Cover Story: Part Three of a Three-Part Series

By SARAH G. MCC. MOISE
Staff Writer

With the amount of growth occurring in Berkeley, Charleston and Dorchester counties, county governments have been forced to make a lot of decisions in the interest of their citizens, both current and future. Some new policies, however, have sparked the development and business communities, particularly those policies pertaining to density, zoning and impact fees.

“When you’re talking about new businesses and homes, these are people’s lives, not just numbers on a page,” says Haila Maze, assistant planning director for the Berkeley-Charleston-Dorchester Council of Governments. “There is never an easy solution to accommodating growth short of building a fence around the whole region and keeping everyone out. People have policies, but we don’t have a whole lot of control over how many people can come to the region. We can just control where they go.”

Maze says regional communication should be a big factor in planning for and managing growth. All three counties are grappling with large developments on a scale not previously dealt with: Charleston County’s Carolina Park, Dorchester County’s Poplar Grove and Watson Hill, and the slew of massive new developments proposed in Berkeley County. Much of the planned and proposed developments resulted from MeadWestvaco, a global provider of packaging and other specialty paper products with facilities in Summerville and North Charleston, deciding to sell large tracts of forested land to developers.

“How can we accommodate something bigger than a lot of our towns?” Maze says, “These really large tracts dumped by MeadWestvaco have opened the opportunity to make much larger scale developments with over 100,000 people. If it all was annexed together—and it’s not—it would be the biggest city in the state. And these are being put in rural areas that don’t have a lot of infrastructure. How are they going to be paid for, and how will they impact the next guys over?”

Developers and builders feel they are getting blamed for causing problems with unplanned growth, but they claim to be meeting the demand—not creating it. Although each county council has indicated that developers have cooperated and participated in decisions designed to control growth, Philip Ford with the Charleston Trident HomeBuilders Association thinks differently.

“The concern we have as an organization is what is happening is more and more land is being taken out of the system and that drives up cost of housing,” says Ford. “It’s a trend. Dorchester County’s preservation ordinance and historic overlay district requires one house per eight acres. Charleston County did it with rural area zoning with areas of low density. Berkeley County is increasing lot size.”

Land use policies don’t work

While Ford emphasizes that impact fees get passed on to the buyer in the end, his real concern is that the land use policies being adopted by local governments don’t work.

“Mount Pleasant has reduced permits, but the demand is the same, so home prices have gone through the roof. People can’t afford the taxes after their property has been reassessed, and the next generation who want to move home after college can’t afford to buy here,” says Ford.

“Traffic is still bad, and now they’re talking about raising the taxes, because they’re not getting money from permit fees and they don’t have any industries. They’re becoming a high end bedroom community that can’t support itself.”

Al Parish, director of the Center for Economic Forecasting at Charles­ton Southern University, says that politicians often think raising lot size restrictions means houses won’t be built. “Regardless of what government does, it’s not going to control the marketplace. You get the same number of houses, but it just takes more land to build them.”

Larger developments cost more to build, which increases the cost per home and pushes housing development out further. “That creates urban sprawl,” says Parish. “And the people who live in these areas have to drive farther to get anywhere. You have no right to complain about traffic if you create minimum lot size restrictions.”

What members of the homebuilder’s association want is flexibility and a respected voice at the planning table. Construction is the third largest economic engine in the area, behind tourism and the military. It puts roughly $1.3 billion into the local economy and employs some 20,000 people directly. Yet, with few exceptions, developers are not represented on county and municipal planning commissions.

Families First, a newly-formed coalition of the South Carolina Landowners’ Association, the Charleston Trident Realtors Association and the Charleston Trident Association of HomeBuilders was created to inform people about the effects of development restrictions.

“We want to educate people in Dorchester County about the negative impact that the R-8 (zoning one house per eight acres) and historic overlay can have on affordable housing,” says Ford.

Mixed-use development

Parish and many others advocate mixed use development as a better way of balancing growth. “If a developer will donate land for a school or put in a gas station, a delicatessen, a grocery...the county can rebate some of these impact fees. It allows the people who live there to meet most of the necessities of life without using our major thoroughfares.”

Mike Murphree, Dorchester County Councilman for District 6, agrees that it’s time to rethink zoning. “Instead of having the people who live here shop five miles from here and drive 15 miles to work, let’s reconsider making zoning multi-use, multi-purpose like in downtown Charleston. Let’s look at making walking cities and villages instead of talking about what we can’t do because something is zoned R-this or R-that.”

He adds that county governments must open the lines of communication. “The tri-county area grows together; it’s not us against them and them against us. The quality of life for all of us is based on all of us working together. We need to make goals and a vision. As a group, we should sit down and say “what kind of community do we want in the long run.’”

COG is focusing most pointedly on areas in the region where jurisdictions come together, and recently formed the Tri-county Land Use Coordinating Committee. The committee has brought together the three counties and their municipalities to talk about land use planning issues.

“We don’t have any set goals now other than looking at areas where jurisdictions come together,” says Maze. “There are road projects that span several jurisdictions, or new neighborhoods that impact several areas but are in one jurisdiction. For instance, in the Ashley River Road corridor, the Watson Hill and Poplar Grove developments will impact the area where Charleston County and Dorchester County come together, as well as the city of Charleston, the town of Hollywood and the town of Summerville.”

COG creates a neutral forum for folks to come together and helps policymakers be more educated about their options. The government office provides tools, such as traffic studies, that have been used successfully elsewhere and locally. Currently COG is working on ways that codes can revised and written so they are responsive and flexible, and allow developers to know what’s expected of them and communities to communicate what they want to see for the future.

“There is no one-size-fits-all plan for growth,” says Maze. “We are realizing in the tri-county area that if you don’t do something, change happens to you. But if you take a coordinated approach, you can manage change.”

Sarah Moise is a staff writer for the Business Journal.

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