High density housing is absolutely essential though if this area has any hope of accommodating every last person who even THINKS they want to move here (even if they change their mind in six months) with cutting down even more trees and filling in even more marsh. Not everyone is going to be able to have a yard or acreage anymore, they need to forget that. Come and live in a 30 story tower in North Charleston, get "the Lowcountry" phase out of your system, and then move back wherever you would have anyway (because people DO actually move here and then leave again, all the time, realizing they DID actually have it better wherever they came from), with hopefully less impact on the natural environment here.
So many municipalities here need to MERGE and cooperate on a REGIONAL PLANNING level. Every town at every size instead is just trying to make sure they get theirs. Regional planning? That's for carpetbaggers, communists and George Soros (yeah, everyone here is a Trump supporter too, even the hipsters)!
If people had started planning properly (and actually sticking TO the plan ... which is NOT what happened on Kiawah since the 1980s), say, 50 years ago, all future development would've been restricted to the land mass between the Ashley and the Cooper (as far inland as Summerville or whatnot), without any height restrictions north of say, Romney Street, not the mess we have now requiring a gazillion BRIDGES to cross every last creek that exists here. All the water crossings are this region's Kryptonite.
Even driving down Henry Tecklenburg Drive today to go to Costco is disgusting, all that used to be trees and/or marsh, while all these old, decrepit, SINGLE STORY buildings like Citadel Mall still take up redevelopable, infill development space. Even all the new buildings and even more shopping centers built in the past two decades and going up now are still sprawling, one story buildings. That is insane. Meanwhile, to accommodate all this, we keep destroying the very natural environment that draws in new people and made the place appealing to the existing people. There's not infinite land here, and some it is going to be underwater eventually, both because of sea level rise and the historic peninsula actually sinking at the same time. It baffles me why routine business items like law offices, government buildings, colleges, hospitals remain in the tourist district, rather than being moved further inland so the peninsula can be left to the tourists and residential real estate while it's still above water, and the rest of the area has time to reconfigure for the changing future.
Derrick |
Charleston, SC |
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