Housing market prompts changes in zoning

County commissioner Hope Haywood addressed the rising costs of houses in Randolph County, suggesting a need to mitigate that rise.

“We have teachers, firefighters, law enforcement officers, EMS workers that we’re trying to recruit, and they need places to live that are affordable,” Haywood said. “Right now the places that we have, I’ve talked to two or three people, and they’ve gone to Trinity to find something. I’m happy for Trinity to have them, but with the site in Chatham County, with Toyota and even now, there’s not enough housing.”

In order to make it easier to find housing, commissioners unanimously approved last month an amendment to the county’s zoning ordinance that will reduce the base density in primary and secondary growth areas from 40,000-square-foot lots to 30,000-square-foot lots. The measure also brings restrictions in rural growth areas from a 3-acre minimum to a 1.5-acre minimum.

The measure is the opposite reaction from the one in neighboring Davidson County. Commissioners in Davidson voted unanimously in August to increase lot sizes in specific areas of the county from a mandatory 30,000 square feet to 40,000 square feet. Davidson County Planning Director Scott Leonard said that board members and staff are trying to answer what the county believes is a problem of too much development in certain areas.

He said their attempts have been to preserve some land, slow the number of houses being built in congested areas and address the stress on schools, EMS and fire departments.

Leonard cautioned commissioners that any adjustment to ordinances would have an effect on the willingness of land developers to construct new housing subdivisions in Davidson County. He warned against making a unilateral move to 40,000 square feet across the board for lots throughout the county.

Much of the increased demand for houses in Davidson County is attributed to the county’s successful recruitment of EGGER to the Linwood area and, most recently, Nucor, which has committed to building a plant in Silver Valley.

Randy Thomason, owner of Thomason Realty Group at High Rock Lake, said that in January 2003, there were 818 listings of houses available in Davidson County. In the five years following the recession, he explained that people were losing their houses, causing an oversupply.

That recession then eased and the number of available houses slowly declined. No other recent period has represented quite so drastic a change in available housing as the last 18 months, which Thomason said has demonstrated a vast undersupply of housing.

“We are down to 358 homes in Davidson County on the market,” Thomason said. “That includes houses, townhomes, condos and manufactured housing. That is a gross undersupply of product. If you look at this trend at any other time on the market, we would have had anywhere from 800 to 1,500 houses on the market, depending on what year you pick.”

Five years ago, Thomason said the median sale price of homes was at $129,000 in Davidson County. In 2022, that price has more than doubled with the median home price in the county rising to $269,000.

Those increases, in both demand and price, have mirrored what officials have seen in Randolph. Some of this has been counteracted by the explosion of development in Archdale and Trinity.

“Over the past several weeks and primarily over the past few months, we’ve been getting a lot of phone calls about development or pending development on land in proximity to the megasite for property development,” Randolph County Inspections Director David Bryant said. “Archdale, Trinity, there’s tons of lots that are still ready to be built on.”

Staff writer Daniel Kennedy can be reached at 336-888-3578, or at dkennedy@atnonline.net.