By Hayden Kobza
Sitting at Chestnut Hall on a sunny Friday afternoon, Mayor Morty Lloyd and David Barto, director of the Collegedale Tomorrow Foundation, discussed the city’s uncertain future.
The two men sat on the front porch of the building located at The Commons, a community gathering place tucked between City Hall and Little Debbie Park. Nearby, the sounds of birds chirping and children playing clashed with the buzz of Apison Pike, the main road a few hundred feet away — a symbolic reminder of a growing dilemma.
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Collegedale—a place known for scenic mountain views, Happy Valley and the hum of rumbling trains—is at a crossroads, according to city officials. As a result, the community leaders, such as Barto, Lloyd and others, spend countless hours grappling with the competing forces of small-town, rural America versus a growing demand for more housing and commercialization.
From 2000 to 2020, the Collegedale population jumped by 70.54%, from 6,514 to 11,109 residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Between 2010 and 2020, it grew by 34.13%, increasing from 8,282 to 11,109, making Collegedale the fastest-growing city in Hamilton County.
The city has seen a significant influx of people from states such as Florida, California, New Jersey and other places due to lower property taxes and better living conditions, according to Barto. While talking to students in an Interactive Journalism class at Southern Adventist University, Barto explained that many newer residents arrived during the pandemic to escape shutdowns and the expensive cost of living.
“Turns out that when you buy a $300,000 house in Florida, and you can't get insurance on it, or your insurance is almost the same amount as your house payment every month, it starts making dealing with two months of winter up here look pretty good,” Barto quipped. “If you're in California and you have to deal with fires and earthquakes and skyrocketing property taxes, it all of a sudden makes Collegedale look pretty good to move to.”
Collegedale has also been attracting many people from the tech industry due to the high-speed Electric Power Board (EPB) Internet service available here, which allows them to work remotely.
“I mean, you can work for any of these big tech companies out of New York and live in a $600,000 house here that's got three times the square footage of the same house you would have in Jersey, or New York, or California,” Barto said, “ and that's why they're coming here.”
Balancing Growth and Preservation
Along with the population growth, the city has also experienced a proliferation of housing developments in recent years, mainly high-density projects, igniting angst among some residents.
In 2023, Jason Allin, the city’s staff planner, moved to Collegedale from Loma Linda, California. Since then, he has been trying to help the city manage growth based on a 2030 land-use plan developed in 2015. In a recent interview, he said the city government will update the plan as 2030 approaches.
“We're at a weird kind of intersection right now,” Allin said. “It's, ‘Do we want to stay more rural? Do we want to stay more of a hometown feel? Or do we want the commercial businesses, which are going to bring more traffic?”
Many residents want the city to remain small with less housing, Allin explained, noting that Collegedale will miss out on many modern amenities without growth.
“I know a lot of the residents - they don't want more houses, but they want more commercial [developments], and you can’t have both,” he explained. “You don't see a Buffalo Wild Wings in the middle of nowhere, right? So that's the hard part right now, it’s trying to figure out what we want to do and what direction we want to go in.”
Meanwhile, the need for affordable housing “is becoming acutely evident at the local level in Collegedale,” Allin explained to attendees at a recent Monday afternoon city meeting.
“Expansion of housing supply is contributing to increased traffic congestion and added pressure on existing infrastructure systems.”
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Over the past few years, apartment complexes have sprung up around the city due to the demand for affordable housing. However, due to the nature of apartments attracting more transient residents, city officials are now discouraging such developments, opting for townhomes to keep people in the city long term.
“We are calling it the missing middle,” Allin told the journalism students. “You have your high-value homes, you have your low income, and right in the middle, right now, are townhomes. That's about what everyone can afford, and that's what we're seeing an increase of.”
At the same time, Allin and other city officials mentioned the lack of buildable land within city limits as one challenge the city faces as the population grows. They estimate the remaining undeveloped land to be about 700 acres, according to Commissioner Laura Howse, a newly elected city official who also spoke to the Interactive Journalism class.
“The city is physically divided by White Oak Mountain, limiting east-west connectivity and reducing the amount of contiguous, developable land,” according to Allin. “Significant portions of Collegedale lie within the Wolftever Creek floodplain and floodway, restricting the intensity and location of future development.”
Responsible Development and Local Impact
During the Chestnut Hall interview, Mayor Lloyd said he ran his campaign on planned growth and wants to see the city develop in a way that increases property values.
