an 18-hole, par-72, semi-private layout designed by Hale Irwin, gifted to the University of Denver by the Ron Moore family in 2012, with The Grill as its restaurant. Homes here have their own sub-association (the HOA at Highlands Ranch Golf Club, managed by Associa Colorado, 303-232-9200) in addition to HRCA. Dad "Potato" Clark's 1859 homestead, the first on the ranch, sat where the course is now.

The attached-home part of Highlands Ranch. HRCA's sub-association list includes the Brownstones at Town Center and the Clocktower Residences (condominiums and townhomes) right at Town Center, and Crescendo at Central Park in the newer Central Park development that HRCA's timeline says opened in 2017 as a 100-acre Shea project with more than 250 apartments, 200 single-family homes and the UCHealth campus. Live here and you walk to Civic Green Park, the library at 9292 S Ridgeline Boulevard, the farmers market and the transit center.

Four subdivisions that HRCA bills differently: because they run their own recreation, they pay a $64 annual administrative-only HRCA assessment instead of the $696. Gleneagles Village (a 55-plus community on HRCA's list, managed by Advance HOA Management, 303-482-2213) wraps around The Links golf course on the east side; The Retreat is also listed as 55-plus. HRCA's history adds two retirement communities on the northwest edge: Wind Crest, an Erickson community that opened in 2007, and Vi at Highlands Ranch, opened 2008.