Five futures for Apex, and what each one costs in land
The Town is choosing how Apex grows for the next thirty years. Its consultants modeled five scenarios. Two of them build the exact same number of homes — on wildly different amounts of ground.
Projects Apex has already approved will disturb 3,889 acres. That happens no matter what the Town decides next. The five scenarios are arguments about the rest.
What Apex is actually deciding
A comprehensive plan is the document the Town reaches for when a developer files a rezoning request, when the budget has to choose between a fire station and a greenway, and when someone asks whether a warehouse belongs on a particular road. It doesn't approve anything by itself. It sets the expectation that everything else gets measured against.
The current one is Advance Apex 2045, adopted in 2019, when about 55,000 people lived in Apex. Roughly 83,000 live here now. The plan guiding decisions about the town's future was written for a town two-thirds its current size.
Peak Plan 2055 replaces it, and pairs a new comprehensive plan with a transportation plan and a study of the NC 55 corridor. In the Town's words, it is meant to help leaders and staff make decisions "in a coordinated, thoughtful manner" over the next thirty years.
Where the process stands
Discovery
Data collection, existing conditions, focus groups, and the first public forum.
CompleteDevelopment
The five land use and conservation scenarios on this page, plus a vision plan, subarea concepts, and a second public forum.
Happening nowDirection
Policy recommendations, an action plan, a third public forum, and review drafts of the plan itself.
Still aheadThis is the phase where public comment can still change the shape of the outcome. Once the process moves to policy recommendations, the Town is writing rules to implement a direction it has already chosen. The scenarios below are the fork in the road.
Pick a scenario
Scenario A is the floor. It assumes every project already approved gets built and then all growth stops — so its footprint is the one no choice can undo. Every other scenario stacks on top of it.
Each dot is one new home. Olive green is protected open space; pale green is land that could still be built on. Map: Town of Apex, Peak Plan 2055 Growth Allocation Comparison.
What gets built for people to live in
The same growth, on half the land
The five scenarios are not five different amounts of growth. Housing and commercial totals are held identical in pairs. B and D build the same 27,517 homes and the same 17.5 million square feet. C and E build the same 23,267 homes and 20.5 million square feet.
Within each pair, the only thing that changes is where the growth goes and what shape it takes. That makes this a clean test of one question: what does spreading out actually cost?
Spread out
Scenarios B and C
11,210 acres
Scenario B — 27,517 homes
10,911 acres
Scenario C — 23,267 homes
Growth follows vacant parcels wherever they sit. Infrastructure has to reach outward to meet it.
Concentrated
Scenarios D and E
7,960 acres
Scenario D — 27,517 homes
8,190 acres
Scenario E — 23,267 homes
The same growth is packed into central corridors and existing shopping centers already served by pipes and roads.
Scenario B disturbs 3,250 more acres than Scenario D — about five square miles — while housing exactly the same number of homes.
What that land is
The Planning Area holds roughly 12,000 acres of forest. About 2,800 acres of land are permanently protected. That leaves something on the order of 9,000 acres of woods with nothing standing between them and a development plan.
The gap between spreading out and concentrating — those 3,250 acres — is a quarter of every acre of forest in the Planning Area. None of the five scenario packets measures tree canopy directly. "Land disturbed" is the closest the Town gets, and disturbed ground is not the same thing as cleared woods.
Nearly 75% of the Planning Area sits inside a watershed protection overlay. Jordan Lake is both the region's drinking water reservoir and the source of Apex's own tap water.
| Scenario | Homes | Commercial |
|---|---|---|
| A — approved projects only | 71% | 64% |
| B — business as usual | 52% | 45% |
| C — spread out, jobs focus | 51% | 42% |
| D — concentrated | 28% | 27% |
| E — concentrated, jobs focus | 30% | 27% |
The no-growth scenario has the worst watershed exposure of the five. That is not a paradox. It reflects where Apex has already approved building — and no plan adopted in 2026 can move those projects.