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“I'm only in favor of responsible development,” he said, “and that we are becoming the city we want to be, and that we're not recklessly entering into projects that we're going to regret 20 or 30 years down the road.”
Barto echoed Lloyd’s sentiments using the controversial Chastain residential housing development as an example. The project, bringing 500 homes to the community, is being developed by Empire Solutions, a company out of Atlanta, on land where the Hidden Hills Farm and Saddle Club was once located. Despite fierce opposition from residents, city officials approved the project, with concessions from the developer.
“I'm pretty proud of what we worked out with Empire communities out of Atlanta,” Barto said. “[The] Chastain farms development over off Edgemon, we preserved almost 50% of the property that won't be touched at all.”
Real People, Real Choices
Nick Ansil, age 36, a husband and father of three, is one of the newer residents who call Collegedale home. In 2021, he moved to the city with his family and found it environmentally appealing and affordable. However, these days, he finds the housing stock limited and expensive. “There's no affordable housing that's going in,” Ansil said. “It's all just new subdivisions, and none of the infrastructure is keeping up.”
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Ansil isn’t the only one who shares this sentiment about affordable housing. Barto mentioned the need for worker-based housing when he spoke to the Interactive Journalism class a few weeks ago.
“We need to be working on worker-based housing that folks have an opportunity to own, and that's what I've been pushing with a lot of the major stakeholders,” Barto said. “To take land that we've got and build cottage communities for people to be able to buy into.”
However, the possibility poses at least one problem. If someone were to build cottage housing in the area, under the American free enterprise system, Barto said most buyers could be retirees from other places, such as Florida, rather than local working-class residents.
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“I don't want to accidentally build a retirement village, because that's what happens when you build cottage communities,” Barto said. “ ... You need a nonprofit to run that kind of enterprise. And that's what I'm working [on].”
Ansil understands that planning for the future is difficult. For him, making responsible changes to the city will take a lot of time and planning.
“I think it's a difficult thing to get right,” he said. “There's a lot of challenges that they're going to have to overcome to do that. …I'm guessing that they're trying, but I think instead of just expanding the roads, we need to find some alternatives, maybe some public transport or something like that in the area.”
Long-Time Residents Reflect on Change
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Marvin Blair, 85, and his wife, Helen, 82, live 20 minutes outside the City of Collegedale in unincorporated Bradley County, the last home before the Tennessee–Georgia line. Blair’s family has been rooted here for generations, while Helen Blair grew up in Cambridge, England, and has called this region home since the couple moved to the area in 1975. They travel to Collegedale and Ooletwah regularly for shopping and doctor visits.
Reminiscing, Blair described the area before Collegedale was established in 1968. He laughed when asked what the town was like during that time. In the 1940s, the land was a quiet, rural expanse, with only a single store he could remember.
While Helen Blair doesn’t travel to Collegedale on a daily basis, she feels the impact of the surrounding areas and described how the newer developments have caused strain on her family.
Blair lost his right leg following cancer treatment several years ago, and now uses a walker to move around. Following chemotherapy, his bones became severely brittle; a seemingly minor injury — stubbing his toe — resulted in his leg breaking, which required an amputation.
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The increased traffic and ongoing construction projects in the greater Collegedale area have made simple tasks like grocery shopping and running errands much more time-consuming for Helen Blair. She finds it more difficult to leave the house as she tries to care for her husband.
“He was in Life Care over in Ooltewah,” she said. “I used to visit him every day while he was in rehab. Sometimes I wouldn't even drive home afterward. Instead of 20 minutes, it would take 40 minutes to get there because of the traffic. That’s the worst part.”
Though frustrated with the amount of growth the area is experiencing, Helen Blair understands that things change.
“We wish our little part of paradise could stay the way it is, but progress is progress, and there's more and more people in this world, and they have to live somewhere,” she said.
As a long-time community member, she hopes city officials will responsibly manage the growth.
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“ … I think a lot of the commissioners or people that are running [the city], all they think, to be honest, is property taxes, and they fail to understand that, then you often have to make the roads wider. You have to build new schools because all those people who move their children have to go to school somewhere.”
Blair said he strongly dislikes the change and misses his small town.
“I prefer to think of it being negative rather than positive,” he said of the recent changes, “because I like open spaces. I like the country part of it.”
