The Most Magical Place in North Carolina

When Jenna Oldham first heard that The Walt Disney Company was building a neighborhood mere feet from her house in Pittsboro, North Carolina, she “about fell on the floor.” She was speechless, shocked, thrilled. 

“When are we moving?” she asked her husband.

Oldham, 35, grew up in Pittsboro, which had a population of about 4,500 in 2020. A self-proclaimed “Disney freak,” Oldham and her husband are annual passholders at Disney World and make frequent trips to Orlando, Florida with their two children. 

Oldham never expected the company’s December 2023 announcement of plans for Asteria, a “Storyliving community” with Disney-themed touches. The second of its kind—the first is Cotino, in Rancho Mirage, California—the development will stretch from the area east of Northwood High School to the banks of the Haw River, along the northern edge of the town limits. The new neighborhood will consist of roughly 4,000 homes on 1,500 acres, with single- and multi-family homes as well as a 55+ community. Sales are expected to start in 2027.

“Inspired by the spirit of discovery,” Disney said in its press release, “the Asteria community is being designed to encourage exploration of the region’s natural beauty and spark life-long learning.”

In an artist’s rendering of the development, misty semi-circles of houses extend from a village green; swimming pools boast wooden docks and waterfalls; the landscape is adorned with blue lakes and tennis courts and color-splashed playgrounds; and leafy trees line sunny gathering areas. A cluster of community buildings convene at the neighborhood’s center, including a teal observatory-style dome.

For what it is—a densely populated subdivision miles from the nearest city—Asteria looks like a magical place to live.

In terms of local development, the neighborhood is a drop in the bucket. Asteria will compose only a small section of Chatham Park, the largest master-planned community in North Carolina, which broke ground in Pittsboro in 2014. Extending across more than 8,000 acres, Chatham Park is projected to be a 25-year project that will bring, all told, about 60,000 new residents to town. When it’s done, Pittsboro’s population is expected to be about 14 times its current size.

The northernmost section of Chatham Park, where Asteria will be built, is considered prime real estate because of its river views. Local environmentalists say it’s also prime wilderness—a riverside forest that has grown undisturbed for more than 100 years. 

In this historically rural county, tensions are already flaring over population growth, environmental changes, and infrastructure challenges. Disney’s Asteria adds to questions about how the small town might change—as well as why the company picked North Carolina for its second such community. Disney declined to comment.

“Whoever heard of Disney building houses?” said Jamie Saunders, who has lived in Pittsboro for 16 years. “Who wants to live in a Mickey Mouse house?”

A New Disney Utopia

Katie Smith keeps a Disney backpack on hand, stocked with snacks, sunscreen, and Liquid I.V. This is one element of being a “Disney adult,” Smith said: “If someone says, do you want to go to Disney right now? I’m like, give me 30 seconds.”

A mother of three, Smith lives in Briar Chapel, a Chatham County development northeast of the Haw River, and has a side hustle as a travel adviser who helps people plan Disney trips. With a single exception, she has traveled to Disney World every month for the past two years. Last December, she took 10 local moms—no kids—down on a Frontier flight for a single day at the park. 

“It was a rowdy plane,” she recalled.

Smith is excited about Asteria, but she doesn’t expect it to be a mini-Disney World. “I know they’re not gonna have characters running around,” she said. “There’s not gonna be rides.” 

Buying a home in Asteria means buying into a different kind of story, one that celebrates exactly what environmentalists prize about Chatham County: its natural beauty. Asteria’s website describes the community as “surrounded by breathtaking scenery … embracing nature by its very design.”

Even the name is significant. Asteria derives from the Carolina Aster, a purple flower with yolk-yellow centers that grows throughout the Southeast. “And like the thriving Carolina Aster flower,” Asteria’s website promises, “this enchanting community will be woven into the beautiful landscape.”

Disney’s talent, Smith said, lies in creating utopian environments. The “Imagineers” who dream up and design Disney projects want “all of your senses to be overtaken in a certain way while you’re there,” she said. “They want you to have this certain experience; they want you to feel a certain way.” 

The company takes this commitment to unusual extremes, measuring the exact distance between trash cans, painting buildings to blend in with their natural surroundings, and using machines called Smellitzers to pump scents throughout the parks. In 2019, Disney obtained a patent for the process of “scent blending,” which would allow for more gradual transitions from one scent to another. 

In Chatham County, no one is sure how this process of utopia-creation will happen. Will the company pump flower blossom aromas down Asteria’s winding streets? Pine scent? Musky river water? 

