Chattanooga and Hamilton County will need 46,000 more apartments, single-family residences and other housing over 20 years to handle swelling growth, new planning studies show.
“It’s not astronomical,” said Karen Hundt, the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Regional Planning Agency’s director of community planning and design. “It’s close to what we’ve been seeing the last few years.”
The last three years of residential permits for the city and county — 3,318 for 2023, 2,935 for 2022 and 3,677 for 2021 — each have surpassed the prior top mark of 2,860 in 2007, figures show.
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Experts estimate Hamilton County’s population will near a half million residents during the next 40 years, the Regional Planning Agency said. That’s up from a U.S. Census Bureau projection of 380,000 last year.