Custom home builder in Scotts Hill, North Carolina.

Scotts Hill sits right on top of the county line.

Scotts Hill runs along US 17 between Porters Neck on the New Hanover side to the south, with Ogden farther down the corridor beyond it, and Hampstead, the next stop north. Scotts Hill Loop Road leaves the highway on the Pender side and swings east toward the Intracoastal Waterway, past wooded ground, older waterfront houses and newer construction, to the marina. Rich Inlet, the natural inlet between Figure Eight Island and Lea-Hutaff Island, lies across the waterway from it, and the community sits roughly midway between the Wrightsville Beach and Surf City bridges.

Two landmarks bracket the place, and they sit on opposite sides of the county line. Poplar Grove stands near the highway on the Pender side, a Greek Revival house of the early 1850s at the center of what was a working peanut farm; it stayed with one family into the early 1970s, has carried a National Register listing since the late 1970s, and has been open to the public as a museum for most of the years since. A short distance south, on the New Hanover side, Novant Health opened its Scotts Hill Medical Center on US 17 in 2026, adding a community hospital to a campus whose outpatient plaza had opened in December 2024.

Scotts Hill is unincorporated on both sides of the county line, so each lot answers to its county. A parcel on the New Hanover side falls under the New Hanover County Unified Development Ordinance, administered by that county's planning staff in Wilmington. A parcel on the Pender side answers to the Pender County UDO and to the county's separate flood damage prevention ordinance, administered from Burgaw, the Pender county seat, with a permitting office on the US 17 corridor in Hampstead that sits nearer the community than the county seat does. Zoning districts, the flood ordinance itself, accessory-structure rules and which office answers the phone all change with the county, so the first fact a Scotts Hill site analysis establishes is which jurisdiction the parcel sits in.

The parcel identification number, checked against the county GIS layer, settles which county a Scotts Hill lot falls in, the same record a title company or a surveyor pulls before closing. The mailing address and the ZIP code are both shared across the line. Scotts Hill Loop Road and Poplar Grove both sit on the Pender side, and the Novant campus on the New Hanover side.

The freeboard is two feet in either county.

Two different ordinances govern Scotts Hill, each on its own side of the line. On the New Hanover side, the county's Unified Development Ordinance sets the zoning districts, the dimensional standards, and, under Article 9, the flood damage prevention rules that apply to new construction in a mapped hazard area. On the Pender side, the Pender County UDO sets the zoning and accessory-structure rules, while a separate chapter of the county's code, Chapter 18, carries the flood damage protection standards on its own.

On the New Hanover side, the UDO is administered by the county's Planning & Land Use office, and building permits are issued and inspected by New Hanover County Building Safety at 230 Government Center Drive in Wilmington, the same office where the county's Local Permit Officers handle a CAMA minor permit at the marsh edge. Pender County splits the same work in two: Planning & Community Development administers the UDO, and Permitting & Inspections issues the permit, from Burgaw or from its Hampstead Annex on US 17, a few miles north of the community and closer than the county seat. A lot near the line sends its paperwork south to Wilmington or north to Hampstead, depending on which side it sits.

On the headline flood figure the two ordinances agree. Pender County Code Section 18-5 fixes the regulatory flood protection elevation two feet over a published base flood elevation, or two feet over the highest adjacent grade on a mapped lot with no published figure, and it adds a third case that New Hanover's definition leaves out: in a future-conditions flood hazard area, two feet over the future-conditions flood elevation. Section 18-73 then holds the reference level of new or substantially improved residential construction, basement included, at or above that line.

New Hanover County's Article 9 lands on the same two feet. Its Section 9.5 definition sets the line two feet over the base flood elevation wherever one has been determined, and no less than two feet over the highest adjacent grade in a mapped area where one has not. So the freeboard matches across the county line, and the base flood elevation under it comes off the effective FIRM panel for the parcel; it can differ between a lot at the creek edge and one on higher ground a short walk away. On a creek-side lot in either county, those two feet get paid for in foundation, in fill and in the run of the stairs. A finished-floor elevation fixed before the base figure is read, then corrected at review, moves the stair, the porch, and the driveway grade with it.

