Tight-lipped home-builder buys land for new houses in Horry County
Meritage Homes, one of the largest home-builders in the country, has purchased two large tracts of land in Horry County where it plans to build hundreds of homes.
On the first tract, near the intersection of S.C. 31 and S.C. 22, Meritage plans to build 731 single-family homes in a “master-planned community.” The homes will be between 1,200 and 2,900 square feet.
The company said in a news release the subdivision will provide “a resort-style pool, cabana, tot lot, pickleball courts and a dock” that provides access to the Intercoastal Waterway.
It’s dubbed the project “Waterside.”
On the second tract, along S.C. 9 in Longs, Meritage plans to build 353 single-family homes that will be between 1,400 and 2,400 square feet. The company plans to build “a pool, cabana, playground, walking trails, community garden and ponds” in the subdivision.
It will call the subdivision Cypress Ridge.
Despite its grand plans, though, Meritage declined to answer specific questions about the developments from The Sun News.
The company declined to provide information about where, specifically, the land is located, if the company will seek to rezone the land and if the land includes wetlands.
“Meritage is too early in the development process for Waterside and Cypress Ridge to fully answer these questions,” Bailey Doyle, a spokesperson for the company, said in an email. “The announcement (of the projects was) solely about the purchase of the land and their intent to build these communities.”
As Horry County has grown — adding nearly 82,000 residents in the last decade alone — such questions have become critical.
In recent months and years, wetland and zoning issues have drawn resident protests and have killed plans for major projects.
Last year, for example, developers killed plans for a major 700-acre housing development in Burgess after residents organized to complain about traffic increases and potential harms to a historic cemetery.
New housing projects in Carolina Forest, too, face frequent resident protests.
Plans for homes along Gardner Lacy Road and on The Wizard golf course have both been scraped within the past year.
And earlier this year, North Myrtle Beach residents living near the S.C. 31 and S.C. 22 interchange raised concerns about clear-cutting the area’s trees, making neighborhoods subject to noise from the highways.
County records indicate that much of the land near the S.C. 31 and S.C. 22 interchange is zoned as commercial forest agriculture, which allows for two single-family homes or three townhomes per acre.
Developers frequently seek to rezone those parcels of land for housing developments since other zoning categories allow for greater density per acre.
The county also recently closed a CFA zoning loophole. That change could force developers into the rezoning process for housing projects.
Since it’s not clear where the company purchased land along S.C. 9, it’s not clear what the land might currently be zoned.
