Developers buy 488 acres of pristine Chatham farmland for mixed use. Here’s the hitch.
READ MORE
VinFast in NC
Vietnamese automaker VinFast announced in March 2022 that it would open an electric vehicle assembly plant in North Carolina. The battery manufacturing plant will be built in Chatham County and is expected to eventually create 7,500 jobs. It’s the largest economic development announcement in the state’s history. Here is coverage from The News & Observer about the plans.
Expand All
Born and raised in Pittsboro, Edward Holmes Jr. grew up a close friend of the Reeves family, who owned a large dairy farm just outside town. As kids, he recalls, they spent long summer days playing in the fields and fishing in the pond.
Now, decades later, he’d like to develop the property into a mixed-use community spanning hundreds of acres in fast-growing Chatham County.
Holmes, with father-son business partners Buddy and Carter Keller, recently purchased the farm — roughly 488 acres — on the west side of Pittsboro between U.S. Highway 64 Business and Alston Chapel Road.
“I grew up in this community and care about making it a great place to live and work,” Holmes told the N&O this week. “This is a great opportunity for us to contribute to thoughtful development in Pittsboro.”
The price tag: $19.6 million, or $39,600 per acre, according to two deeds filed Dec. 16. But here’s the hitch: They’re buying the property with no entitlements in place. It has no sewer access and very limited water supply, and no guarantees that will change anytime soon.
Pittsboro’s sewer and water capacities are “at capacity,” said Pittsboro’s interim town manager, Hazen Blodgett.
The town has grappled with wastewater woes for years. Blodgett said it’s now in talks to merge water and waste systems with neighboring town Sanford. Proposed plans would require building a 14-mile force main, a pressurized sewer pipe, to transport wastewater to Sanford.
It’s expected to cost around $55 million and would increase the town’s capacity to 2 million gallons of wastewater a day, Blodgett said. It would also allow for developments like those planned for the Reeves farm to be built.
“It looks like we now have a viable solution,” he said, but stressed it would take a few years to come to fruition. “I’m not comfortable saying when it will be operational. There are too many unknowns.”
Meanwhile, Chatham Park and Sanford already have an agreement for a 3 million-gallon-a-day water line. It’s expected to open around 2026. The 7,068-acre development on the east side of Pittsboro is expected to bring thousands of homes, roughly 60,000 people and 22 million square feet of business, medical and commercial construction to the area by 2045.
Homegrown developers
Holmes said he’s felt “positive” about the town’s level of commitment to increasing wastewater capacity and is willing to wait it out. “We bought the property knowing that it could stay in its current state for a long time.”
Holmes and his partners are already active developers in the greater Triangle. For years, Holmes ran Chapel Hill-based Holmes Oil Inc. — the parent company of Cruizers convenience stores — until it was acquired in 2020 by South Carolina-based Refuel Operating Company. Separately, Buddy and Carter Keller are managing members of Sanford-based Carolina Commercial Contractors. Founded in 1998, the company is behind a number of projects and businesses throughout the region, such as the Refuel at Mosaic at Chatham Park and the Green Beagle Lodge for pets in Pittsboro.
Most recently, the trio teamed up to complete the 264-unit apartment complex Sanctuary at Powell Place at 145 Retreat Drive in Pittsboro. It opened in 2021.
Holmes said their latest project is yet to be named and planning is in the early stages. “It’s vague. We’re looking at every option we can at this point. We’d like to have single-family houses, and a mixed-use of multifamily affordable housing or mid-market housing. There’s tremendous demand.”
Another priority is integrating the development with Pittsboro’s downtown. “Instead of creating an exclusive subdivision that’s separate from the town, we want this to be an extension,” he said.
Changing landscape
Once a vast expanse of undeveloped land, Chatham County’s rural landscape of farms and forest has quickly given way to construction in recent years, making it one of the fastest-growing counties in the state.
Data from the U.S. Census showed its population jumped more than 20% over the past 10 years, to 77,889 residents, as residential growth from Chapel Hill and Cary spills into its two biggest towns, Pittsboro and Siler City.
That figure is expected to climb as new projects continue to fill the pipeline. Among them: Vietnamese carmaker VinFast is building a multibillion-dollar production facility on a 2,150-acre “megasite” in Moncure that it says will employ up to 7,500 workers. In Siler City, another 19 miles west of Pittsboro, Wolfspeed, a Durham silicon chip manufacturer, is pouring $5 billion into the rural county and creating 1,800 jobs.
Graham said there’s not enough housing today to meet the current demand. “Let alone the 9,000 more workers expected to be coming to Chatham County.”
He noted the proposed project will be located “exactly halfway” between the VinFast plant in Moncure and Wolfspeed in Siler City and could help to house those future workers. He also didn’t see the project as a competitor to Chatham Park.
“There’s so much growth to come that they’ll both complement each other,” he said. “It also gives Pittsboro an opportunity to balance growth. [We] keep the old downtown in the center by having growth all around, instead of just in one direction.”
This story was originally published January 13, 2023 at 7:00 AM.
