The county of 68,000 has more than doubled in size in the past 30 years, and has issued permits for more than 5,100 housing units since 2020. Just over half of those were for single-family homes, with about a quarter going to apartments, townhomes, and duplexes.
Pender County Planning and Community Development Director Daniel Adams said those numbers indicate a growing trend in the county as demand for housing surges in the Cape Fear Region.
“It would be easy to speculate that that might have something to do with the cost of housing,” Adams said, “so one can assume that a duplex or a townhome is a more affordable type of housing than a single-family home.”
The growth isn’t just in Hampstead, either: a substantial number of new permits are west of Highway 17, in places like Rocky Point. Adams said the rise in multifamily development appears to be market-driven – otherwise, developers would be bringing only single-family projects forward.
He pointed to Blake Farm, the DR Horton project in Scotts Hill, as an example. That property has a commercial component near Highway 17, apartments and townhomes further off the road, and single-family homes further back.
“I think that project in itself demonstrates that there's still a market demand for diversity in housing types, and especially in this area where folks are continuing to move,” he said.
Growing pains
Pender County is in the middle of updating its comprehensive plan, and recently asked residents what they’d like to see emphasized. The perennial issues of flooding, stormwater, and traffic rose to the top of the list of responses.
For traffic, the most significant problem facing Pender County is a lack of alternate routes for Highway 17. Anyone living in Hampstead has to get on Highway 17 to get from point A to point B. And it’s also the throughline from Onslow County to Wilmington, the region’s major metro area. That is a lot of strain to put on one road, and a single car crash can back up the highway for hours.
But the Hampstead Bypass, currently under construction, will alleviate a lot of those problems once it’s completed in 2030. It would offer those commuting to Wilmington from the North an alternative route, and would be a redundant road that can accommodate traffic when something goes wrong on Highway 17.
Destination Hampstead
Currently, Hampstead is largely a bedroom community that people drive past on their way to and from larger communities. But Hampstead may someday become a destination in its own right, Adams said. Right now, many residents in Hampstead need to travel into Wilmington or Jacksonville for some of their shopping and other commercial activities. But now that there’s a larger population in the area, Adams said Hamstead has reached a tipping point “where it's now viable for more commercial businesses to be successful in the county, at least in the east side of the county.”
Residents told planners that was one of their highest priorities in the new comprehensive plan. Adams said he expects to see more commercial growth in Hampstead, which may, in turn, alleviate some of the traffic congestion into Wilmington. “That would be great for everybody, right? Because now folks don't have to drive to Wilmington, and it reduces traffic. And, you know, there's a ripple effect from all those things.”
Already, Hampstead has seen new commercial developments bringing the kinds of services residents want. Adams pointed to a new business park in the area: Oyster Creek Landing. It has nail and hair salons, spas, dental offices, realtors, restaurants, and a lot of other smaller businesses that serve as helpful amenities to local residents.
The substantial housing growth in Pender County has finally made that kind of commercial growth viable, and Adams predicts more developments like that, alongside more big box stores and grocery stores in the coming years. And it’ll help keep their tax bills lower, too.
Residents in Pender County “spend their dollars in New Hanover County or up in Jacksonville,” Adams said. “You can assume that's because the services that they can get in those places are not available here. So if we were able to provide those services, then we would grow our commercial tax base, and then that alleviates some of the pressure on the residential tax base.”
There’s also more industrial development along Highway 421, and Adams said it’s growing. Job centers and commercial centers in Pender County will be a boon for local taxpayers, as those businesses take on a growing share of the tax burden for needed services.
Both types of development would potentially alleviate traffic in the greater region, as residents can stay within the county’s borders for their daily trips to work and to run errands. Shorter trips closer to home mean cars stay on the road for less time, which alleviates traffic congestion in the overall transportation network.
Creating connections
As for the connective roads needed within communities like Hampstead – that’s a tougher question. While there have been a few attempts at forming its own local government, Hampstead is unincorporated, and counties don’t have the power to build their own roads under state law. That means there’s no one to manage road construction to connect neighborhoods within Hampstead, meaning there are very few alternative routes to the main highway.
Working around that problem is a serious challenge, Adams said.
“We work closely with DOT, and the regional planning organization, the Wilmington Metropolitan Planning Organization. We work closely with those partners to try and, you know, review projects on a case-by-case basis,” Adams said.
Under Pender County’s Unified Development Ordinance (UDO), residential properties are required to connect streets to nearby neighborhoods to prevent unnecessary traffic onto major thoroughfares, and they have to create road stubs if they aren’t next to existing developments yet.
Adams said there’s a similar requirement for commercial properties: “We require those parking lots to connect to adjacent properties. If they're connecting to an undeveloped property, they have to stub if they're connecting, to say if an undeveloped property is building and it's next to a developed property, they have to tie into their parking lot.”
There are a few missed opportunities with older developments which remain disconnected, but Adams said the county is working to solve connectivity problems in creative ways to get around the ban on counties building roads: having developers build roads for them.
It’s called the collector street plan, and it aims to alleviate congestion and establish alternative routes in the eastern and southern parts of the county. Certain areas have been identified as needing collector roads, and developers who build there are required to build their sections. For example, The Hawthorne Headwaters apartment complex, currently under construction, will add a collector road section between Deerfield drive and Hughes Road.
It will take time for developers to collectively build entire collector roads, but Adams said the long-term goal is worthwhile: that “folks who live in Hampstead who want to go to the grocery store, can get to the grocery store without having to get on Highway 17 and keep some of that local traffic off of 17.”
Rocky Point
There’s another region of the county that’s growing rapidly: Rocky Point.
“I think the logical train of thought is that Rocky Point is going to be sort of the next frontier for growth and development in the county,” Adams said.
The coming decades will bring thousands of homes to Rocky Point, thanks to two massive development projects underway. Adams wonders what it will take to maintain a rural character in the unincorporated community.
“Finding that way to balance the preservation of the rural character of the area, you know, with the demand of development is something that I would love to see,” Adams said. “There’s so much value in Western Pender County.”
The rapid growth in Rocky Point is a counterpoint to Castle Hayne, one of the few “rural” areas left in New Hanover County. While residents there are looking to Castle Hayne as a last bastion of rural land, Rocky Point just up the road is, to Adams’ mind, an urbanizing section of Pender. That trend will drive traffic through Castle Hayne via Highway 40 and 117, as Rocky Point residents are likely to go to Wilmington for errands, leisure, and work.
Even further down the road, Adams expects to see more development in Wallace, in Duplin County, on the northern border of Pender County.
“I think that's an area that maybe folks don't often consider as an area of growth, but I think that's a corridor that could see some growth in the next 10-20 years,” he said.
Adams said the coming decades of growth will be informed by the county’s comprehensive plan. Residents interested in shaping the future of Pender County’s development can share their perspectives as the comprehensive plan is developed over coming months, and before it’s adopted in November 2025. 1,500 people have already shared their views with planning staff, and Adams is incorporating those concerns about flooding, traffic, and infrastructure, into the draft plan.
