Asbestos Abatement in Davidson, North Carolina
Davidson’s housing is young. About 6,294 units, a median build year of 2005, and just 660 units (10.5 percent) finished before 1980. On the raw numbers it looks like one of the least likely places in Mecklenburg County to need this kind of work. In practice Davidson has a more direct connection to asbestos than any other town in the Charlotte metro, because for forty years it manufactured the material.
Carolina Asbestos Company and the Linden Mill property
The Linden Cotton Mill building, known today as the Metrolina Warehouse, housed Carolina Asbestos Co. from 1930 until roughly 1970. The plant produced asbestos fabric, shingles and brake linings. Production waste went into a pit behind the factory, and what built up there is a mound around 25 feet high holding an estimated 2,200 tons of asbestos-containing soil. It sits under a temporary soil-and-grass cap; permanent containment has not been constructed. Lat Purser and Associates has proposed a mixed-use redevelopment of the property since 2019, with permanent encapsulation of the mound part of what that would involve. The property was inherited in 2004 by Cynthia Chirot and two siblings, and the site is moving through North Carolina’s brownfields agreement framework. Residents of the historically Black West Side neighborhood have raised concerns both about disturbing the material and about what redevelopment would mean for the neighborhood.
That mound is a contaminated soil matter under a brownfields agreement, a different track from the building-material abatement this page is about. It is worth knowing anyway, because it is why property owners in this town tend to arrive at the subject already informed, and why nobody in Davidson treats a survey as a formality.
Delburg Mill and a concentrated historic core
Davidson Cotton Mill, later renamed Delburg Mill, was incorporated on July 8, 1907 and opened in January 1908. It grew between 1907 and 1924, first by eight bays to the west and then by roughly eighteen more that close to doubled its footprint, with a conveyor running to the picker house by 1925. Martin Cannon bought it in 1923. Cotton production ended in 1950 and Bridgeport Fabrics occupied the building from about 1954 to 1962. It became a Charlotte-Mecklenburg designated landmark in February 2004 and has since been rehabilitated into shops, offices and restaurants with an adjacent condominium complex.
Set that alongside the Davidson Historic District and the North Main Street Extension to the town’s local historic district, and the town-wide 10.5 percent figure starts to mislead. Those 660 older units are not distributed evenly across Davidson. They cluster in a compact walkable core, which means one block near Main Street can hold more mid-century and earlier building material than an entire subdivision built in 2005. Percentages describe towns. Buildings are described by surveys, and one produced by a North Carolina accredited inspector is a precondition of starting either renovation or demolition here.
Two, three and four unit buildings: an exclusion that only goes halfway
If what you own in Davidson is a two-, three- or four-unit building rather than a single house, one rule matters more than the rest, and it is routinely half-understood.
Under the federal facility definition used by NESHAP, a residential building with four or fewer dwelling units is not a facility at all. Mecklenburg County Air Quality administers that federal program locally rather than the state doing it, and the practical result is that your triplex generates no MCAQ notification. It is very easy to hear that and conclude no filing is required at all. It is not so. Sitting behind it is the North Carolina removal permit from the DHHS Health Hazards Control Unit, built on G.S. 130A Article 19 and 10A NCAC 41C .0600, reaching every county in the state, and written without any four-unit carve-out in it. A Davidson quadplex can be outside NESHAP and inside the state permit regime at the same moment. One filing falls away, the other stands.
Step up to five units, or to any commercial or institutional building, and both filings come back. Whichever combination applies, ten working days have to pass between submittal and the scheduled start, and a Monday holiday does nothing to lengthen that window because holidays falling on weekdays are counted in. The volumes that pull a project into the permit are 35 cubic feet, 260 linear feet or 160 square feet of regulated asbestos-containing material, each figure standing alone rather than contributing to a shared total. Pull out a load-supporting structural member and the job becomes a demolition, at which point form DHHS-3768 is owed whether or not the survey turned up any asbestos. You can read more about how we sequence survey, containment and clearance on a residential-scale project.
Buildings in the Davidson core are old enough that damp and suspect material tend to turn up together, so remediation sometimes runs in the same program of work. Davidson is the northernmost of the Mecklenburg towns in our coverage list. For the volume of older building stock further down I-77, see our Charlotte page.
To arrange a survey or talk through a permit on a Davidson property, call 704-393-0303 or get in touch. Our address is 913 E. Catawba St., Belmont, NC 28012.
