Word To Commissioners: Zone US 64 Corridor Now or Boom Could be a Bust
Utility lines planned for the corridor will spawn rapid growth, but land-use controls are needed to ensure this development will benefit the public, a wide range of sources said.
ROSMAN — A once-in-a-generation development boom was on its way, Transylvania County Commissioners said at their Dec. 13 meeting.
They had just voted to accept a $2 million grant from Dogwood Health Trust and agreed to hire an engineer with funds from another windfall — $7 million in federal funds passed along with the help of state lawmakers.
Most of this money, along with smaller grants and a portion of a previously received $6.7 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds, would be poured into the Town of Rosman’s utility system.
The focus would be on providing service to one of the county’s few strips of high-and-dry land ripe for industrial and dense residential development — the Rosman Highway (US 64) corridor east of town.
Commissioner David Guice saw it as a chance for the county to finally recover from the devastating factory closures of the early 2000s.
Commissioner Teresa McCall touted “the benefit for the town of Rosman and beyond . . . I don’t think anybody can comprehend what that might look like 10 years from now.”
“This is not just temporary,” said Commission Vice Chairman Jake Dalton. “This can absolutely transform the county from where it is now to something we can’t imagine.”
But for Transylvania to take advantage of this rare opportunity it must guide that growth, said a host of academic planners, land-use activists and current and former political leaders interviewed for this story.
A multi-million dollar public investment in utilities, and the development opportunity that follows, will effectively enrich landowners in this corridor, said Bill Lapsley, chairman of the all-Republican Henderson County Commission.
That gives the public the right to exercise control over its use, he said, “and that control is zoning.”
Only with zoning, said Lapsley and others, can Transylvania prevent too much choice property from being consumed by already plentiful upscale homes for retirees and part-time residents.
Only with zoning can the county forecast and prepare for the added demands on public services — law enforcement, schools and the utility lines themselves — that will come with a surge in development.
Only with zoning can the county set aside parcels for desperately needed affordable housing and jobs-rich manufacturing operations — including ones, such as asphalt plants and landfills, that can degrade the value of nearby property.
As is true in many rural counties, detailed land planning has long been a foreign concept in Transylvania, which has no countywide zoning law. But the prospect of rampant development spawned by utility construction has a way of changing views about zoning, and there are signs it might happen here.
A majority of County Commissioners have said that at least some land-use controls will be needed in this corridor. But they haven’t discussed them publicly and haven’t provided details — even as the county has begun seeking bids to lay several miles of water and sewer lines east of Rosman.
“Once you’ve put in utilities, you’ve opened the door for development, and it’s hard to close the door once it’s open,” said Laplsey, who added that implementing zoning can be a long, politically fraught process.
So, he said, “Do it now.”
Money and Plans
Ambitions for the expansion of utilities on US 64 started small, with a plan that secured outside money to pay most of the cost of running Rosman’s sewer lines about three miles east to Gaia Herbs.
In March of 2021, after learning about the first round of Rescue Act (ARPA) funding, the Commission agreed to simultaneously install water lines for most of this path. It was the most efficient use of dollars that were clearly allowed to be spent on infrastructure, County Manager Jaime Laughter told them.
“This saves money by mobilizing once for both” jobs, she wrote in a recent email response to questions about the corridor.
The total cost of this initial project, which Rosman Mayor Brian Shelton calls “Phase One,” is $5.5 million, including the cost of a utility crossing near Whitmire Road and $1.3 million to cover potential cost overruns and other contingencies, according to a document due to be presented for Commission approval next month.
The $7 million from the state — the original source of which was also ARPA — will pay to start work on Phase Two, a surface-water supply plant to replace the wells that now provide the town’s drinking water, Shelton said.
The intake will likely be built on either the North or West fork of the French Broad River, he said, and is expected to more than double the town’s water capacity to about 600,000 gallons per day.
