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FIVE Growing by Choice: Community Planning The tiny hamlet of Awendaw, northeast of Mount Pleasant in Charleston County, was devastated by Hurricane Hugo in 1989. No sooner had the storm moved north than I traveled to help friends who had lost their home. What I found on arrival was heart-wrenching. The storm-ravaged area that included pockets of extreme poverty was a tragic landscape. Public services were minimal or nonexistent . Yet the mortal immediacy of the situation helped the distraught community band together to bridge traditional racial and class differences. Everyone joined together to help those whose lives had been shattered. Seventeen years later, in 2006, another storm, this time over growth, had a different effect on Awendaw. It fragmented rather than unified the community. That year, Lewis C. White, a local real estate agent, announced his intention to sell a 324-acre parcel he owned near Awendaw. The purchaser, Watertree Properties based in North Carolina, planned to pay seventeen million dollars for the land and construct three to four hundred houses on the site. The upscale homes would cost between four hundred thousand and one million dollars. The gated community would double the population of the predominantly African American rural town and transform its racial makeup. Proponents of the project claimed that the “environmentally friendly” development would include clustered housing, nature preserves, and open spaces. It would also bring desperately needed property tax revenues and infrastructure to the poor community, which still depended on wells for its water and septic tanks for its sewage treatment. Opponents countered that the development would destroy one of the most ecologically important areas in the lowcountry. “I think it’s horrible,” exclaimed one resident. “I think it’s totally out of character with what the majority of residents want. It just makes no sense for Awendaw.”1 Had the project in Awendaw been proposed twenty years earlier, it probably would have been approved with little notice. In 2006, however, several factors transformed the proposed development of the “White Tract” into a prolonged, complicated controversy involving racial and class overtones, tensions between newcomers and longtime residents, and charges of croneyism. First, the White Tract, nestled between the Francis Marion National Forest and the Cape Romaine National Wildlife Refuge and running along the Intracoastal Waterway, was both Growing by Choice: Community Planning 129 ecologically sensitive and geographically strategic, having received designation as a Class I wilderness, one of only 158 places in the nation to receive such distinction .2 Second, the lowcountry’s conservation coalition mobilized its considerable forces to oppose the project. “This can’t happen,” declared John Brubaker, a past president of the South Carolina Native Plant Society who lived near the White Tract. “The conservation community is prepared to do everything and anything that it can to ensure that it does not happen.” Because no sewer lines connected the proposed development to Awendaw, septic tanks would have to be used to handle wastewater. The threat that sewerage seeping from the subdivision would despoil sensitive waterways as well as shorebird habitat and nesting territory for loggerhead turtles spurred the involvement of environmental organizations. “It’s just absolutely the wrong place [for a development],” stressed Dana Beach of the Coastal Conservation League. “The property has extensive wetlands. It’s one of the most globally important ecological areas in the east. For that reason alone, the town ought to turn it down.”3 A third factor complicating approval of the proposed development was that the property owner, Lewis C. White, a lifelong resident, chaired the town’s planning commission. People opposed to the development questioned whether the town council could make an objective decision about a project spearheaded by such a prominent local figure. That the planning commission and the mayor publicly endorsed the project only fueled suspicions of a “good-old-boy” network controlling the approvals process. For his part White dismissed critics of the project as “not-in-my-backyard” new residents who opposed any additional growth in the area. “They come to Awendaw, buy land, build a home and don’t want anyone else to do the same,” he charged.4 A fourth factor affecting the fate of the White Tract was perhaps the most crucial : in the mid-1990s the South Carolina General Assembly had mandated that all communities with planning commissions must develop comprehensive longrange land-use plans to manage growth more effectively. The proposed development of the White Tract therefore had to satisfy the requirements of the Town...

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