Jurisdiction, New Hanover side

New Hanover County Unified Development Ordinance (unincorporated)

Jurisdiction, Pender side

Pender County Unified Development Ordinance, with flood rules in the county Code of Ordinances (unincorporated)

Flood chapters

New Hanover County UDO, Article 9 (Flood Damage Prevention); Pender County Code, Chapter 18 (Flood Damage Protection)

Freeboard on both sides

Two feet over the base flood elevation; two feet over highest adjacent grade in a mapped area with no published BFE (New Hanover County UDO Sec. 9.5; Pender County Code Secs. 18-5 and 18-73)

Who reviews and permits

New Hanover side: Planning & Land Use for zoning, Building Safety for permits, Government Center, Wilmington. Pender side: Planning & Community Development for zoning, Permitting & Inspections in Burgaw or at the Hampstead Annex

Residential zoning districts

New Hanover side: a family that includes R-20, R-15, R-10 and R-7. Pender side: RA, RP, RM and MH. Some US 17 frontage is zoned commercial or planned development instead

Flood zone

The effective FEMA FIRM panel for the parcel, or the NC Flood Risk Information System viewer, read for the parcel itself

Ultimate design wind speed

New Hanover side, note h: 140 mph west of US 17, 150 mph east. Pender side, note j: 140 mph for mainland Topsail Township, which is where Scotts Hill sits; 150 mph only east of the Intracoastal Waterway; 130 mph for the inland remainder of the county. 2018 NC Residential Code, Table R301.2(4)

CAMA review

Estuarine shoreline work near the marsh: CAMA minor permits from New Hanover County's Local Permit Officers on the New Hanover side, and from the Division of Coastal Management's Wilmington office on the Pender side

Water and sewer

CFPUA on part of the New Hanover side; the Pender County Scotts Hill Water & Sewer District on part of the Pender side; well and septic elsewhere. Confirmed per parcel with the provider

Next-door lots in Scotts Hill can carry different wind numbers.

The 2018 North Carolina Residential Code sets the ultimate design wind speed for both counties in Table R301.2(4), and its county notes draw their own lines through Scotts Hill. On the New Hanover side, note h splits the county at US 17: 140 mph west of the highway, 150 mph east of it. North of the trumpet interchange where the bypass meets US 17 at Kirkland there is one US 17, the northward run of Market Street, and a New Hanover-side parcel here is simply east or west of it. On that side of the line, a lot on the marsh side of the highway is designed for 150 mph, and one a short walk west of it for 140 mph.

On the Pender side, note j ignores the highway and draws its lines by the Intracoastal Waterway and by township instead: 150 mph for land east of the waterway, 140 mph for the part of Topsail Township that lies west of it, and 130 mph for everything inland of that, from Burgaw to Rocky Point. The Pender side of Scotts Hill is mainland Topsail Township, so it reads 140 mph whichever side of US 17 a parcel sits on. Put the two notes together and, east of the highway, the county line itself becomes a wind line: a New Hanover lot there is designed for 150 mph, and the Pender lot beside it for 140 mph. West of the highway the figure is 140 mph in both counties.

The gap matters for more than the number. Section R4601.1 of the same code applies Chapter 46, the state's coastal and flood-plain construction standards, to every site in the 150 mph zone, and otherwise to regulatory floodplains and to coastal high hazard and ocean hazard areas. A New Hanover-side lot east of US 17 comes under Chapter 46 by its wind zone alone. A Pender-side lot at 140 mph comes under it only if the FIRM panel for that parcel puts it in a regulatory floodplain. The site analysis records both the table row and the flood status before a truss package or a connector schedule is priced, since every connection in the load path is sized from them.

What those figures change is the load path: a higher ultimate design wind speed pushes uplift and lateral pressure further up the roof-to-foundation connection, which shows up in truss uplift straps, sheathing nailing schedules, and how the wall ties into the foundation, more than in anything a homeowner would notice on a walkthrough. The zone figure is also only half the calculation: exposure category, which reads the open marsh, water, and tree cover upwind of the house, is settled lot by lot by the engineer, and a lot facing open marsh can read a harsher exposure than a wooded one inside the same zone. Coastal physics as a design brief sets out the argument in full.

Wind is also a salt question here. Scotts Hill sits close enough to the sound and the Intracoastal that salt-laden air reaches well past any lot with a direct view of the water, carried on ordinary onshore afternoons as well as in storms. Onshore wind carries that salt inland, which is why fastener and cladding durability choices are made for a wooded interior lot much as for a marina-front one: connector metallurgy chosen for distance from the water, cladding that tolerates being salted and rinsed on repeat, and a flashing sequence drawn on the plans.

On Scotts Hill Loop Road, the marsh takes back some of the acreage.

