Land use
Anderson will push for zoning changes based on people, not houses
While his constituents were raising concerns about the number of new homes that could be built on the Waccamaw Neck under a new land use plan, County Council Member Bob Anderson said he started thinking about density in a different way.
“We’re looking at this as if it’s all about dwellings. It’s not about dwellings, it’s about people,” he said.
Specifically, the 80,108 people he estimated to be living in the area at the peak of the tourist season.
“They are using our roads, our stores, our churches,” Anderson said.
The land use element in Georgetown County’s comprehensive plan, which was updated in July over Anderson’s lone objection, uses U.S. Census data to measure growth, but doesn’t factor in the seasonal shifts driven by the tourist economy.
The peak summer population that Anderson calculated for the Waccamaw Neck is 26 percent greater than the latest census estimate for the county as a whole, 63,594.
“The Waccamaw Neck is bigger than what shows up on the census,” Anderson said.
The land use plan does acknowledge the seasonal shift. Among the ways the county can preserve its culture and character, according to the plan, are creating a tourism management plan, weighing the impact of short-term rentals and making sure transportation infrastructure is sized for peak seasonal demand.
Population is another of the 10 state-mandated elements of the comprehensive plan. The county’s population element doesn’t try to assess the number of seasonal visitors. It only includes estimates of tourist spending. But it says, “the effect on services such as police, fire and emergency will need to be closely monitored.”
It isn’t the seasonal influx that Anderson wants to address, it’s the permanent population. He hopes to start next week when the council is due to give second reading to a change to the zoning ordinance that will reduce the maximum number of units allowed in the “general residential” district from 16 to 12.
The change will align the ordinance with the land use plan. The county plans a wider revision of the zoning code to meet other goals in the plan.
Anderson wants the maximum number of units cut to five, but only for permanent homes. And he wants the minimum lot size in the general residential district increased from 6,000 square feet to a quarter acre.
“People understand what an acre is,” Anderson said.
The county’s equivalent is 10,000 square feet. An acre is equal to 43,560 square feet.
“Let’s go to: a minimum lot size that can be inhabited by a single-family dwelling is one quarter of an acre,” Anderson said.
But that would only be for homes that are classified as primary residences, and which are assessed for taxes at 4 percent of their market value. Second homes and commercial property is assessed at 6 percent.
“If it’s a 6 percent dwelling you let that alone,” Anderson said. “On a 4 percent dwelling we’d have four units an acre.”
There are 11,406 dwellings with 4 percent asessments on Waccamaw Neck and 8,854 at 6 percent.
In trying to determine the seasonal population, Anderson used those tax designations to come up with his estimates. Although he assumed all 6 percent dwellings were seasonal, that assessment also applies to rentals with permanent residents.
While his numbers may not be exact, he said the census isn’t either. That’s not the point, he said.
“We need to be careful in our growth in population,” Anderson said. “The rate of building dwellings has got to subside.”