Because these investments and improvements can be leveraged to attract more funding, Shelton says, he sees them as just a start.
“Very much so,” he said, and drove through the town and the corridor to show off his short-term and long-term plans.
Work on Phase One is expected to begin later this year and take about 18 months to complete, he said. Both the sewer line and the water main — which will extend to near the Harmony Korner convenience store — will run along the north side of Rosman Highway. Utility customers on the south side will then be able to access the pipes by boring connections beneath the highway or extending lines to the Whitmire crossing.
That crossing can serve as the starting point for what Shelton sees as a future, so-far-unfunded Phase Three — extending lines along Whitmire and Calvert roads back to Rosman. He drove to the town’s sewage treatment plant, tucked away on a wooded lot on the banks of the French Broad, to show a potential Phase Four.
The plant currently processes only about one-fourth of its 250,000-gallon-per day capacity, but it may one day need an expansion or an additional holding basin to limit the likelihood of overflows into the river.
The county, which lacks its own utility department, plans to draw up an agreement that allows the town to carry out this function.
“That should be an agenda item soon,” Laughter wrote. But Shelton said there are still sticking points, including a request from the county that Rosman repay a portion of the ARPA money to help fund future water and sewer projects.
He is also resisting the county’s demands to have final say over utility design.
“Those might not be the county’s phases, but they’re my phases,” Shelton said of his future plans. “My sewer and water, my phases.”
How Soon the Boom?
This utility expansion represents such a boon to the corridor that, in December, McCall jokingly suggested opening a bottle of champagne.
Not quite yet, said owners of land along US 64.
Some have already reached out to ask about utility access, Shelton said. All of them interviewed for this story — at least the ones aware of the county’s plans — welcomed the prospect of expanded service and its potential to boost development.
But most of them said it wouldn’t happen soon.
Bobby Wood and his son own what seems like a choice, 157-acre parcel that extends from just off US 64 to the corner of Hannah Ford and Green roads near the French Broad.
He pointed out that distant corner from outside his hilltop home and said that, yes, he could probably make big money selling elevated lots with such expansive views.
But he hadn’t heard about the plans for the utilities, he said. And, though his son might feel differently, Wood said he isn’t interested in cashing in on them in the near future.
The property, some of which is rented to Gaia for agricultural use, has been in his family for about 60 years, and “actually I want to keep it and give it to my kids and grandkids,” said Wood, 74.
“I’m very content with life and what I’m doing.”
Josh Leder said his family has also been buying up land near the corridor for decades, and his company, Leder-Sparlin Enterprises, now owns more than 500 acres between US 64 and Pisgah National Forest.
Leder, who is best known for renovating properties in or near Brevard, currently offers upscale camping on the land. “Right now, I’m doing glamping,” he said.
He didn’t know much about the plans to run water and sewer lines in the corridor, he said, and doesn’t know if or when he will try to access them.
“This is the long game . . . It might take another 25 years,” he said. “But I applaud Rosman and (Dogwood) for being forward thinking and at least creating an opportunity, where it could bring in more housing or more manufacturing or more services to an area that is probably ripe for it.”
Fisher Realty has listed what appears to be a prime parcel on the corridor — 200 acres with about 4000 feet of frontage on the highway east of US 178 priced at about $2 million.
That’s only slightly more than the owners paid for the parcels that form the bulk of this offering in 2006 and 2007, according to country records.
Why hasn’t the price skyrocketed?
The planned work doesn’t really change things for this land, Shelton said; it already has access to utilities on its south side, along Old Rosman Highway.
Running lines to make that connection will be expensive and, likely, time-consuming, said Amy Fisher, co-owner of the real estate firm. The same is true of securing permission from the state Department of Transportation to access US 64. Some of the land is sloped too steeply to develop and another portion borders the former site of an old landfill that the county monitors for pollutants.
“Some of it is unusable,” she said, before starting to sound more like a typical Realtor. “Some of it is gorgeous,” she said. “It has very little flood impact . . . it has a beautiful trail system . . . some really good building sites with views and you’re close to both Brevard and Rosman.”