“I can’t tell you how many times I heard the word ‘surreal’ immediately following the announcement” about Asteria, said John Bonitz, a member of the Pittsboro board of commissioners. 

Chatham County’s proximity to a large airport, multiple universities, and Research Triangle Park makes it an appealing location for developers. Since Asteria is part of Chatham Park and falls under the same zoning ordinances and land entitlements, it doesn’t require any new sign-off from the town. Commissioners found out about it shortly before the public did.

For Bonitz and other Pittsboro residents, it’s hard to combine the Disney brand with their sense of their town. 

“For a good number of us,” Bonitz said, “it was just so inconceivable that a place as real and authentic and grimy and lovable as Pittsboro, you know, with all its quirks and rough edges—that it could attract the attention of something that is so much about polish and perfectionism, and about hiding those rough edges.”

‘Disney Heaven’

Disney’s past experiments with community-building haven’t always been idyllic. The company started building houses decades ago with Celebration, a 12,000-person suburb of Orlando featuring a picturesque town center and a curated blend of affordable housing and high-end homes.

But Disney subsequently sold the town center to the private equity firm Lexin Capital, which refinanced and converted many properties to condos. Owners battled with Lexin over rampant water penetration, termite infestations, and mold in their new homes. Disney blamed Lexin for negligent maintenance; Lexin blamed Disney for shoddy construction. 

Storyliving communities are a new enterprise for Disney. The first broke ground this year in Rancho Mirage, California, two hours from Disneyland. Called Cotino, the homes are modern, glassy, and desert-inspired. Their smallest “cottage” options are expected to be listed in the upper $1 millions. 

If the two developments are cousins, Asteria will be the country mouse. More red clay, less cactus. More farmhouse, less glass. Local realtors expect home prices will be lower, reflecting the cost of living difference between Pittsboro and Palm Springs, though HOA fees will likely be high. 

But in many ways, the two communities are similar. Plans for both feature tightly knit houses with ample communal space. Both are expected to contain some larger-than-life elements. One of the buildings in Cotino is expected to resemble a house from The Incredibles 2. In other Cotino renderings, enormous stained-glass flowers drape over public green spaces. 

And that’s just the landscape; then there are all the perks. With a clubhouse, rec center, parks, pools, gardens, restaurants, and nature trails, Asteria is being promoted as an all-inclusive neighborhood. The company has also promised additional Disney-derived perks like storytelling dinners, classes taught by Disney artists, and family fun days with Disney-themed activities.

Michael Sanders is one of many Triangle-based realtors speculating about Asteria. “Guys,” Sanders said in a YouTube video, “if you’re a Disney geek, you’re gonna feel like you died and went to Disney heaven in this place.”

Water Wars

For Jamie Saunders, heaven is already in Chatham County.

Saunders, 69, lives on a hill above the southern banks of the Haw River. Her house is surrounded by trees, home to foxes, coyotes, deer, and even the occasional bear. Down on the river, there are beavers, otters, blue herons, bald eagles, and many fish, including the endangered Cape Fear shiner.

“We’ve got top predators all the way down,” Saunders said. “Once you’ve got a core like that, it breeds everything. More seeds, more life, more animals, more everything.”

No matter Asteria’s goal of celebrating nature, a 4,000-home subdivision is a major disruption to the local environment. For Saunders, this is particularly tragic because the ecosystem here is so old and complex.

The Haw River Assembly, a nonprofit citizens’ group founded in 1982 to restore and protect the river and Jordan Lake, shares her concerns. The organization, which has a staff of six and around 400 active volunteers, tried to coax the developers of Chatham Park, Preston Development, toward a shared vision of environmental stewardship. 

In a controversial decision in 2015, the town of Pittsboro voted to zone Chatham Park as a “planned development district,” which allowed it to operate according to an independent set of environmental standards, called elements. These elements govern issues like open space, tree protection, landscaping, and stormwater. 

Vanessa Jenkins, executive vice president of Preston Development, said the town of Pittsboro and Chatham Park negotiated those elements together. But on the ground, there have been problems. The Haw River Assembly obtained documents from Chatham County in April showing that Chatham Park has been cited for violating sediment and erosion rules 15 times since 2019. Other builders in Chatham Park were cited six times. Preston Development did not respond to a request for comment on these violations.

