"It's going to be 2036 before we are ready to say, alright, we've got some taps for sale," Chapin Mayor Bill Mitchell told residents in a Facebook Live video the day after Lexington County Council finalized the sale of the old Chapin Business and Technology Park. The county had just approved a deal requiring a minimum of 600 new homes on the site. The mayor was describing a wastewater system that, by his account, can only extend service to about 170 new properties for the foreseeable future.
Those two numbers, 600 and 170, are the whole story here. Not because one side is right and the other is wrong, but because they're both true at the same time, and the gap between them is what actually determines how fast this corner of Chapin changes.
What the county just sold
On August 11, 2026, Lexington County Council voted 5-3 to sell 203.7 acres at the Chapin Business and Technology Park at Brighton to developer Andy White's Brighton Capital Partners for $20.4 million. The land sits at the gateway to town, off I-26 and Columbia Avenue, and it has been empty since the county built it as a pure industrial park more than a decade ago. Sidewalks, roads, a water fountain, and no tenant, ever, for life sciences, manufacturing, distribution, or aerospace use, which is what the park was originally zoned to attract.
The sale contract requires the property to become "a mixed-use development consisting of multiple residential and commercial uses," with a minimum of 600 residential units and at least 25 percent of usable acreage set aside for commercial, retail, or office space. Councilwoman Beth Carrigg has described the vision as a mixed-use village with more than 2,500 jobs, a library, and an amphitheater, built around a technology incubator rather than heavy industry or data centers.
That's the approval. It is not the timeline.
A separate, smaller project next door
Part of the confusion floating around Chapin right now is that two different developments sit next to each other and get talked about as one. Brighton Capital's 600-home minimum applies to the county-owned tech park parcel. A separate 160-acre tract on the same corridor, submitted by Mungo Homes, has been working through Chapin's own Planning Commission since 2024 under a different name, the Brighton Planned Development.
That Mungo project started at roughly 500 homes when it was first proposed in 2024, was scaled down to 382 single-family homes by mid-2025, and was sent back for further revisions by the Chapin Planning Commission in November 2025 after residents raised concerns about traffic and an incomplete commercial commitment. The commission came back a month later, on December 11, 2025, and conditionally approved the project at 377 residential units, sending it on to Chapin Town Council for further consideration. Mayor Mitchell has separately put the project's scale at 390 homes.
Here's how the two tracks compare as of this month:
| Project | Acreage | Homes required or proposed | Status as of September 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brighton Capital Partners (former county tech park) | 203.7 | 600 minimum | Sale finalized Aug. 11, 2026. No construction timeline set. |
| Mungo Homes (adjacent Brighton Planned Development) | ~160 | 377, conditionally approved | Cleared Chapin Planning Commission Dec. 11, 2025. Awaiting Town Council action. |
| Combined, per Mayor Mitchell's public estimate | 360+ | Roughly 1,000 | Two separate approval processes, not one coordinated build-out. |
Mitchell has said the two processes moving forward without coordinated conversation with the town amounts to "stiff-arming" Chapin, and that the county offered $4 million toward the cost of 667 water and sewer taps he says he declined. Whatever the final shape of that dispute, the practical point for anyone watching this corridor is that "1,000 new homes" is not one project with one start date. It's two projects on two tracks, and only one of them has cleared final county approval.
The bottleneck isn't zoning
Here's where the sewer contract matters more than either homebuilder's site plan.
Back in 2015, when the property was still planned as a technology park alone, Lexington County and the Town of Chapin signed an agreement making the town responsible for supplying sewer taps to the site. That agreement predates any residential component. It was written for office parks and light industry, not 600 rooftops.
The sale contract between the county and Brighton Capital Partners acknowledges this directly. It states that the seller, meaning the county, "agrees in good faith to use its best efforts to enforce the sewer service agreement with the town of Chapin to provide sewer service to the property at the required capacity rates for purchaser to develop the property." That's a promise to try, not a guarantee of taps.
Mayor Mitchell's public position is that the town's own treatment plant is already constrained, that Chapin can extend service to roughly 170 new properties in the near term, and that a planned $42 million expansion to the water treatment plant will take years to complete before the town has capacity to sell more taps. His framing of "2036" isn't a random scare number. Controlling growth through the pace of tap sales was part of his campaign platform when he ran for mayor, and he has said so publicly more than once.
None of this means Brighton's 600 homes won't get built. County council approved the zoning, the sale closed, and the developer has every legal right to move forward with entitlements in hand. What it means is that the pace of construction is gated by a utility agreement written for a different kind of project a decade ago, and that agreement is currently controlled by a town government that has said, repeatedly and on the record, that it intends to use that leverage.
Why this matters if you're comparing Chapin corridors
If you're weighing a home near the Brighton gateway against something in an already-built Lake Murray neighborhood, the headline number of 600 or 1,000 new homes can make the newer corridor feel like it's about to change overnight. The sewer math suggests otherwise, at least for the next several years.
That cuts both ways. If you're drawn to Brighton's location near I-26 for the commute and you're comparing it to more established pockets of Chapin, the traffic and school impact many residents worry about is likely to arrive in phases stretched across years, not all at once. Longtime resident Sandy Wade has argued publicly that the shift from a business-and-technology park toward primarily residential use trades a stronger tax base and reverse commute pattern for exactly the kind of road and school strain she says the original park was meant to avoid. Whether that tradeoff proves to be a net negative for the area depends heavily on how long the sewer constraint actually holds, and on whether the promised 2,500 jobs and commercial acreage materialize on anything close to the residential timeline.
If you already own in Chapin and you're trying to figure out what "gateway to town" growth means for your own property's trajectory, the honest answer right now is that nobody, including the county and the town, has fully reconciled the zoning approval with the utility constraint. That reconciliation, whenever it happens, is the number that will actually move this market, not the 600 or the 1,000 that's been in the headlines all year.
A few questions worth asking before you read too much into either number
Does the county's approval mean construction starts soon? Approval and shovel-ready are different things. The land is sold and zoned, but no groundbreaking date has been reported, and the sewer capacity question remains unresolved as of this writing.
Are the Brighton Capital and Mungo Homes projects the same development? No. They're adjacent parcels moving through separate approval processes, one through the county, one through the town's own Planning Commission, with different unit counts and different timelines.
Could this deal still change? Councilwoman Charli Wessinger has publicly raised the possibility of litigation risk tied to the sale. Combined with the unresolved sewer agreement, there's more than one thread here that could still shift the outcome.
If you're trying to read a Chapin listing near this corridor and want to know what's actually likely to happen on the ground versus what's approved on paper, that's the kind of question worth asking before you make an offer. Phillip Jenkins has spent more than three decades watching how Chapin's growth stories actually play out over years, not headlines. Request your free home valuation and get a straight read on what a property near Brighton is worth today, given what's really coming and when.
