As Horry County grows, developers have more power than residents. Could that change?
This story is part one of a two-part series examining the balance of power in Horry County growth and development. You can read part two here.
Along Gardner Lacy Road, a partially-wooded four-lane through the Western-most neighborhoods in Carolina Forest, two tracts of tree-packed land could soon be home to mini-warehouse storage units.
That, developers say, is because county leaders recently voted down a request to rezone that land. Developers wanted to build 58 single-family homes on the land, arguing that more homes would fit in better with the surrounding area than one of the many uses allowed under the land’s current zoning, Commercial Forest Agriculture. But residents were deeply opposed to the plans to build more homes, and organized against the project, speaking up at public meetings and collecting more than 1,500 signatures on a petition.
But when County Council members voted down the rezoning request, meaning the 58 homes couldn’t be built on that land, it wasn’t a complete victory. Ideally, said Cherie Reid, the Carolina Forest resident who first began circulating the petition against the project, the land would have been left as forest and kept that way. Some Carolina Forest residents, Reid quipped, have begun saying the area could have to change its name, since builders keep taking down trees to build homes.
Regardless of what developers built on the land along Gardner Lacy Road, Reid said, “it was going to be awfully crowded. So in a sense, (storage units are) a better project, but again it’s building on every square inch they can find.”
“It would be nice to keep some areas of Carolina Forest where you can actually drive for a block or two and not see homes or businesses or mini storage,” she added. “The whole place has changed so much.”
Taken as a whole, the development plans, resident push-back and outcome of the Gardner Lacy Road project illustrate the balance of power in Horry County as the region continues to experience explosive growth: Even when residents turn out in force against a particular project, they ultimately have little ability to shape what gets built in their neighborhoods.
That’s partly because a majority of the land in the county is zoned under no-longer-used zoning categories, like Commercial Forest Agriculture and Forest Agriculture, broad zoning classifications that allow for a wide variety of uses. It’s also partly because of how the planning and zoning process works in Horry County; generally, the rules allow property owners to do what they wish with their land and include only a few tools residents can use to determine what gets built and where.
“The biggest problem I’ve noticed since I got out of school…is that state law is not set up to let us do a lot,” said Carol Coleman, Horry County’s deputy director of planning and zoning from 2006 to 2015 and who now works as the local planning services director for the Waccamaw Regional Council of Governments. “You can tell it’s written more from a legal perspective, developer perspective, and not as much from the planning perspective, and that was designed.”
Pamela Dawson, a member of the county Planning Commission, added that the local laws that create bodies like the Planning Commission mandate that positions go to developers or others with professional expertise.
“There are requirements that say, ‘Okay, there have to be so many engineers, so many architects,” Dawson said. “O Planning Commission, I think there’s only two or three seats that are not required to be related to the industry.”
What ideas do you have for what Horry County should look like as it grows? Email The Sun News reporter J. Dale Shoemaker at dshoemaker@thesunnews.com.
Former county planners, community leaders, residents and even some developers agree that Horry County’s planning and zoning processes could be improved to either make residents better informed of how the system works, or by giving residents more of a say in what gets built, and where. Currently, residents only have a handful of tools at their disposal to oppose a specific development or influence development in their communities more broadly. County Council Chairman Johnny Gardner said that’s something he’s interested in addressing next year, after the council works through its current slate of projects, which include enacting impact fees on new buildings and spending federal funds from the latest COVID-19 relief package.
Oftentimes, Gardner said, the county’s old zoning classifications — like Commercial Forest Agriculture — lead to situations where residents have to choose between a rezoning and new housing, or leaving the land as-is and living with one of the many projects that those zones allow for.
“That is the position that we’re put in and it’s not a good position to be in,” Gardner said, noting that council committees are already working with county planners to clean up and streamline parts of the zoning code. “We need some zoning lawyers and some government to come in and see if there’s something that can be done.”
How zoning was designed, and how it works
Unlike other parts of the country, the land in Horry County wasn’t fully zoned — meaning the local government outlined and classified land uses in law — until about 20 years ago. Other parts of the county did have zoning, but it didn’t exist county-wide, particularly in the unincorporated areas of the county. That meant that if you owned a piece of property that wasn’t zoned, there were few restrictions the local government could impose on how you used that land, or what you built on it.
“Basically, the residents and property owners were always opposed to county-wide zoning,” said Adam Parness, who served as a member of the Horry County Planning Commission, and as chairman of the commission, for a decade in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Parness later served on the Myrtle Beach Planning Commission, too.
So opposed to county-wide zoning were residents, Parness said, that people would bring shotguns to Planning Commission meetings as they spoke against certain plans.