Scotts Hill Loop Road, on the Pender side of the line, carries the community's waterfront character. The water along it drains toward Futch Creek: Scotts Hill Creek, dammed about a century and a half ago into a ten-acre mill pond behind Poplar Grove, spills into Foy Creek on the south side of the loop road, and Foy Creek joins Futch Creek on its way to the waterway. Lots on that fringe front tidal creek and marsh, and the buildable ground on one is often smaller than the recorded acreage suggests once the marsh edge and any required buffer are drawn onto the survey. Behind the fringe, wooded interior parcels and a scatter of newer subdivisions fill the ground between the loop road and the highway, where soil, tree cover, and drainage matter more to a design than tidal exposure does. Some of that woodland now has a different use. The Abbey Nature Preserve, about 62 acres of the old Foy land behind Poplar Grove with the mill pond and its trail network inside it, sits under conservation agreements held by the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust since 2007, and Pender County, which ran it as a public park under a lease from 2022, now owns it outright after a donation from Mungo Homes; a separate easement, entered in 2009, covers the 14-acre museum tract at Poplar Grove itself. The rest of that Foy holding, some 240 acres on Scotts Hill Loop Road, was sold in the 2022 transaction for residential development under the Pender UDO.

A marsh-front or creek-front lot in Scotts Hill answers to its county's flood ordinance and, in many cases, to the state's estuarine shoreline Area of Environmental Concern as well. That AEC reaches 75 feet landward of normal high water, or 575 feet along waters the state classifies as Outstanding Resource Waters. Inside it, new development sits 30 feet back from normal high water, apart from water-dependent structures such as docks, and impervious surface is capped at 30 percent of the AEC area of the lot (15A NCAC 07H .0209). We draw both lines onto the survey before a footprint goes down.

The flood zone comes off the effective FIRM panel for the parcel itself, or off the state Flood Risk Information System viewer, and it is read for the lot. A lot that shows clean and dry on a decades-old plat can sit differently on the current map, and a creek-front lot in particular can sit inside a mapped special flood hazard area well back from the visible waterline.

Access is its own line item on this kind of lot. Some creek and marsh parcels reach the public road by a private drive over an easement, and on the Pender side the UDO puts numbers on that arrangement in Section 5.3.2.B: the house needs a lot on, or reached from, a public road at least thirty feet wide, and a lot that gets there by easement needs an easement no narrower than twenty feet. Twenty feet is tight once a culvert, a turnaround, and a concrete truck have to share it. On either side of the line, we read the recorded width off the plat before a garage or a turning area goes on a plan.

Water and sewer follow the county line, because each county built its own system. On the New Hanover side the provider is Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, whose mains reach the north end of the county along the US 17 corridor and serve some of the parcels toward the sound; we confirm with CFPUA's Development Services group whether a main can reach a vacant lot and at what tap cost. On the Pender side the county's own utility runs a Scotts Hill Water & Sewer District, one of several districts Pender County Utilities operates; coverage inside the district runs street by street, and we confirm capacity for a specific lot with the district. Away from both systems, and on much of the wooded interior ground on either side of the line, a well and a septic system remain the ordinary arrangement, with the septic permit issued by the applicable county's Environmental Health staff. Near the marina and along the tidal fringe, grading has to answer to marsh hydrology as well as to the drainfield, so the utility answer is settled alongside the moisture and drainage strategy before a floor plan assumes one.

We confirm the county before we read the ground.

A Tropical Tides site analysis is formal, written, finished before design begins and kept in the client's project workspace, and on most coastal lots its first page is about water and wind. On a Scotts Hill lot the first page is a parcel identification number. The parcel-first site analysis pulls the PIN, sets it against both counties' GIS parcel layers, and records which county's ordinance governs the ground, because the zoning district, the flood chapter, the permit counter, and the wind-speed row in the code table all follow from that one answer.

Once jurisdiction is settled, fitting the house to its parcel starts with the site itself: flood zone classification against the current FIRM panel or the NC Flood Risk Information System, the Area of Environmental Concern line where a lot fronts a creek or the Intracoastal, wind exposure category, orientation to the marsh or to whatever tree line stands between the house and the water, tree cover, and how the lot reaches the road. On a wooded interior parcel the same document is likely to spend more of its length on soils, on where water goes in a heavy rain, and on which trees are worth designing around than on anything to do with the tide.

On the New Hanover side, the analysis also works out which residential district applies among a family that includes R-20, R-15, R-10, and R-7, each with its own lot-size and setback structure. Some Scotts Hill parcels sit outside them: frontage along the US 17 corridor sometimes carries commercial or planned-development zoning instead. On the Pender side, the residential districts include RA, RP, RM, and MH, and RP stands for Residential Performance. Which district a Pender-side lot carries comes off the county zoning map, and we confirm it with Pender County Planning & Community Development before a site plan assumes one.

FORTIFIED Gold means the same thing on both sides of the line.

East of US 17 the county line drops the code's design wind speed from 150 to 140 mph, and the Futch Creek marsh, the salt air and the August humidity run right across it. The design standard follows the marsh. Every house we design here pursues FORTIFIED Gold, the top tier of the IBHS program, with the roof, the openings, and the connections from ridge to foundation checked by an independent evaluator. Whether the permit is reviewed in Wilmington or in Burgaw, the drawings answer to the same criteria.

