By Dennis Quick

Housing heebie-jeebies. My apartment complex (technically it’s a townhome community) is going condo, and when my lease expires this summer I have to make a choice: buy mine or some other unit in the place, or leave.

I’m leaving. I will not buy something that was built to be rented. Unless I lived in, say, Manhattan, where even the tiniest shoebox of an apartment (like the upper East Side closet I lived in years ago) can be sold in a New York minute, I’d think twice about purchasing an apartment, especially a small one-bedroom whose walls allow the midnight cries of a newborn to pierce my deadline-rattled brain.

So I’m going to cross my fingers, grit my teeth and do some house hunting. Don’t be surprised if I contradict myself and end up buying an apartment.

That apartment-to-condo conversions are a huge hit in the Lowcountry and elsewhere around the nation illustrates how much the “American Dream” has shrunk since the end of World War II.

In 1947, Levittown, the nation’s first mass-produced housing development, emerged on New York’s Long Island. About 17,000 houses were built for G.I.s returning from the war. The houses all looked alike, and they were small (about 800 square feet), but they were houses and, more important, they were affordable. In 1951, Levitt & Sons Inc. built a second Levittown, this one in eastern Pennsylvania. The Levittowns epitomized the American Dream of home ownership. In those days, home ownership meant owning a house with a lawn around it.

It did not mean owning an apartment. But, sadly, that’s often what’s passing for the American Dream these days.

Developers flipping apartments into condos know for many of us this is the best chance we have for home ownership. After all, the median price of a Lowcountry single-family home continues to soar—from $227,865 in 2003 to $259,313 in 2004 to $274,963 in January 2005, according to the Charleston Trident Association of Realtors. I’m afraid to guess what the median price will be by the end of this year.

True, if you subtract the resort islands’ million-dollar homes, the median single-family home price would be lower. But that offers me little comfort. In West Ashley’s Byrnes Downs neighborhood, located nowhere near a resort, cozy brick houses built in the 1940s cost close to $250,000 or more. That’s because Byrnes Downs is just outside the Charleston peninsula. 

I realize that housing is more affordable the farther away you are from Charleston. But for many of us, that defeats the point of having moved here in the first place. If housing prices push folks so far away from Charleston that they have to pack a meal for their morning commute, some people might decide it’s not worth it and leave the region altogether. We live in a beautiful place all right, but there are other places.

That’s why we need to rekindle the spirit of Levittown here in the Lowcountry. I’m not suggesting we carve out territory somewhere and slap together a mass of inexpensive, barracks-like homes. Instead, all players in our region’s economy—business leaders, private developers, home builders, civil engineers and officials from all levels of government—should gather at the table and hammer out a way to provide decent, attractive housing for teachers, police officers and other working-class folks throughout the area, not just in the outskirts.

Workforce woes. At the Business Journal’s Feb. 15 Business Forum at the Harbour Club, manufacturing representatives and labor and human resources professionals discussed the state of the Lowcountry’s workforce. It was a sobering discussion. Among many other problems, employers are having difficulty finding people possessing basic math and English-language skills.

Schools are operating in one world, businesses in another, and the two definitely are not meeting. Businesses have to go into schools and emphasize the importance of mastering math and English. Business representatives should take a blatantly materialistic approach, if necessary. Want to own lots of cool stuff when you grow up? Then you’ll need a job. To get that job, you’ll need math and language skills.

Schools need to organize field trips to varieties of businesses so kids can see the many different kinds of jobs out there and that a college education isn’t mandatory for earning a good living. An extensive schools-business hookup needs to happen now.

Dennis Quick is senior staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dquick@crbj.com.

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