Mount Pleasant Town Council implemented a building permit allocation system, which would place limits on home construction throughout the municipality. The Council has wrestled with the decision in the past and finally approved a plan in January to restrict the number of building permits to slow residential growth by a third.
New Permit Allocation System Will Contain Rapid Growth
Mount Pleasant is the fourth-largest and fastest-growing city in South Carolina. The town experienced rapid growth and now has 88,000 residents, up from 40,000 in 2000. The town has already adopted restrictions on development when it mandated a moratorium on apartment developments and instituted the highest impact fees in South Carolina.
Opponents of the new limits on building permits said the rules would drive up housing prices. They claim this will create an economic hardship to small home builders and potentially lead to a lawsuit.
Mayor Will Haynie said that a few people opposing the permit limits should not “get us off something we’ve been doing work on for months and months. We have 40,000 residential units of every type in the Town of Mount Pleasant. Let’s don’t delay something this important that I know I promised the voters. And I think most of us promised the voters this type of growth management.”
Building Permit Limits to Save the Town Money
“If the town’s population rate of growth is not adequately managed, Town Council may be forced to either significantly increase property taxes to respond to service and infrastructure demands or reduce the present levels of service for town facilities and services,” the new permit allocation system states.
The new permit rules allow a total of 2,400 permits in the next five years for single-family homes or townhomes. It will also allow 100 for accessory dwellings and 500 for multi-family units. Only a limited number of permits will be issued every six months with no more than 25 for a development to help ease rapid development in the town. This excludes multi-family units. This comes to 600 new permits allocated for residents each year, mostly for single-family homes.
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