Chatham board’s only choice was to rubber-stamp 124-acre rural housing project
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- Chatham OKs a 60‑home Bramblewood subdivision on nearly 124 acres despite protests.
- State law and the site's residential zoning left county little power to block the project.
- Neighbors concerned about traffic, flooding, light, noise, and loss of rural character
A 60-home subdivision approved Tuesday for U.S. 64 west of Pittsboro will transform nearly 124 acres of woods and pasture land despite neighbors’ worries about losing their rural way of life.
Bramblewood will create one- to nine-acre single-family lots on the prime farmland at 7241 U.S. 64 West. Nearly a quarter of the site will remain undeveloped, mostly around stream buffers, and several homes will back up to two streams running south along the property line.
It will be one of the smallest communities built by Raleigh-based developer Greenfield Communities, with a single street onto U.S. 64, and five stormwater ponds scattered across the site.
Neighbors urged the Chatham County commissioners to reject the plan Tuesday and enact a moratorium on rural development until the new Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) guides land development. The UDO was set aside in 2024 because of a new state law that prohibits “downzoning” — reducing density or land uses — without permission from all affected property owners.
The commissioners voted 5-0 to approve Bramblewood after seeking clarification about the floodplain, vegetative buffers and stormwater ponds. State law prohibits counties from enacting temporary moratoriums to adopt new limits on residential uses.
The site’s residential zoning also left the board with no wiggle room on the project, which can be built “by right,” county attorney Emily Meeker said. A court could order the county to approve the project if the application was denied, she said.
Commissioner David Delaney urged the developer “to make sure that they are scrupulously working with the planning team to meet the very high standard that the county has for keeping [everyone] fully informed about what they intend to do.”
“It’s one thing to say that the plan is needed to meet the legal standards, and that things will probably be fine, but then to find out that somebody took a shortcut because they didn’t have the right person on the crew that day, and all of a sudden you get two waterfalls coming down someplace that nobody expected,” Delaney said.
The plan puts the largest lots along the creek to allow more space for the buffer, and homes are sited as close to the street as possible, said Nic Robinson, the developer’s attorney. State law also requires stormwater ponds to control new runoff from the site.
The next step is seeking permits and submitting a construction plan, expected within the next three years. The timeline for building homes will depend on the housing market, Robinson said.
Farms giving way to subdivisions
Cattle once grazed at the Bramblewood site — previously a part of Howard’s Farm — and the land has traces of an old stagecoach road and hints of historic links to Native American tribes, according to Sy Robbins with the Chatham County Historical Association.
The draw these days is U-pick berries, and the fruit, vegetables and homemade ice cream sold at Mema’s Fruit Shack since 2014.
Alice and Harold Howard, who own the farm and its fruit orchards, will keep working the remaining 35 acres, but they are now in their mid-80s and “just farming for the fun of it,” Alice Howard said.
“We definitely right now — unless it freezes this coming week — will have plenty of peaches and strawberries” this year, she said. “It just depends on the weather.”
Harold Howard is also a longtime real estate investor and builder, and the family has been involved in a slew of projects over the years, starting in Cary in the 1970s, Alice Howard said. In later years, the Howards built the Shambley Meadows subdivision near the farm and also sold land to the investors behind Chatham Park, an 8,500-acre master-planned community near Pittsboro.
In 2021, the couple sold a large piece of the farm to their son and his wife. Dwayne Howard is the owner of Mid-South Builders; his wife Kris Howard owns Chatham Homes Realty. Greenfield BW LLC bought that tract and an adjacent Howard family lot last year.
“I know people don’t want to see the farms [go], and I don’t like to see them go either, but ... it’s coming,” Alice Howard said. “I remember even back the ‘50s [hearing] by the time you get grown, you probably won’t know where Raleigh starts and Greensboro stops.”
Worries about environment, traffic, rural life
Bramblewood’s neighbors aren’t ready to let go of their rural way of life or the farms that stretch between Pittsboro and Siler City, they told the commissioners.
A community meeting with the developer did not resolve their concerns about traffic, flooding, noise, light pollution, or the potential effects on farmland and the environment, said Emily Moose, who lives southwest of Bramblewood.
“We’re also concerned about public safety, and the fact that this is really detrimental to Chatham County’s rural character,” Moose said, while urging commissioners to “really have some clear intent and will behind how we want this county to look in the future.”
Bramblewood is “a very dense residential subdivision in an agricultural area, and it’s really the type of sprawling ‘death by a thousand cuts’ development in an agricultural area that our county’s residents just don’t want,” she said.
Commissioner Katie Kenlan, who lives in a fast-growing area north of Pittsboro, thanked the neighbors for bringing their concerns.
“This is happening to me, too, but, you know, this is how private land sales work,” Kenlan said. “Mostly, what I wanted to say is I know the pain of your way of life changing and what's happening in our county.”
This story was originally published March 25, 2026 at 8:09 AM with the headline "Chatham board’s only choice was to rubber-stamp 124-acre rural housing project."
