Davidson

Davidson is the hardest town on this lake to buy in, and it is not close. Good houses here go under contract before I can get a second showing scheduled. If you want to live in Davidson you need to be ready to move on the day, not the weekend.

The reason is that the town decided a long time ago not to get any bigger. Officials have controlled growth deliberately, so while Huntersville and Mooresville have doubled, Davidson has stayed small. That restraint is exactly what people are paying for, and it is why supply never catches up with demand.

The college came first. Presbyterians founded Davidson College in 1837 and named it for Brigadier General William Lee Davidson, a local Revolutionary War officer. The town grew up around the campus, incorporated as Davidson College in 1879, then dropped the second word twelve years later. The college put in the first water and electricity at the turn of the century. It still sits on 450 acres in the middle of downtown with about two thousand students, and it sets the tone of the whole place. A lot of my buyers here are academics, doctors, and families who want their children around that.

Downtown was built for walking, not driving, and it won planning awards for it. Connected walkways, dense blocks, enormous oaks, and Main Street lined with independent shops and restaurants rather than chains. The farmers market is the biggest in the area. Concerts on the Green run Sunday nights through the summer, Art on the Green is in April, and the Davidson Community Players have been staging plays since 1965.

For green space you have the Lake Davidson Nature Preserve, with a loop trail around the peninsula shoreline and a launch for canoes and kayaks, the paved Southeast Greenway running just under three miles from downtown out to the southeastern neighborhoods, and Fisher Farm Park off Shearer Road, which has about five miles of mountain bike trail across two hundred acres.

Schools are a real draw and there is more choice here than anywhere else on the lake: Davidson Elementary in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg system, the Community School of Davidson as a public charter, plus Davidson Day School and other independents.

A word of caution. Davidson is not a waterfront town in the way Cornelius is. There is lake access, but if a dock is your non-negotiable, you will have a very short list here and I would rather tell you that now. What Davidson gives you instead is a town you can live in without a car for most of the week, which almost nowhere else around Lake Norman can offer.