Concentrating isn't free
The scenarios that save land cost more in staffing. D and E each need a third new fire station and twelve more firefighters than the spread-out options. D needs the most police officers of any scenario — more than B, despite housing about 5,000 fewer people.
| A | B | C | D | E | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Police officers | +62 | +151 | +128 | +182 | +156 |
| Firefighters | +72 | +72 | +72 | +84 | +84 |
| New fire stations | +2 | +2 | +2 | +3 | +3 |
| Growth needing new pump stations | 6% | 28% | 25% | 18% | 23% |
| Growth in existing service areas | 77% | 61% | 66% | 75% | 69% |
The trade runs both ways. Spreading out is cheaper in people and more expensive in pipe: Scenario B puts 28% of its growth in areas needing new pump stations, against 7% for Scenario D. Pump stations are the costly, failure-prone part of a sewer system.
No scenario carries a dollar figure. The Town has not published a cost-to-serve comparison, so residents are being asked to weigh five futures without knowing what any of them costs to run.
So which one should you want?
That depends entirely on what you care about most. Here is what the Town's own numbers say, and what each choice costs you.
If you care about open space
Scenario D
Disturbs 7,960 acres — 3,250 fewer than Scenario B while building the identical 27,517 homes.
But no scenario measures tree canopy. D disturbs less ground; whether it spares more forest is untested.
If you care about Jordan Lake
Scenario D
Puts 28% of new homes inside the critical watershed that supplies Apex's drinking water, against 52% under Scenario B.
But 75% of that growth lands in existing service areas, which means upsizing pipes the Town already owns.
If you care about jobs here
Scenario E
The highest ratio of new jobs to new residents of any scenario, at roughly one job for every two people who move in.
But it assumes premium bus transit and a downtown rail station Apex does not control, and the jobs figure is an input to the model rather than a forecast.
If you want those jobs without the bet
Scenario C
Delivers the same 26,882 jobs using today's development patterns, with no reliance on transit that may never arrive.
But it consumes 2,721 more acres than Scenario E to produce the identical number of jobs.
If you want a detached house
Scenario B
Builds 9,875 new single-family detached homes, more than any other scenario, and keeps them at 36% of the housing mix.
But it disturbs the most land, needs the most new pump stations, and puts the most development in the watershed.
If you worry about crowded schools
Scenario E
Adds 5,456 K–12 students, against 7,524 under Scenario B — roughly 2,000 fewer children entering Wake County schools.
But that is mostly because E houses 14,661 fewer people overall, not because it plans schools better.
D and E answer five of these six questions. The Town has not published what either would cost to run.
That gap matters. The concentrated scenarios ask more of the Town in staffing — more officers, more firefighters, another station — while asking less of it in land and pipe. Without a cost-to-serve comparison, nobody can say which way that trade nets out. It is a fair question to put to staff before the next public forum.
Questions the packets don't answer
- Water supply is never mentioned. Apex holds 12.9 million gallons a day of the Cary/Apex treatment plant's capacity. At today's usage that serves roughly 89,000 people. Scenario B envisions 159,909. The boards discuss pipes and pump stations — moving water — but not having it.
- The road plans may fight the land use plans. Scenarios D and E depend on transit-oriented development along Williams Street. NCDOT has NC 55 programmed for widening and for a superstreet conversion that restricts access along East Williams Street.
- Two futures rest on decisions Apex doesn't make. D and E assume premium bus transit, and E assumes a passenger rail station downtown on the S-Line.
- The growth totals are inputs, not forecasts. Each scenario adds round numbers to the approved baseline — C and E add exactly one million square feet each of retail, office and industrial over B and D. "This scenario creates more jobs" is an assumption the model was given, not a result it produced.
- Every scenario assumes a slowdown. The Planning Area grew about 28% in five years. Even Scenario B implies roughly 2% a year through 2055.
- Canopy is never measured. No scenario reports tree cover, though residents raised it repeatedly in the Town's own engagement sessions.
