The Charleston region is prospering by many measures — including rising property values, new industries and healthy tourism. But it will be important for city and county leaders to make strides in addressing challenges that accompany that success, such as rising housing costs, congested roads and the loss of rural land.
Berkeley, Charleston and Dorchester counties have new leaders, and both Berkeley and Dorchester have encouraging new mandates to address roads and land conservation. The two largest cities, Charleston and North Charleston, face elections in November for mayor and many council seats, a reality that could limit bold new action.
Nevertheless, our future prosperity and quality of life hinge on continued progress on a host of familiar issues, from creating more affordable housing and reducing flooding to using land wisely, keeping our communities safe, improving our transportation networks and making fiscally sound decisions so we have the resources to get those jobs done.
Improving resiliency
During the past decade, the coastal region has become more attuned than ever to the risks posed by our warming planet, in particular more frequent hurricanes, heavier rains and rising seas. The Lowcountry has always flooded, but that fact cannot and must not lead to inaction.
We need better drainage systems and a greater ability to protect ourselves from severe storms and sea level rise. The city of Charleston and the Army Corps of Engineers need to make progress on their $1.1 billion plan to build a barrier along the historic peninsula’s edge; we hope they strike a deal this year to proceed with a detailed design, a crucial step toward understanding whether this will be something the city wants to pay for. No one will accept a concrete wall ringing downtown, no matter how tall. We believe there are options to make this new barrier an attractive, positive feature, but only after completing the next phase, known as preliminary engineering and design, will we know for sure.
But the peninsula is not the only area that needs attention. Other ongoing drainage upgrades in West Ashley, North Charleston and Mount Pleasant need to remain on schedule, and all coastal governments should follow Charleston’s lead and consider a more difficult, long-term step: revising zoning to reflect the elevation of properties, a move to allow more density where flooding is least likely and relatively less building on our lowest-lying spots.
Housing affordability
If anything is rising to compete with flooding as the region’s No. 1 concern, it may be the lack of affordable places to live. The growing popularity of the Charleston region has had a dramatic downside, as newcomers — many of whom have come from more affluent communities — have relocated here and helped bid up the prices of homes. Not only are home prices rapidly outpacing growth in local wages, but rental rates are, too. The pandemic led to a great expansion of working from home, and many of these workers have opted to relocate to communities along the Southeastern coast.
This trend has packed a particular punch to teachers, police officers, restaurant workers and other in-person employees who have an ever more challenging time finding a suitable home near their job.
Local governments must respond to this affordability crunch in several ways, including subsidizing new, affordable housing construction, whether it’s to be rented or sold. The city of Charleston has led local initiatives along these lines with two bond issues, but we’re disappointed at the lack of progress Charleston County Council has made. We urge county officials to devise a strategy for supporting more housing construction, and not just on the county-owned property at 995 Morrison Drive.
All cities and counties also should look at their zoning policies to ensure they are not overly restrictive or burdensome for new housing developers. While zoning certainly should help preserve the character of neighborhoods from unwanted change, unnecessary bureaucratic rules can drive up costs.Â
Managing growth
We also must be careful about where we build. Allowing valuable farmland, scenic viewsheds and rural historical sites to be lost or eroded by new subdivisions ultimately would erode our region’s special sense of place.
So we not only need good planning and zoning to guide development toward the most appropriate places, especially those where infrastructure already exists, but we need to be proactive as well about protecting and conserving the rural lands we value most. Charleston and Beaufort counties have been leaders in this area, with a local stream of funding to complement state, federal and nonprofit conservation dollars.
This year, Berkeley and Dorchester counties will join them, with a small portion of their newly extended sales taxes going toward purchasing green space. It’s vital that officials in these counties make plans to allocate that money as wisely as possible, not only by protecting the most cherished places, ideally for some public use, but also by stretching those dollars with outside grants and other contributions. As these two counties undergo a dramatic shift to more urbanized areas, they must ensure that they preserve the scenic, environmentally significant and historic places that matter most.
Getting around
Those who have lived in and around Charleston for years know we’re adding residents faster than our road system can handle them, so congestion and delays — particularly after the pandemic receded — remain a major headache for many residents.
This problem is shared across our increasingly connected region, so planning should have a regional perspective. And while it’s important that well-vetted road projects proceed in a timely way, city and county leaders also should recognize when building or dramatically widening a road is not the right thing to do, whether it’s the now-defunct plan to widen S.C. Highway 41 to five lanes through East Cooper’s Phillips Community or the exorbitantly costly ($2.2 billion and counting) plan to connect Interstate 526 from West Ashley to the James Island connector.
Smaller projects, such as completing the access roads north and south of Maybank Highway from the Stono River to River Road, are more affordable, less controversial and quicker solutions. And the region must continue to make progress on a new bus rapid transit line along Rivers Avenue, a potentially game-changing public transportation initiative that cleared a major hurdle last year. We also must work harder to make our local streets and bridges safer places to walk and bike.
Budget discipline
Many public officials would argue there’s no more important part of their job than keeping their city or county safe, and we certainly agree. But their main challenge in doing that is also their main challenge in ensuring that other local government functions — such as sanitation, planning and zoning and clearing ditches — work as they should: hiring and retaining the necessary employees.
Local governments across the Charleston region have experienced greater difficulties in filling vacant positions, a national trend that some have called a little-noticed, slow-moving crisis. The problem might be worse here, given our housing affordability crunch. As city and county officials set their budgets this year — or consider mid-year adjustments — they should take a fiscally conservative approach that closely scrutinizes any new spending proposals and prioritizes raises and other salary adjustments needed to reduce turnover and fill vital positions.
Redeveloping smartly
Decisions made in council chambers this year promise to reverberate across future generations, as a few local governments have special opportunities to redevelop prime real estate that has been underused for decades. Enthusiastic public participation will be vital to those decisions.
The most-mentioned project along these lines is Union Pier, an approximately 70-acre parcel the State Ports Authority owns along the Cooper River, just north of Joe Riley Waterfront Park. Charleston City Council soon is expected to consider a master plan for its redevelopment, and residents and city officials must get the details right, including the site’s envisioned uses and types of buildings as well as how it all will be paid for.
North Charleston also has an exciting opportunity as Congress recently agreed to let Joint Base Charleston talk with the city about redeveloping a large chunk of warehouses between Avenue B and the Cooper River just north of Noisette Creek and the city’s Riverfront Park. We hope to see progress as well on the conversion of the former Piggly Wiggly site in West Ashley, an important focal point in Charleston’s largest suburb. Other cities and towns should seize similar, if smaller-scale opportunities to move ahead with new parks or public spaces that will make their communities more livable in the years to come.