“I think there are a lot of possible uses for that land,” she said. “There are opportunities for commercial, there are opportunities for residential.”
Utilities: Just the First Step
Especially residential, said Ben Hitchings, the former planning director of the Town of Chapel Hill and a fellow and adjunct instructor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Government.
Housing usually forms the initial wave of development into areas freshly provided by utilities, he said: “Rooftops” often come first, then the stores and restaurants that need an existing customer base.
But those rooftops won’t cover market-rate, modestly priced workforce housing, which are not economically feasible given current development costs and market conditions, Fisher said.
Even less likely, at least any time soon, are the developments the Dogwood grant targets — affordable rental complexes, which usually need backing from federal tax credits or similar sources.
Affordable developments are necessarily dense developments, meaning utility access is essential, she said. But the competition for government subsidies is fierce and the agency that distributes them in North Carolina scores projects on factors including walkability and close proximity to grocery stores, doctors’ offices and other resources.
“Putting in a sewer line is great, but I can’t walk down Rosman Highway to the library,” said Fisher, who has spent several years seeking land for affordable projects on behalf of longtime client Workforce Homestead Inc.
“I think that having the utilities is fantastic and I think that’s a really necessary first step,” she said, “but that’s step one out of about 100. It’s the tip of the iceberg.”
Too Much of a Good Thing?
A preview of the kind of residential development the utility expansion is likely to spark can be seen at the GlenLaurel Preserve subdivision off Cherryfield Creek Road north of US 64.
It long ago invested in utility connections, Ted Futrelle, the subdivision’s exclusive builder, said earlier this year — and business is booming.
He had secured contracts to build more than dozen houses on the 215-acre development, he said, and well-outfitted “courtyard homes” — ranging in size from 1,500 to 1,900 square feet — were going for between $450,000 and $550,000.
Those prices are now typical in a county where the median sale price of homes recently surpassed Buncombe County for the first time in memory and where builders and Realtors are seeing crushing demand from out-of-town buyers.
But this wealth pouring into the county is also contributing to a mounting crisis in its economy — the closely related shortages of labor and reasonably priced housing.
More upscale housing means not only less land for affordable housing but more demand for service-sector jobs with wages too low to cover the costs of market-rate housing. As working residents flee Transylvania in search of higher paying industrial jobs and reasonably priced dwelling units, the shrinking force can hamper its ability to draw manufacturers.
Referring to a recent labor report from the Mountain Area Workforce Development Board, Transylvania Schools Superintendent Jeff McDaris said at last week’s School Board meeting that the county’s rock bottom unemployment rate of 3.3 percent sounds like good news.
But it's also a red flag, he said, a sign workers are fleeing the county because of the lack of reasonably priced housing and well-paid jobs.
“Not only are we at risk of not having enough workers in our county, we could lose more of the ones we have,” he said. “That’s why I say we need the types of industry that pay higher wages.”
The strip along US 64 is one of the few places in the county where such industry — or affordable housing — is ever likely to be built, according to Transylvania’s 2025 Comprehensive Plan.
In a county where vast acreage lies on mountain slopes or in flood zones or public ownership, the plan says, the corridor is by far the largest and most open of the county’s three “Designated Growth Areas,” defined as “land suitable for industrial or dense development.”
“This is the big piece that’s identified,” said Guice, the Commission’s only vocal advocate of land-use planning. “But if you leave it up to developers, they will buy up the land in that corridor and they will develop homes to be sold at huge prices.”
Guice pointed to another example of this same pattern — the Mills River Crossing development flanking both sides of US 280 in Henderson County. Some homes in the 93-lot development, which is served by the city of Hendersonville’s water supply, are advertised for more than $1 million,
“I’m not saying that’s bad, but it’s got to be a mix,” Guice said. “I’m also concerned about our working people and our young families.”