In the early 2000s, though, residents grew concerned about a landfill locating in the Western part of the county, not wanting it to be near any of their homes. That helped convince people that county-wide zoning was a good idea, because it could dictate where such a large project could be established, Parness said. Along with Tony Cox — who currently serves on the South Carolina Department of Transportation Commission — and Donald Helms — a realtor and current member of the Horry Georgetown Technical College Area Commission — Parness helped to design some of the county’s zoning classifications, including Commercial Forest Agriculture (CFA). CFA is a broad zoning classification that allows everything from farms, to stores to houses to churches to be built there.
CFA was designed to be so broad, Parness said, as a way to appease the residents who didn’t want zoning, and those who wanted to restrict things like landfills.
“We would blanket zone the county as CFA, which wouldn’t allow for a landfill (and) it worked great,” Parness said. “That was where CFA was born in terms of county wide development.”
In the last two decades, though, Horry County has grown exponentially — adding close to 200,000 new residents — and the broad nature of CFA now causes residents to have little say about what developers build in their neighborhood.
In Little River, for example, developers are looking to build 55 townhomes on a 13 acre piece of land near Highway 17 and Heather Glenn Boulevard that’s currently forest and wetlands. The land is zoned CFA, and even though some nearby residents said they don’t want to lose the woods near their home, there’s little they can do to stop something from being built there. And indeed, Felix Pitts, an agent for G3 Engineering which is helping develop the project, argued at a recent community meeting that the CFA zoning allows for all sorts of “more offensive” uses of the land. Pitts made similar arguments at community meetings on the Gardner Lacy Road project, and hospital officials with Conway Medical Center have also made that argument as they seek to rezone land in Carolina Forest to build a hospital.
Sandra Knight was one of the Little River residents who attended the community meeting about the townhome project, and said she’d prefer to not have the trees near her home cut down, meaning she’d have to look at a development from her yard. Still, she said, there’s not much she can do about it.
“I knew we couldn’t stop it, it’s zoned for anything right now basically,” she said. “I think it’s a terrible thing that’s been overlooked all these years. For developers it’s fine but for residents it’s not. You should have some say in what gets built nearby, (both) businesses and residents.”
Pitts, however, argues that rezoning land in the county from CFA or another one of the broad categories to residential or commercial is ultimately a good thing because doing so eliminates the broad categories forever, parcel by parcel. As Horry County has updated its zoning code over the last 20 years, its designed newer, tighter zoning categories and no longer allows land to be rezoned into the older categories. When developers rezone land from CFA to residential in particular, Pitts said, residents are able to have the new homes placed further away from their property lines and can ask developers to put in amenities like sidewalks to beautify the area.
“They need to be looking at a CFA rezoning next to a neighborhood as a gift,” Pitts said, explaining that many residents don’t fully understand how broad CFA is, and what all can be built there. If they did, Pitts said, residents would be less opposed to new housing in their neighborhoods, as was the case with the Gardner Lacy Road project that his firm was also part of.
“It could have been a lot better, it could have been residential development,” he said about the Gardner Lacy Road project. “Now none of that is going to happen and that’s unfortunate. And I think it comes down to the public not being totally educated on what CFA is and what (developers) can do with it.”
In cases like the Gardner Lacy Road project, that means that even if residents turn out in force against a development, and even if the County Council agrees with them and votes a rezoning request down, the residents ultimately don’t get a say in how their neighborhood develops.
“You won the battle, but be aware that you may lose the war, and that’s the challenge,” Coleman said.
Are residents’ wishes always right?
Even though Horry County’s zoning code gives developers more say over their land than residents who live nearby, that doesn’t mean residents are always right when they oppose new buildings, Pitts, Coleman and Parness all said.
“It’s the property owners conundrum: I want to do what I want with my property and I want to control what my neighbor does too,” Coleman said.
And residents not wanting certain rezonings or certain developments near their homes is not a new problem, Parness said. Today, it’s not uncommon to hear a county leader quip that the last resident who moved to Horry County wants to be the last person to move to Horry County.
“They want to shut the gate behind them,” Council member Al Allen, who represents Aynor and much of Western Horry County, said when residents were speaking against another Carolina Forest development in May.
Parness said some planning commissioners in his day came up with acronyms to describe the types of common complaints they heard from residents about new development: NIMBY, meaning “Not In My Backyard;” CAVE, meaning “Citizens Against Virtually Everything;” and BANANA, meaning “Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.”
At planning commission and county council meetings today, those types of complaints are still common.
“People have a right to own land, people have a right to buy land, people have a right to build on land,” Parness said, explaining that residents are allowed to have input on the development process, but ultimately, they can’t control all new development in the county. “It’s the nature of society today to protest anything you’re not happy with.”
Ways homeowners can fight development
Along the Highway 90 corridor, residents like Tammy Baker are used to what they call a country lifestyle. Neighbors are spaced out, everyone is able to do what they want on their property, and there are enough roads and resources to keep everyone safe, even though they’re spread out.
But in recent years, the area has exploded with new homes, and more are on the horizon.