The lower figure can read like permission to do less, and a continuous load path matters at 140 mph as much as at 150.

Alongside FORTIFIED Gold, every design carries an airtightness target below 1.0 ACH50, a design target that a blower-door test has to confirm before handover. The Futch Creek marsh explains why it matters here. On a still summer evening the air coming off the marsh is hot and humid, and inside a cooled house any gap in the envelope becomes a place where that air meets a surface colder than its dew point, deep in a wall where condensation can sit for years unseen. The answer is an air barrier specified as one unbroken line on the drawings and then checked in the field seam by seam: at the sill plate, around every window, and at each pipe, duct, or wire that passes through it.

The target follows the design inland as well, onto the wooded parcels behind the loop road that lose the direct marsh exposure and keep the same hot, humid coastal air. Ventilation behind a sub-1.0 envelope sets out why a tight envelope and a deliberate fresh-air supply work together, and the airtightness target and its test comes paired with equipment sized to the calculated load of the house, so it runs long enough to bring the humidity down before it short-cycles off. The FORTIFIED evaluation runs at the framing stage and a first blower-door test runs before drywall, where a finding can still change the work, and both are scheduled around the inspections of whichever county permits the house.

New construction in Scotts Hill still has open ground to choose from.

Each kind of project here usually starts from its own constraint: flood and AEC review for a new house near the water, the county's substantial-improvement clock for a renovation, and the drainfield or the utility tap for an ADU.

Creek-front and wooded lots

Undeveloped creek-front parcels off the loop road and wooded lots nearer the highway are where new homes in Scotts Hill are most likely to go, with new subdivisions still appearing. Each lot brings its own mix of zoning district, flood review and, at the water, Area of Environmental Concern review.

Renovation here keeps the house's orientation to the marsh.

Older houses worth renovating along Scotts Hill Loop Road often have an orientation to the marsh that a current designer would choose again, set on a foundation older than the flood maps in their present form. Renovating an older marsh-front house here starts from that orientation and keeps it, replacing what time and storms have worn: a new skin and air barrier over the existing frame, a roof rebuilt to meet the FORTIFIED roof requirements, air handlers and condensers raised above the regulatory flood protection elevation, and the airtightness target applied to an old house one assembly at a time. The two counties count substantial improvement differently. Both set the line at 50 percent of the structure's market value, but Pender's Chapter 18 counts the cost of work over any one-year period and New Hanover's Article 9 over any five-year period, and past that line the whole house has to meet current elevation requirements. We price the scope against the right county's clock before it is fixed.

An ADU means two different tests here.

Scotts Hill puts two accessory-dwelling rules a few hundred feet apart, and they regulate different things. Pender's rule is about the unit itself: how large it is against the main house, how many there are, and where it stands on the lot. New Hanover's rule is about how the unit connects: the kind of house it serves, where the car parks, which driveway it uses, and whether the water and sewer can carry it; its text even names CFPUA as the kind of provider that has to vouch for capacity. A lot that clears one county's test easily can struggle with the other's.

Pender side, UDO 5.3.2.E

A single detached unit, clearly subordinate to the house, capped at a third (33 percent) of the heated floor area of the principal dwelling, placed in the side or rear yard at the setbacks a principal structure would meet

Pender side, UDO 5.3.2.A.1

A separate path: as many as three residential structures on a single lot in a residential district, each carrying the district minimum lot size on a plat drawn by a licensed surveyor

New Hanover side, UDO 4.4.4.A

One detached ADU per lot, by right in the residential districts (Table 4.4.3), where the main house is single-family detached; one parking space; the main driveway outside RA; provider-documented water and sewer capacity, or Environmental Health well and septic approval

On either side, a well-and-septic lot usually meets its practical limit at the drainfield before it meets either ordinance, because a second dwelling adds bedrooms and bedrooms size a septic system. On a lot served by CFPUA or by the Pender district, the question becomes whether the provider will document the capacity. On a large Pender-side tract, the three-structure path can suit a multigenerational plan better than a unit capped at a third of the house, though it asks for more land and a fuller plat. Feasibility for a backyard unit here starts with capacity, and with the parcel record that says which of the rules above is actually in force; on a New Hanover-side parcel in a PD or RMF district, Section 4.4.4.A allows the unit only with a single-family detached house.

On either side of the line, we build with vetted partners under Tropical Tides' direction and North Carolina Residential Contractor License #109520. We're members of the Brunswick County Home Builders Association, and 910-946-5512 is the number to call.