Designating industrial zones is an easy enough start for drawing that use, said former Commission chair Mike Hawkins.
Creating the right conditions for affordable housing, on the other hand, requires a deep commitment from local governments that even big, wealthy cities struggle to muster, said Hawkins, the county’s representative in a Duke University-sponsored initiative to address the shortage of these units in Western North Carolina.
Beyond reserving land for dense development, it can require tools such as “inclusionary zones,” where developers must provide units for residents earning a range of incomes. It may mean beefing up planning staffs, setting aside hours for discussions with stakeholders, and local contributions of money or land.
“When we’re talking about housing, it comes down to ‘want to.’ How badly do you want to do it,” Hawkins said, “and for whatever reason we haven’t had that here in the past.”
Is “Zoning” still the “Z-word?”
There are some signs that desire still isn’t there, either when it comes to affordable housing or land-use planning in general, but other signs of a growing will to take action.
Most of the requirements for developments in Transylvania are outlined in its Master Subdivision Ordinance, which covers not just residential but commercial and industrial development.
It states that any change to a more intense land use requires compliance with other rules covering steep slopes and flood-prone regions. It also sets standards for road construction, drainage and erosion control.
But outside of Pisgah Forest, the county has no restrictions on what can be built where, and most commissioners, citing property rights, have long expressed reluctance to implement land-use controls. They reaffirmed this position last year, when they indefinitely tabled the Cedar Mountain Small Area Plan, which was supported by a strong majority of the community’s residents.
Commission Chairman Jason Chappell didn’t respond to voice mails or an email about the possibility of tackling land-use planning in the corridor and Commissioner Larry Chapman referred such questions to Laughter, who said only that the topic had not been placed on a Commission agenda.
On the other hand, the terms of the Dogwood grant, which is targeted at encouraging affordable housing, sets aside $437,000 for studies, including a countywide housing plan. The grant also requires the county to funnel $1.6 million into a housing land trust if it fails to attract at least 84 units of affordable housing after the utilities are constructed.
Laughter, Fisher said, has already reached out to get a developer’s perspective on the obstacles to affordable housing. McCall, at that Dec. 13 meeting, said that investment of utility funds in the corridor warrants “planning with a purpose,” which, she wrote in a follow-up email, “means carefully balancing the implementation of control measures while also recognizing individuals' rights and freedoms.”
Dalton said in an interview that he is open to land-use planning at “a very, very high level. It’s going to be more focused on high density housing and things like that and it’s not affecting private property rights or anything like that.”
But he also sees the need to protect the public investment in infrastructure, he said. “The last thing we want to happen is for somebody to come in and put in 150 mobile homes or something like that. That’s not why we’re doing this.”
The Hazards of Not Zoning
Lapsley and former Henderson County commissioners understand the reluctance on the part of their conservative counterparts in Transylvania.
They’ve been there.
“Henderson County was just like Transylvania County, but that was 20 years ago,” said Chuck McGrady, a longtime former Republican Henderson County Commissioner and state representative. “You learn pretty quickly that if you put infrastructure in, the growth will come and you need to put in the zoning before you build something out.”
Minds start to change with proposals that threaten neighborhoods with smell, noise, traffic and/or environmental disruption.
Thus Henderson’s first crack at countrywide zoning in 2001: it designated most of the unincorporated land for “open use” but gave the Commission the right to regulate projects such as concrete and asphalt plants, junkyards, race tracks and slaughterhouses.
A crucial next step is one especially applicable to Transylvania: identifying land for dense residential and other industrial uses, Lapsley said. Zoning for dense development alone can’t stop it from being consumed by large-lot upscale homes, but it does identify parcels that the county can start pitching to prospective developers. The same is true of potential industrial sites.
This step also provides political protection, Lapsley said. These uses, which are the most needed in much of Western North Carolina, are also the ones most likely to bring vocal opposition, such as the hostile reception to affordable housing plans in or near Brevard.
