In April 2026, the Brunswick County Planning Board did something it had already done five months earlier. It rejected a plan to build more than a thousand homes off Green Hill Road in Winnabow, the same corridor where Mallory Creek Plantation has spent the last decade quietly filling in its own sections, one phase at a time.
The developer's attorney had argued the project met, and in places exceeded, the county's own development standards. The board voted it down anyway, citing flooding risk and traffic safety at the Green Hill Road and U.S. 17 intersection. Central to that decision was testimony from Travis Mercer, chief of the Winnabow Volunteer Fire Department, who told the board that during heavy rain his crews routinely struggle to reach homes in the area at all.
By May, the developer, CLD Engineering along with a Florida-based purchaser called HIC Land LLC, had filed suit against the county in Brunswick County Superior Court. Their complaint didn't mince words about the fire chief's role in sinking the deal, arguing he has no credentials qualifying him as an expert in traffic safety.
That fight is still unresolved as of this writing. But the pattern behind it tells you something more useful than any single lawsuit outcome: this corridor's biggest growth bets keep getting stuck at the permitting stage, while communities that are already built keep absorbing buyers who don't want to wait and see.
The Timeline, in Full
| Date | What Happened |
|---|---|
| Nov. 10, 2025 | Planning board votes 4-2 to deny the original 1,450-home Green Hill Planned Development, citing school capacity and traffic safety |
| April 13, 2026 | A revised 1,340-home version is denied again, this time on flooding and traffic grounds, with the Winnabow VFD chief's testimony cited in the board's reasoning |
| May 6, 2026 | CLD Engineering and HIC Land LLC file suit against Brunswick County in Superior Court, arguing the denial wasn't supported by credible evidence |
Two denials of the same underlying acreage in five months isn't a fluke. It's a board that has settled on an answer and is sticking to it, even under legal pressure.
Same Two Words, Different Address
Green Hill isn't an isolated case. The Cherrytree Tract, a 1,000-home planned development about five miles away, was denied in September 2025 over the same combination of traffic and flooding concerns, then came back through the process and is now listed as an approved planned development. And waiting across Town Creek Road is the Maco Tract, a separate proposal for 12,499 units still working through the county's process.
Three separate tracts, three separate developers, and the same two objections showing up in the record each time: the roads can't absorb it, and the drainage can't handle it. Cherrytree's path from denial to approval shows those objections don't necessarily kill a project, but they do add months or years and usually shrink the unit count before anything breaks ground.
Why the Lawsuit Was Predictable
North Carolina law generally requires local governments to approve development applications that meet or exceed the standards already written into their own ordinances. When a board denies a technically compliant project anyway, it's leaning on judgment calls, like how much weight to give a fire chief's field experience, that don't always hold up if a judge is asked to review them line by line.
This isn't the first time Brunswick County has ended up in court over this exact tension. A 283-home development called Sailor's Haven near Sunset Beach followed nearly the same script: the planning board denied the original application over stormwater concerns in 2025, the developer sued, and a revised plan with fewer units was eventually approved. If Green Hill follows that path, the fight isn't really about whether homes get built. It's about how many, on what timeline, and with what conditions attached, none of which gets settled quickly.
What This Means If You're Looking at Mallory Creek Plantation
Here's the part that matters if you're comparing communities in this stretch of Brunswick County rather than reading about zoning fights for their own sake.
Mallory Creek Plantation already exists. The pool, clubhouse, sidewalks, and walking paths that a proposal like Green Hill is still fighting to get approved are already built, already paid for by the community's HOA, and already usable the week you move in. Local agents who work this market regularly note that Mallory Creek's HOA fees run lower than comparable Leland-area communities, which matters more when you're not also waiting years to find out whether the neighborhood next door gets built at all.
The location advantages that a future mega-development would eventually offer are ones Mallory Creek already has. The community sits close to Brunswick Nature Park, which has trails and a kayak launch, and to the newer Riverfront Park with its riverwalk and fishing pier. It also has a shorter path to the Brunswick Forest commercial area than most of the proposed developments further out along Green Hill Road, and it includes a Del Webb section built specifically for active adult buyers, something none of the pending mega-projects have announced.
Demand for that finished product shows up in resale numbers, too. One recent Mallory Creek resale listed at $255,000 and closed at $325,000, about 21.5 percent over asking. That's not a community-wide average, and single sales shouldn't be read as a trend line, but it's a real data point showing buyers are willing to compete for homes that already exist rather than bet on ones that might.
None of this means Winnabow has stopped growing. It means the growth that's actually happening is showing up in smaller, incremental additions inside established communities like Mallory Creek, not in the thousand-plus-home projects that keep hitting the same wall at the planning board.
Questions Worth Asking Before You Compare
If you're weighing Mallory Creek Plantation against a still-unbuilt community elsewhere in this corridor, a few questions will tell you more than the site plan renderings will:
- Has this specific project cleared the planning board, or is it still in review, appeal, or litigation?
- What does the developer's own traffic study say about the nearest major intersection, and has the county's engineering staff signed off on it?
- Has the site had documented drainage or flooding issues in the past five years, and if so, what stormwater infrastructure is actually built, not just planned?
- What happens to your closing timeline if the project's approval is later challenged in court?
None of these questions require a law degree. They just require asking before you fall in love with a floor plan.
A Few Questions We Hear Often
Does the Green Hill lawsuit affect homes already built in Mallory Creek Plantation? No. The litigation concerns a separate, undeveloped 784-acre tract off Green Hill Road. Mallory Creek's existing sections aren't part of that case.
If Green Hill eventually gets approved, will it change what my Mallory Creek home is worth? Possibly, in either direction. More rooftops nearby typically means more nearby retail and services over time, but it can also mean more traffic on the roads you already use. Either effect would take years to show up, since the project is still in litigation with no construction timeline.
Is Winnabow still a good place to buy right now, given all this uncertainty about future development? The uncertainty is specific to the large proposed projects, not to the town's established neighborhoods. Communities like Mallory Creek Plantation already have their infrastructure built and their traffic patterns established, which is a different risk profile than land that's still working through the county approval process.
If you're weighing Mallory Creek Plantation against something newer, or not yet built, in this same stretch of Brunswick County, it helps to talk through what's actually finished versus what's still theoretical. Team Gale works this corridor regularly and can walk you through the specific sections, HOA structures, and resale patterns that matter here. Call (910) 541-1212, request a home valuation, or ask us for a custom comparison between Mallory Creek and any other Winnabow-area community you're considering.