Cardinal News: Then & Now takes a look back at the stories we brought you over the last 12 months. Through the end of the year, we’re sharing updates on some of the people and issues that made news in 2024. This installment: a 580-acre mixed-use development planned for Axton.
Pittsylvania County approved a massive master-planned community last summer to help address the anticipated housing demand that would be created by the nearby megasite landing a tenant. Over a year later, that has paid off, developers say.
The county had been working to attract a tenant to the Southern Virginia Megasite at Berry Hill for years. Officials knew that landing a developer at the site would be transformative for the region, increasing the already high housing demand.
A local development group, Southside Investing, submitted a proposal to build a housing development in Axton, just 9 miles from the megasite. The county board of supervisors approved the project in August 2023.
Last month, Microporous, a manufacturer of battery components for electric vehicles, announced that it would become the first tenant at the megasite, promising to invest a minimum of $1.3 billion and bring more than 2,000 jobs to the area.
Some of those workers will be local residents, said John Reeves, CEO of the Tennessee-based company. But others will be moving to the area and looking for housing.
The 580-acre master-planned community, with its 1,900 housing units, will help meet this demand.
“We believe that economic development involves housing every bit as much as jobs,” said Tony Salah, a member of Southside Investing, the development company behind the project.
The Microporous announcement “validates our time and energy and dollars into this area,” Salah said. “We want to be the supply solution for a portion of the housing demand.”
The Axton project “is part of a broader narrative” demonstrating that the region is able to accommodate growth from large, impactful projects, said Matt Rowe, economic development director for Pittsylvania County.
“No single residential or commercial project solely moves the needle for a transformative project like Microporous,” Rowe said.
But, when combined with the continued urban renewal in Danville and investments into public schools, manufacturing workforce programs, shovel-ready sites and quality of life, “all of these elements add up to a winning formula for attractive and winning mega-sized projects.”
Salah and Todd Curtis, another member of Southside Investing, said that the group appreciates the county’s work to recruit Microporous.
“Obviously that’s the reason we pursued this endeavor,” Curtis said. “We knew something would come and that there was going to be a need for housing. What has been accomplished is amazing, to say the least. It’s wonderful.”
Plans call for housing, commercial, community spaces
The project is a planned-unit development, a zoning term that refers to a mix of uses.
The development plans include not only a variety of housing but also a community grocery store, a hotel, a child care center and a community center. These features may shift, as the project is “adaptable to what the market wants,” Salah said.
“The reason why we’re doing a PUD is because we can offer different types of housing at different price points to accommodate the market as different megasite tenants create jobs,” he said.
With Microporous as the anchor tenant, the county hopes to attract other companies to the 3,528-acre megasite.
Construction has not yet begun for the project, Salah said.
“We are in the midst of a laundry list of engineering thresholds that we have to cross,” he said. “I can’t give you a timeframe. … We’re going to have our eyes looking toward the megasite as they develop their time schedules. We’ll hopefully be on a parallel course, but again, it’s all market dependent.”
The Southside Investing proposal projected a full build-out time of close to a decade, with phases of the project being completed sooner than that.
“The market is really going to dictate when we start building houses,” Salah said. “If senior housing becomes more market-ready sooner, we’ll adapt. If multifamily apartments feel like they can be realized sooner rather than later, we’ll adapt.”
There was strong resident opposition to this project when it was working its way through the approval process last summer.
Salah and the other developers with Southside Investing held community meetings to address resident questions and concerns, but more than 20 residents still spoke against the project at multiple public hearings.
They were concerned about traffic, loss of agricultural land and the natural beauty of the county, and the possibility that this development could kickstart a chain of similar developments.
Salah said there haven’t been any additional meetings with the community since the project’s approval. The group is “very accessible” to residents who want to have a conversation, he said.
“I have offered to meet with anybody, then and now, who has questions or concerns,” Salah said. “But frankly, because nothing’s coming out of the ground, I don’t think a lot of folks are thinking about it right now.”
