A plan to add more than 1,100 new homes to Whitfield County’s tight housing market cleared a hurdle when the board of commissioners unanimously approved a measure last week extending sewer lines to a 400-acre housing development site on Cleveland Highway about 12 miles north of Dalton.
“We have thousands of people who come into Dalton and Whitfield County every day for work … there’s just so many jobs we have, which is great, but they all go back home because there is no place for them to live,” said commission chair Jevin Jensen in an interview Monday. “They go back to Cleveland [Tennessee], they go back to Catoosa County. And we literally can see the population during the day from 8 to 5 grow by thousands of people, but then they all leave at five o’clock.”
Expected to be an investment of more than $300 million, Camden Farms would be the largest planned community ever in Whitfield County, according to Jensen. The typical home will feature four bedrooms and three bathrooms, with a starting price around $300,000. The development is planned to include amenities like playgrounds and a pool.
At a special meeting Thursday at Edwards Park Community Center, the board voted to allocate $900,000 to extend sewer lines 3 miles north to reach the site on Cleveland Highway in the Strain Road area. The development aligns with the county’s master plan to add more homes in its northern end, Jensen said, near several middle and high schools that have recently been built and opened.
Jensen said the deal with Three Point Development of Chattanooga requires that once the builder closes on the property and starts engineering work, Whitfield County will provide the sewer funds from the $20.3 million the county is receiving from the federal American Rescue Plan, a pandemic relief package passed last year by Democrats in Congress.