Development to grow Cramerton by thousands

A development under construction in Cramerton will have more than 1,000 homes and could take more than six years to complete.

Cramerton Mayor Nelson Wills said that the Redhawk Development will include new community parks, greenways, and more than 1,000 homes on close to 500 acres of land near South New Hope Road.

The new development will take the town of Cramerton from around 6,000 residents to close to 10,000, Wills said.

"It's going to be a really, really nice place to live," he added.

While the Redhawk development has been under construction for just over a year, the development has been a topic of discussion since at least 2018. The project was originally proposed by MT Land, a developer that asked Gaston County in January of 2019 to rezone about 288 acres of the property to allow for townhomes and commercial development. The proposed subdivision was then called The Overlook at Riverside. After opposition from some in the community, who were concerned about the development's impact infrastructure, local schools, the environment and their overall quality of life, the Gaston County Board of Commissioners denied that request.

"They had actually come to the town before that with a plan that the town was not in favor of … and so they decided that they were going to go to the county hoping for a different outcome," said Josh Watkins, Cramerton's assistant town manager and planning director.

It didn't work, but after failing at the county level, the developer revised its plans and returned to Cramerton with a different proposal, Watkins said.

"The developer came back to the town with a plan that was more appropriate to what our land use plans called for. When they came back to us, we were able to work through that process with our planning board and our Board of Commissioners to approve the development in its current form."

In the initial proposals, the development would have been more than 2,000 homes.

"We saw several different versions," Watkins said.

The town of Cramerton convinced the developer to reduce the proposal to closer to 1,000 homes. In 2020, the property was rezoned to accommodate for the development, and Cramerton annexed the land into the town.

But after that, MT Land sold the property to a different developer, Integral Communities. The project is now being completed as a joint venture partnership between Integral Communities and the homebuilder Lennar, said Integral Communities Vice President Paul Tryon.

"MT Land was eventually successful at getting a conditional rezoning of the property … but we purchased it from them and then redesigned the project to have less environmental impact, less impact on streams, more open space and to function better as a planned community, and then we resubmitted and our amendments were approved by the town," Tryon said.

Tryon said that the development is being built in phases and will ultimately have around 1,300 homes.

"It probably won't be completed until the early 2030s, in about seven or eight years," he said.

The development will have a variety of different housing types, which will include townhomes, single family homes, and age-targeted homes, which will have a bedroom on the main floor.

The project also includes the possibility of retail businesses, Tryon said.

Currently, workers are installing the infrastructure for the development, including water and sewer systems. The first homeowners will likely move in by "mid-year to the third quarter" of next year, Tryon said.

Wills said that Cramerton town leaders are excited about the development.

"You've only got one chance to get it right when it comes to land. Once you've zoned it and somebody buys it, it's done. Being very strategic about a very finite amount of land that's left to be built is something that is critically important to feature generations. What we do today affects our grandkids and beyond," Wills said.

This article originally appeared on The Gaston Gazette: Development to grow Cramerton by thousands