Residential growth keeps moving along strongly and steadily in Cleveland County.
And it's forcing officials in the county of 92,000 to rethink how to deal with the impact. To get a picture of where growth is in Cleveland County, The Observer analyzed building permit information collected by the Centralina Council of Governments, a regionwide planning agency. The findings show that from 1990 to 1997, Cleveland County saw almost a 24 percent increase in residential building permit applications. For the same period, this compares with 14.3 percent in Gaston County, 26.6 percent in Mecklenburg County and 31.8 percent in Cabarrus County. Lincoln County grew 19.7 percent from 1990 to '96.