Lowcountry swamped: Developers won’t stop until we’re another Atlanta

Growth that ate Bluffton and Hardeeville is now chomping on unincorporated Jasper County.

When I started at The Island Packet 45 years ago, the job to four-lane U.S. 278 on Hilton Head Island was just beginning. Artist Elizabeth Grant raised a tiny clinched fist in the air, demanding that we at least make sculptures from the twisted trunks of live oaks that shaded Sea Pines Circle instead of burning them.

She lost, and we’ve been losing ever since.

When I started, the north end of Hilton Head was considered the boondocks. Development that started on the south end of Hilton Head may end up sprawling all the way Knoxville, we don’t know. But what we have seen with our own eyes is that what’s left in its wake will look more like Atlanta than our dear Lowcountry.

The late state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, who was reared in Ridgeland before being killed in his Charleston church, used his rumbling voice to tell us what we are losing. When Jasper County celebrated its 100th birthday a decade ago, Pinckney spoke of the beauty of a place standing adjacent to booming coastal Beaufort County.

“Jasper County quietly boasts enchanting coastal plains filled with spreading moss-covered live oaks, supple palmettos and stately pines,” he read from a resolution.

The Jasper County seal includes a deer, a duck and a fish, as well as dogwood blooms and four pine cones to depict a sporting paradise, conservation and a major industry — timber production.

Soon that could all go up in smoke, like the live oaks that graced Sea Pines Circle.

The 5,200-acre Chelsea Plantation off S.C. 170 in Okatie, which was quietly owned as a hunting preserve by the Marshall Field family for 85 years, has been sold. And now high-density residential and commercial development is proposed to transform an area near the old white brick mansion, the intersection of S.C. 170 with Callawssie Drive and Snake Road in unincorporated Jasper County.

“A lot of people have viewed land owned by longtime families as protected forever,” Kate Schaefer said. She has long fought to protect the Lowcountry, working with the Coastal Conservation League and now with the Open Land Trust based in Beaufort.

“But Chelsea was sold (for $32 million) in 2019, and now we have essentially a bank out of Missouri that owns the property.”

More development is planned for the northern reaches of Chelsea, this on land called Tickton Hall that is circled by Euhaw Creek, near Cooler’s Store in the Old House area along S.C. 462.

Unless you’re in the waves of newer residents who have made Hardeeville and Bluffton among the fastest-growing places in the state over the past decade, you know exactly what this means.

‘ANOTHER BLUFFTON’

What’s missing is consideration of the cumulative effect as developer after developer comes in with plans, each so world-class and generous to our well-being you’d think they were giving us another Central Park.

But they’re not fooling residents of rural Jasper County.

“It shouldn’t be another Bluffton,” a resident of the Old Bailey Road area off S.C. 170 told Jasper County Council about plans by a Bluffton developer to put 233 residences and 65,820 square feet of commercial space on a 26-acre plot in her neighborhood.

“A community is more than just money.”

Someone else said, “Another person getting filthy rich. Is that what this is about?”

That Bailey Park development would rise a couple of miles down S.C. 170 from the proposed development explosion called Chelsea South at Snake Road: 438 residential units plus 269 multi-family units, and 69,600 square feet of commercial space plus 315,000 square feet of mixed-use commercial space on 290 acres, much of it wetlands, that borders the canal bringing drinking water from the Savannah River to the Beaufort Jasper Water and Sewer Authority plant across the road.

It’s not yet known how many homes and how much commercial space would be allowed in a proposed Tickton Hall development if the town of Ridgeland approves an annexation request and development agreement on 1,500 acres. It is partially owned by Robert Graves of Bluffton, who has developed condos on the south end of Hilton Head and his family’s Pepper Hall in Bluffton.

Jasper County Council over the past 15 years has adopted a conservation plan and a growth plan to specifically prevent what now comes before them.

The plan was to push development into the municipalities of Hardeeville and Ridgeland and leave the rest rural. But the municipalities have both ballooned from 2 square miles to 60 square miles, and now developers are banging on the door of County Council, seeking high-density growth in unincorporated areas.

For now, the County Council pumped the brakes on the Chelsea South proposal, and has gotten input on the best places for conservation and for development throughout what they call the Broad River Corridor.

County administrator Andy Fulghum knows that residential development won’t pay for itself.

“The strategy of pushing growth into municipalities was not only probably the right thing to do environmentally,” he said, “but it was also a fiscal survivability strategy for the county because a lot of counties just grow and sprawl, and they get backed into providing sort of a municipal types of service, and it’s a rat race because you have to have more development in order to provide the services, and we didn’t want to be that.”

Now we have a test case, or two or three. What will Jasper County Council do?

Experience shows that property owners have rights and even the best-laid government plans, and the will of the citizens who demanded them, are little more than a speed bump to high-powered and well-connected development teams.

HIGH COST

All of the Lowcountry, from Charleston to Pritchardville, is at risk.

“We’re seeing a lot of pressure starting to build on St. Helena and Lady’s Island,” said Dean Moss, who has watched this area’s change for decades. “There’s an enormous amount of undeveloped properties and properties permitted for development on Lady’s Island.”

In April, Victor Dover, a nationally recognized leader in city planning, told city of Beaufort leaders that it will do no good to pretend demand for development will go away. He suggested they instead view it as a “wave of prosperity” and insist on the kind of community they want.

Yes, but we know – by watching the kudzu-crawl from Sea Pines Circle to Chelsea Plantation – what will eventually happen. We no longer have to wonder “what if.” We can ride around and see what will happen if rural Jasper County’s future is dictated by the development that ate Bluffton and Hardeeville.

S.C. 462 will have to be four-laned with a bunch of traffic lights added, S.C. 170 will have to be six-laned and schools will have to be built. Most of the hundreds of millions of dollars that costs will have to be raised locally.

Affordable housing will become more scarce, pay for most of the promised jobs will struggle to hit a living-wage, tracts large and small will be clear-cut, wetlands needed to control flooding and polluted stormwater runoff will disappear and newcomers will complain about barking hunting dogs and begonia-eating deer that can no longer be hunted.

Worse, the Broad River off the now-pristine Port Royal Sound and all its beautiful tributaries winding around Jasper County will be polluted and crowded with weekenders swamping the shores with their wakes.

But there’s even more to it than that.

A LOST SOUL

Nationally-syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker of South Carolina got huge feedback when she wrote in August about growth in Charleston, where she started as a reporter at the Charleston Evening Post about the time I started at The Packet.

“I’m a stranger in my own town” was the headline, and she expressed sentiments that many have voiced here, first about Hilton Head and then about Bluffton.

“What was once a sleepy Navy town juxtaposed within an old, aristocratic porch society now resembles something closer to a nonstop bachelorette party or a walking club for the brunch set.”

And here’s what’s really at stake for the late and lamented Lowcountry:

“When is too much really way too much? … This city has lost something much more valuable than its new economic drivers. It lost its relationship to its artistic self. Charleston’s muse was always a sultry soul full of longing and lust, a penchant for sin and an appetite for redemption …

“But it’s impossible to resurrect the soul of a city once it’s been ‘improved.’ ”

David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.