That’s led Baker to begin organizing with her neighbors to push back against what they see as over-development. She’s begun circulating a petition calling for a pause on new high-density housing until better zoning rules are in place for the area. One option is a zoning overlay that could more stringently lay out what’s allowed to be built, and where.
Doing so, she said, is one of the few tools she has to get Horry County to better respond to residents’ wishes for growth and development.
“With the petition, what we’re going to try to do is get them to stop the high-density rezonings until we can get the overlay in place,” she said. “And then we can continue to develop and develop in a smarter way. And a safer way.”
Developers, she said, have for decades had money to contribute to County Council members’ campaigns and have had an outsized say in how growth and development happens in the county. That’s now become a problem that she wants to fix, she said.
“I feel like they’re getting favor over our safety, kind of in the name of greed,” she said. “They could build on half-acre lots and make some money, it doesn’t have to be the high density.”
A zoning overlay, like Baker would like to see along the Highway 90 corridor, is one of the other tools the county uses to help determine what gets built where. Areas like Little River and the Burgess community already have zoning overlays that put stricter rules on the types of development that can get built in certain areas, and what that development looks like.
Al Jordan, the president of the Greater Burgess Community Association, was part of the effort in the early 2000s to institute the zoning overlay for Burgess, which, in part, restricts where commercial developments can locate and what those businesses look like.
“The basic reason (for the Burgess overlay) is that the community knew that development was going to be coming to this area and we wanted to exert more control over the appearance of that development,” Jordan said.
Overlay districts, once approved by county leaders, carry the force of law, meaning that developers have a harder time changing them than something like a comprehensive plan. A change to the county’s Imagine 2040 comprehensive plan needs approval from county council, whereas a change to an overlay zone needs to go before the Zoning Board of Appeals.
To date, Jordan said, the overlay district has been successful.
“The advantage of an area plan, like our area plan, is that also becomes law and becomes part of the county zoning code,” Jordan said. “If there’s a proposal to do some sort of rezoning that is not in compliance with the area plan then the county is obligated to follow the area plan and not do it.”
What planning rules could change?
A majority of the people The Sun News interviewed for this story agreed that, at a minimum, Horry County could be more transparent and offer more resources to the public about how planning and zoning works so that residents know what developments are planned, and when they can give input on the projects.
Carole VanSickler, a Carolina Forest resident, said even making the signs that the county places near a planned development larger and bolder could go a long way and attract attention from more residents. VanSickler is also the president of the Carolina Forest Civic Association but noted she was speaking as a resident. She said the tight timeline of the county zoning process also doesn’t lend itself to residents being able to voice opposition to certain developments, as she’s done a number of times over the years in Carolina Forest.
“The public doesn’t know (about a rezoning or new development) until an orange sign, a very small orange sign, pops up in their neighborhood,” VanSickler said. “You have to start a grassroots campaign and you can’t do that in two weeks, so it works in the planning commission and developers favor.”
Pitts, with G3 Engineering, said he thinks the county should circulate rezoning notices to more people, and should include more information about the rezoning request and planned development when those notices are mailed out. That could better educate the public and quell some of the anger he sees at community meetings.
“(Residents) have no knowledge and have no idea about the site plan,” Pitts said. “The problem at that point is that a petition has been circulated, the phone calls have been made, council members are worried. The county would do well that when there’s a notice in the mail, and there’s a meeting, they attach the site plan.”
Parness, the former Planning Commission chairman, suggested that it may be up to state lawmakers to give local zoning laws and local governments more power to control land in their jurisdictions and control development that way.
Coleman suggested that an oversight body, or even adding a step to the planning process could give the public more of a chance to understand what’s happening in their neighborhoods and speak out against developments they don’t want to see. While the public currently has the ability to speak at public meetings against a certain development, Coleman and others noted that those aren’t always the most productive venues.
“Give them the opportunity to look at it before it goes forward,” Coleman said.
For the county’s part, spokesperson Kelly Moore pointed to Horry County’s Planning Academy, a free course offered to residents to learn about planning and zoning, if they want to learn how to better influence development.
David Jordan, the county’s planning director, pointed out that significant changes to how the county approaches development would have to come from the council, as it’s a policy decision rather than a technical one. Still, he said, county planners are well aware of some of the issues with current zoning and there’s been some appetite to change them in the recent past.
Pamela Dawson, a member of the Planning Commission, said residents organizing and coming together is the first step towards change.
“When people show up in numbers, when people communicate with their elected officials on an ongoing basis and stay engaged, that’s really important,” she said.
And while Gardner said he wants to be careful to not infringe on the property rights residents and developers have, he’s willing to look into what changes the county could make to level the playing field.
“That’s one of the things I’d like to do next year,” he said.
This story was originally published July 12, 2021 at 8:48 AM with the headline "As Horry County grows, developers have more power than residents. Could that change?."
