Some serendipity helped create Chatham Park, the 8,200-acre development under construction – with some of it open for business – on 15-501 South a few miles from downtown Pittsboro.
First, creators and developers Tim Smith and Julian “Bubba” Rawl grew up two hours west and two hours east, respectively, from Pittsboro and Chatham County. Smith, an engineering graduate at N.C. State, is from Salisbury where his family was among the founders of Food Lion (then Food Town). Rawl is from Greenville, NC, and was a boots-on-the-ground business entrepreneur who once dreamt of playing football at UNC.
Second, the original 2,000-acre plan for Chatham Park was expanded when SAS co-founder and CEO Jim Goodnight became an investor and partner. Goodnight had about as much personal proximity to Chatham County as his two would-partners.
What is coming out of the ground is a live-work-play community that is one of the largest of its kind in the country. Smith was running an engineering firm in Cary when Goodnight swooped in and bought an entire office part of lots to grow his billion-dollar software company. As it turned out, Rawl owned a piece of land in Cary when Smith was hunting a site for a new Rick Hendricks dealership.
“I flew down to Greenville where Bubba lived,” Smith recalled. “We had lunch at the Greenville Country Club and people were saying ‘congratulations, Bubba!’ all the way in. He had just gotten back from his honeymoon the week before. So, we know how long we’ve been together. We’ve been married as long as he’s been married. We started doing deals together and been together ever since for 39 years.”
With most of their developments in the Raleigh area and in Wilmington, they formed the Preston Development Company and began looking to expand their business footprint. The original owners of Governors Club had abandoned their plans to build another golf community, and Preston purchased that land as their first 1,600 acres for Chatham Park. Then, with Goodnight’s involvement and real estate flagging after 9/11, Smith and Rawl got more aggressive in purchasing adjacent parcels.
“It evolved into a much bigger project than we ever imagined,” Smith said. “We met with the town of Pittsboro because they had sewer plant and we needed water. We worked with Randy Voller, who was the mayor. He said, ‘We’d love to have you annexed into the town.’ And so we started that process, and we had all our approvals by 2015.”
The plan morphed into a community where people could look at Chatham County as a place to live and work, and Chatham Park represents an opportunity to do both. A neighborhood with small homes has been built and is already occupied, the Mosaic retail center is open for business with 12 restaurants and more to come, and beyond commercial office space includes a 45-acre UNC Health Care campus, a private school and daycare center, playgrounds, amphitheater, a senior care and wellness facility and a YMCA, all either under construction or on the drawing board. Ground has also been broken on the first hotel in Chatham County, a Hampton Inn & Suites, with plans for a second hotel to follow.
“Michael Walden, an economist over at NC State, did a report and the impact was $7 billion to the state,” Rawl said, “plus multiple years of employment growth with an excess of a hundred thousand jobs that we will have played a part in providing. And I know you’ve seen the announcement right down south of us there for the VinFast automobile plant with 7,500, but eventually go to 12,500 employees.
“If you look at all of these new towns, Holly Springs would be a good example, 25 years ago they didn’t have but 15 to 20,000 people living down there. And that is coming up on 40,000. You see all the emerging new stores and new neighborhoods. And we will sort of be like that. We’ll have 50,000 plus folks living in Chatham Park. We definitely want to be focused on helping downtown Pittsboro because it’s such an amenity that you can’t replicate in these other little towns.”
Smith said an extensive survey of Chatham County residents showed that high-speed internet to be the most desired amenity, helping some residents upgrade from old-fashioned dial-up service.
“We had to get Century Link to run a $15 million fiber optic cable to Pittsboro to satisfy 10 gigabytes of service; that was one of the first things. And then we require every home to have a 240 plug in the garage for electric cars. We require every business to have at least two electric car chargers. And we have an innovative storm water program that we developed, which is the first one in the state with lot higher regulations and rules than what the state or the county or the town requires,” Smith said.
Chatham Park will have affordable housing from apartments to single-family homes for sale or rent. “We want a well-rounded community,” Smith said. “We want to make sure that just about anybody can live in Chatham Park and work there.
“Another big thing we’re coming with is single family rental housing . . . our first development is 55 homes that we’re building, which will be rental homes and all your landscaping and maintenance taken care of. So it’s like an apartment, but for a young family doesn’t want to buy a house yet. They rent a house and if they really like the area, then they will buy one. We want to make out to the public that we’re building affordable housing and a lot of it, no other developer has made this kind of commitment ever that I know of in the state of North Carolina on the east coast.”
With all the growth at Chatham Park being planned for Pittsboro, there are critics who are anti-change.
“I use the expression, they used to come protest our project in busloads and we got ’em now onto a minivan. And we’re looking forward to having somebody come on a unicycle here soon here,” Rawl said.
“We get it that you go to a small community, and you have folks that don’t want to see change. They fight change. You look up at some of the folks who were opposed to us being there and enjoying himself at our restaurants. I think they’re saying, well, it’s not as bad as we thought. People resist change and it’s incumbent upon us to do a quality job and to become a part of the town. And we’re both North Carolinians. So we’re not from out of state and don’t understand what’s going on in this part of the world. And I think that’s a bit of an attribute for us to be able to pull it off.”
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