Beaufort County is studying the use of a building moratorium on large-scale developments in the county to help it better prepare for the impacts.
And Beaufort County is not alone – governments in many parts of the state are turning to moratoria to buy time, or in some cases, to deter developers.
The Charleston Post-Courier recently reported that “Moratoriums are what can happen when residents and local officials feel like they’re getting too much of something too fast and feel overwhelmed.
“Increasingly, residents of fast-growing areas across South Carolina have been calling for temporary freezes on certain types of development — sometimes lasting years — and local governments have been approving them.
“The idea is to take a pause so that governments can potentially put new rules in place. That’s supposed to be the purpose because a town or city can’t simply say “no more apartments” or “no more adult businesses” without running afoul of the law.
Read the entire Post-Courier story here.
1 thought on “Building Moratoriums Not Uncommon In South Carolina”
I definitely believe that a moratorium is called for in Beaufort County. I’ve seen, firsthand, what can happen when the developers overwhelm a community. The political infrastructure is infiltrated by the developers, builders, realtors and development is chaotic without any —- restraints applied and certainly with anemic limitations and inadequate contributions to compensate the community for the added stresses on the physical and social infrastructures that are not designed for nor capable of absorbing the added loads. Traffic is the most immediately obvious stress but every community system is put under unsustainable stresses and by the time the community realizes what has been done to them, the developers are long gone and the local residents are left with a lower quality of life and a big tab to clean it up, or else be saddled with a new and much lower reality.
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