Apartments not surging everywhere

Why is northern Mecklenburg County experiencing an apartment-building boom but not the southerly towns in the county?

And why, for that matter, is the northernmost town of Davidson being left out?

Planners in the south Mecklenburg towns of Pineville, Matthews and Mint Hill say there is little available land for residential building, and apartments are low on the priority list.

But as for Davidson, the explanation is more elusive, said Assistant Town Manager Dawn Blobaum.

“We don’t really have that demographic,” Blobaum said. “We’re always looking for developers to build apartments here because we welcome that demographic. We don’t really know why people aren’t proposing apartments, but they’re not.”

What about the 1,800 young people who attend Davidson College? The vast majority of them live on campus, and the few who don’t tend to live in basement and garage apartments in private homes, Blobaum said.

Davidson is an “outlier” when it comes to building trends, said David Peete, Huntersville principal planner. “They have some special circumstances you don’t see everywhere.”

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