Rio Rancho Estates, NM

Rio Rancho Estates is an unincorporated Sandoval County CDP that sits alongside the city of Rio Rancho, carrying the name of the much larger land development that started the modern city. AMREP purchased 55,000 acres in the early 1960s and marketed the tract as Rio Rancho Estates; later purchases expanded the platted development to about 92,000 acres. Rio Rancho incorporated in 1981, but the CDP remains a separate county place on the city's southern side. Its local story is about survey lines, half-acre and one-acre lots, and a development name that outlived the city boundary it helped create.