Zoning amounts to fair warning to homeowners that, for example, the scenic 50-acre farm next to their deluxe property might one day become a “cigarette factory,” Lapsley said.
“If it's zoned industrial, I can say, ‘Wait a minute, you knew when you bought there that it was zoned industrial and if you didn’t, shame on you.’ ”
Residents begin to understand that zoning does not just take property rights, but protects them, he said. They also start to understand that public investment justifies public control.
“It’s not very sincere to say you’re opposed to government intervention of land use, but you are interested in a $10 million for a sewer line thanks to the federal government,” said Dana Beach, who lives part-time near Caesar’s Head and, as the longtime leader of the Coastal Conservation League in South Carolina, is helping Henderson County with the current rewriting of its comprehensive plan.
There are disagreements in the direction the new plan should take, Lapsley said, but no suggestions that planning should be scrapped altogether.
“Get rid of zoning? I haven’t heard anybody say that,” he said.
Instead, most residents see it as a chance to help guide the county’s future — which is how Transylvania’s leaders should pitch it here, he said.
“If I was in Transylvania County, I’d look at that whole corridor and I’d zone it now. I’d meet with all those people there and say, ‘Okay, we’re getting ready to put these utilities in. People are going to come, things are going to happen, and if you want to have a voice, we want to hear it.’ ”
Stakeholders
That’s precisely the expectation of Futrelle, the GlenLaurel builder, and Fisher, the Realtor representing perhaps its most imminently developable property.
Though they represent industries that might be expected to oppose zoning, they see it as protecting property values. They both favor it as long as it includes input from people with an interest in the corridor’ land.
“I believe zoning contributes to a higher quality of life,” Fisher said.
It’s not right for the whole county, she said, but “zoning in most cases helps maintain property values and allows similarly identified properties to kind of be grouped together.”
Futrelle is not worried about disturbances to GlenLaurel, which borders Pisgah National Forest and is “fairly well protected,” he said.
“But I’ve been a builder/developer for 40 years and I prefer zoning for a lot of reasons. I prefer good zoning that is implemented with the input of stakeholders,” he said. “I think zoning is a good thing if it is a vision for the community and shared by the community.”
Which will probably mean some controls, but not the heavy governmental hand some residents fear, said Renee Kumor, a former longtime member of Henderson’s County Commission and Planning Board.
Driving north on a stretch of Spartanburg Highway served by the city of Hendersonville utilities she passed car dealerships, a muffler shop, a building supply depot and locally owned restaurants.
“It’s always going to be a hodgepodge unless (zoning laws) include architectural criteria,” said Kumor, “all it means is they try to keep the commercial and the industrial closer together and away from housing developments.”
US 64 heading east of downtown Hendersonville is also zoned for commercial use, and is jammed with chain stores such as Dunkin Donuts, Chick-fil-A and Golden Corral that arrived after Hendersonville utilities were laid to serve the nearby Walmart Supercenter.
But at the top of a hill and across Howard’s Gap Road, traffic thins and so does the roadside clutter. Kumor drove past homes on large lots and orchards of bare, trimmed apple trees and occasional pockets of neighborhood stores.
The county long ago decided not to run accessible sewer lines along the road and, when the current county zoning law was passed, it designated most of this land for homes on lots no smaller than an acre.
Though this land use might change with the new comprehensive plan and, maybe, future sewer service, these past decisions helped preserve the county’s apple industry, while allowing orchard owners to operate stands that do a booming business during the harvest season.
It reflects what the stakeholders and the people of Henderson wanted for this land, Kumor said, without imposing harsh restrictions on its use.
The alternative? What Transylvania has now.
“You’re already zoned,” she said. “It’s called ACH zoning — anything can happen.”
Dan, as always this is an excellent article. Our BOC needs to start thinking in 21st century terms. We aren’t going back to the good old days.
Great, in depth and comprehensive article!