Chatham Park: the dream that’s built to last

“We’re dreamers. And Chatham Park was a big dream for us, probably the biggest dream you could possibly have. We want to change people’s lives when they live here.”
 
Tim Smith, co-founder of Preston Development Company, isn’t exaggerating. He and Bubba Rawl have been working on the near 10,000-acre, +27,000-unit planned community in Chatham County since the 1990s. When they closed on their first parcel in 2006, the county population was less than 60,000 people. When fully built out, 75,000 people will call Chatham Park home.
 
This is the story of how it all came together. 
 
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Chatham Park’s origin can be traced to three men taking a walk on newly graded and cleared property in Chatham County three decades ago. Bubba Rawl, Truby Proctor, and renowned golfer and designer Jack Nicklaus strolled through what would become the third nine holes at the Governors Club golf course shortly before they opened.
 
On that walk, Proctor invited Rawl to come to an early-stage planning charette for a 1,600-acre parcel not too far from the Governors Club that he had his eye on. Proctor passed away 16 months later, but the potential of that property – then still in a wooded, off-the-beaten-path exurb of Raleigh – stuck with Rawl.
 
In the years to follow, Rawl and Smith would complete prestige projects throughout the Triangle, including Prestonwood Country Club and Wakefield Plantation.
 
“We’d spend a lot of time building a brand and customers for a project, then we’d run out of road,” Rawl said. “By 2005, we figured we didn’t need 15 different projects – we got comfortable with doing this one big project.”
 
They turned their attention back to the Chatham County land they’d first visited a decade prior. In 2006, with the market booming, Rawl and Smith purchased a 1,700-acre tract and set out to envision what might be.
 
The move took guts. The real estate market was hot, but Chatham County was not considered a major growth opportunity, certainly not on the scale of what would become Chatham Park.
 
The next decade might have proved the naysayers right. The subprime mortgage crisis brought the economy to the brink of collapse. Real estate values cratered. Rawl and Smith faced regulatory hurdles to boot – Chatham County policymakers rejected early plans for the property, reflecting local concerns that more people and more jobs would change the area’s rural character.
 
But Rawl and Smith kept at it. They pieced together other properties – “30 acres here, 70 acres there, 120 acres there,” Rawl said – until they compiled holdings on which they could build something truly transformative.
 
By 2015, the economic recovery was in full swing, propelled in part by North Carolina’s sharp turn towards business-friendly fiscal and regulatory policies. County policymakers finally came around and approved Chatham Park’s master plan that year.
 
Rawl and Smith started bringing to life the vision they’d long held – a walkable community in which people could work, live, play, and learn. They negotiated with companies like UNC Health and Thales Academy with an eye towards maximizing the community’s desirability, not returns on each individual property.
 
“In some instances we sold land for less than it was worth, but it was the right call because it’s adding value everywhere else because it’s the right service,” Rawl said. “By partnering with the YMCA, for example, we were able to have them provide the entertainment amenity instead of us having to build it ourselves. They bring such a brand to the area.”
 
When fully built out, Chatham Park will have an economic impact of $7 billion and $440 million in annual tax revenue, according to an analysis by well-known former N.C. State professor Dr. Michael Walden.
 
Like all bets, their success with Chatham Park is part vision, part guts, and part luck. Multi-billion dollar corporate investments in the area from Wolfspeed and Toyota supercharged Chatham County’s growth prospects and primed Chatham Park for more immediate success than even Rawl and Smith might have imagined.
 
And recent population-level trends away from cities and toward exurbs suggest even more demand for communities like Chatham Park. “The trend has transformed once-sleepy rural towns into thriving cultural communities with booming populations and housing markets,” the Daily Mail reported earlier this month.
 
Rawl and Smith couldn’t possibly have foreseen the economy-altering companies that would move to the area. But their instinct for what the region might one day be able to support kept them in the game.
 
“We’d seen where the growth was going – Cary, Holly Springs, Fuquay. But this was before ‘megasite’ was even in anybody’s vocabulary,” Rawl said.
 
It’s also true that the existence of a community like Chatham Park has an impact when policymakers negotiate with big companies. “Every large project we have, Chatham Park is going to be a part of the discussion, every single time,” Michael Smith, president of the Chatham County Economic Development Corporation, said.
 
State House Minority Leader Robert Reives, who represents Chatham County, agrees. “I think that Chatham Park is our biggest selling point for our megasites,” he said.
 
Chatham Park recently attracted another company with a household name, too.
 
Last year, Disney announced plans to build its second “Storyliving” community in the country on 1,500 acres in Chatham Park. The Disney neighborhoods will feature amenities one might expect in a well-planned community, but will also include “Disney-themed experiences, including ‘family fun days’; day trips and longer vacation excursions; classes led by Disney artists; and storytelling dinners,” the News & Observer reported.
 
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Rawl and Smith didn’t know they were looking at land that would cement their legacy when they first set foot in some Chatham County woods 30 years ago.
 
Rawl said, “All the other projects, we’ve outlived them. This one’s going to outlive us.”