Danville has added more than 100 housing units to its market since 2023, with over 200 more in construction. In Pittsylvania, a master-planned community will soon add more than 1,800 units to the county’s housing stock.
It’s still not enough, local officials say.
Danville and Pittsylvania County are experiencing unprecedented levels of growth, for which the housing market wasn’t prepared.
Job creation in the region, which is driving the increase in demand for housing, has picked up rapidly in recent years, after decades of job losses tied to the declining tobacco and textile industries.
Large facilities locating at industrial parks in the region are expected to create thousands of jobs in the coming years. The Berry Hill megasite, the largest industrial site in the state, will soon be home to lithium-ion battery separator manufacturer Microporous.
Microporous has promised to create about 2,000 new jobs. And data center developer Stack Infrastructure is promising about 2,500 permanent jobs at an AI data center facility that is also expected to come to the Berry Hill site, though there has been no formal announcement.
Close to 1,000 new housing units are needed to support the Microporous project alone, according to the Danville Housing Navigator.
The workers will need places to live, said Linda Green, executive director of the Southern Virginia Regional Alliance, a regional economic development group.
That’s why local development group Southside Investing is building a massive master-planned community development in Axton, nine miles from the megasite.
Tony Salah, with Southside Investing, said the group “has been actively preparing to meet the housing demand of future jobs.” The 590-acre development, called Sugar Tree Living, will create more than 1,800 units across all housing types — single-family, apartments, townhomes and senior living.
Salah joined other developers, along with real estate professionals, builders, bankers and economic development officials in Danville on Thursday for the fifth annual Southern Virginia Regional Housing Summit.
At the event, Green said that housing demand in the region has increased even since 2022, when a study identified a pent-up demand for about 600 single-family homes and 700 apartment units in Danville.
“Housing has been built, new projects have been announced and our economic development pipeline has changed substantially,” she said. “But the projections for tomorrow change even faster and more drastically.”
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Since the study was released, the city has built 112 rental units and 16 for-sale units, with 233 more units in construction.
Despite this, the demand has continued to grow, according to a 2025 update to the study.
Pent-up demand in the city now calls for nearly 4,000 rental units and 1,300 owned units, said Susan McCulloch, Danville’s director of housing and development.
Housing is now seen as a key part of economic development, Green said. Companies always ask about housing when considering whether to locate in an area, she said.
“They’re going to ask the housing question, and if you don’t have a solution for it, you can’t win the project,” Green said. “That’s why we increasingly view housing as workforce and economic development infrastructure. You no longer see a division between the departments.”
Salah echoed this sentiment, calling the housing deficit “the overwhelming regional refrain of need.”
The Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors approved the Sugar Tree Living project in 2023, over a year before the Microporous announcement, anticipating that a major housing development would be needed to support eventual jobs at the megasite.
On top of 1,800 housing units, the development will also offer amenities like healthcare, childcare, retail, dining, hospitality and recreation, and services like on-site fire and rescue.
When it was approved, the master-planned community drew some pushback from residents about traffic, loss of agricultural land and the natural beauty of the county, and the possibility that the development could kickstart a chain of similar developments.
Microporous locating at the megasite “validated our time and energy and dollars into this area,” Salah said in a 2024 interview after the company’s announcement.
“We want to be the supply solution for a portion of the housing demand,” he said then.
After Thursday’s housing summit, Salah added that Southside Investing is feeling “more and more confident that an abundant wave of well-paying, good jobs are closer than ever.”
A second tenant at the megasite — and thousands of additional jobs — is on the horizon, with data center developer Stack Infrastructure planning to build an AI data center campus on nearly 3,000 acres at the site.
A local performance agreement for the project outlines Stack’s promise of $100 billion in investment and more than 2,000 permanent jobs.
“The housing implication is clear,” Green said. “We must prepare for both permanent employment growth and the workforce needed to construct and equip these growing facilities.”
Information about the region’s housing needs, current projects and available sites can be found on the Danville Housing Navigator website.