New Mississippi Development Will Be State’s Biggest

The Stone County, Miss., Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved the first stages of an 8,000-home planned community, which will include 12 “villages” as well as a city center, trails, lakes, fields, a sheriff’s office, a fire station and town hall, the Hattiesburg American reports.

The project, which will be the biggest in the Mississippi housing market, and whose first phase will cost $150 million, will include 12 different villages built across 5,000 acres of land. The community will include both townhouses and condominiums.

The single-family homes are expected to be priced from $130,000-500,000, with the possibility of some home prices reaching $1 million, said Bob Windham, a partner with Mississippi Investors VI, LLC. Officials did not say if some of the units would be set aside as affordable housing.

The project has been in the works for nine months, but quickly came to fruition because of circumstances created by Hurricane Katrina.

“For a project of this size to move this quickly is really unprecedented. But of course, the need for housing in South Mississippi is unprecedented as well,” said one housing official.

The group will do all the “horizontal building,” including roadways, water systems and some of the commercial center, then will sell the villages to eight home builders, none of whom are based in Mississippi.

“The builders will come in here and speculate on homes,” he said, “and as they sell, they’ll build more. I don’t know if we’ll build 500 in one year or 5,000.”

He said based on market analysis and current Mississippi mortgage rates, he believes that the demand for housing quickly will fill the development.

“If all of the information is true, there is a pent-up need of 80,000 homes in Mississippi,” he said.

The question will be whether people can afford mortgage loans on some of these properties. For now, officials remain optimistic. Stone County tax assessor Charles Williams Jr. said the development will have an enormous impact on the county.

“Nothing this large has happened in Stone County since it was founded,” he said. “Nothing on this scale.”

Currently there are 3,500 single-family homes in Stone County, he said, plus about 800 mobile homes and more renters, which means the development, according to his estimate, will triple the population in the next five years.