“Chatham Park has just been pretty unwilling, over all these years, to do more to protect the environment than they can get away with,” said Haw River Assembly Executive Director Elaine Chiosso.

So when the Haw River Assembly heard about Asteria, the group saw an opportunity to apply pressure and garner support from far beyond Chatham County. “Because Disney is a publicly traded company, and it has a huge brand, right?” Chiosso said. “Who doesn’t know Disney?”

The organization wrote to Disney asking the company to honor its stated environmental goals for 2030 and make conservation a priority in developing Asteria. The letter emphasized the need to protect the tree canopy, improve stormwater management and drinking water, and design roads and trails with care. The group also launched a petition calling on Disney and DMB Development, the Arizona-based developer heading up both Cotino and Asteria, to commit to stronger environmental standards than Chatham Park’s. 

At a community meeting in mid-May, DMB Development said it would preserve significant swaths of forested land, use natural surface trails along the river in place of paved walkways, and begin construction in the least environmentally sensitive parts of the subdivision. DMB also offered the Haw River Assembly permission to examine their stormwater and sediment impacts on site. 

“That’s rare, that you get a developer who says that,” said Chiosso.

Bonitz, the Pittsboro commissioner, is optimistic that Asteria will bring a new kind of development and community engagement. He hopes “the Disney-DMB partnership will find meaningful ways to respond to community concerns such as respecting the natural areas and protecting the dark night sky.”

DMB declined to comment.

An ongoing challenge for Pittsboro, Chatham Park, and now Asteria, is water and sewage infrastructure. Pittsboro draws its drinking water from the Haw River, which has been plagued by upriver industrial contamination. The town has for years anticipated that its population would outgrow its current water supply and sewage capacity, even with Chatham Park’s construction of a new treatment plant in 2019.  

In July, Pittsboro will merge its water and wastewater services with the city of Sanford, in neighboring Lee County, under the new name TriRiver Water. This will alleviate pressure on Pittsboro’s resources, although concerns about water quality and resource scarcity continue.

Pittsboro resident Katie Bryant co-founded the advocacy group Clean Haw River in 2020. When Bryant heard about Asteria, her first reaction was to wonder “why [Disney] would pick a community with a water issue.” Then she thought, “Has anyone told them?” The town of Pittsboro declined to comment.

Bryant hopes developments like Asteria, and greater Chatham Park, will join the campaign to advocate for safe drinking water in Pittsboro. She would love to see town leadership push them in this direction.

“Yes, come in and develop,” Bryant said, “but let’s battle this upstream together.” 

Pittsboro’s Potential

Oldham, the Disney lover who grew up in Pittsboro, fondly remembers what Pittsboro was like when she was a child. Trees lined the two-lane roads and the nearest Walmart was an hour away. But she doesn’t think it needs to stay that way.

She grew up taking ballet, tap, jazz, modern, and clogging lessons, and she now owns a children’s dance studio just north of the courthouse, on Hillsboro Street. She sees a similar artistic spirit in Walt Disney—the man, and now, the brand. “I just believe in passion, and art, and the things that truly make you feel,” Oldham said. “And so does Disney.”

Oldham sees Pittsboro as a place that fosters creativity and beauty. Asteria’s arrival, to her, is a meeting of two of her great loves. 

“For a company as magical, inventive, unique, and storytelling as Disney is—for them to see the potential in Pittsboro, North Carolina? It literally brings me to tears,” Oldham said. “Because this is my town. And I’ve always seen that potential.”

Oldham agrees that the county’s rapid development has its challenges. With seven stoplights between her house and her studio, it takes her three times as long to get to work as it used to.

“Is it surprising? No. Is it annoying? Yes,” Oldham said. “But that’s what happens with growth.”

Maybe, in the case of Disney, that growth will happen with more environmental protection than Pittsboro has seen in the past. “They are not shy about literally shaping the earth,” Bonitz said of Disney Imagineers. “But then when it is done, it is usually really high quality, and with a level of forethought that is extraordinary.”

Oldham doesn’t think her family will end up moving to Asteria. They value their acres of land, with a big yard for their kids to play. Oldham can’t see selling—“unless Disney promises to put Magic Kingdom on it,” she joked.

Then, maybe, she’d consider it.

Sara Graybeal is a Pittsboro native whose writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Carolina Quarterly, Hobart Pulp, and elsewhere. Sara holds a master’s degree in fine art in creative writing from UNC-Greensboro and a master’s degree in folklore from UNC-Chapel Hill. She lives in Greensboro.