The New Neck

Sliver of land the size of Manhattan yields widening opportunity, new perils

North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey couldn't be more right about the importance of the Neck, and that's partly because, as a zone of opportunity, it's getting bigger. Longtimers think of the Neck as that narrow territory starting at Mount Pleasant Street and ending approximately where Meeting and King streets dissolve into Spruill and Rivers avenues.

The New Neck, fast becoming one of the hottest urban redeveloping areas in the nation, extends northward up to North Charleston's Park Circle. In its new geography, it's a stretch of land as large as Manhattan.

In this region's debate about growth, about where more homes should be built or not built, the New Neck is the best staging ground to demonstrate how more people can live closer to major job centers. It's the proving ground for rebuilding whole neighborhoods without violating the legitimate rights and interests of people already there.

In fact, almost every issue critical to the region's 21st-century success is in play. Here the raw wounds of the region's history are laid bare - industrial pollution including oil refineries and intensive phosphate mining that left "brownfields" in their wake, an interstate road that ran roughshod over historic black neighborhoods, massive job losses and middle-class loss following the Navy Base's closing, and power held by sometimes fiercely competing governments.

Yet the corresponding opportunities are dazzling. Here's a chance to create connected urban neighborhoods with room and prices for everyone who wants to live there. It's a chance to untangle the knotty dilemmas that are wrapped around port expansion, so goods move and people get to jobs efficiently.

It's an opportunity to reclaim industrial wastelands and ride the emerging wave of "green" development for new commercial enterprises. It's a way to create fresh opportunities for long-suffering black neighborhoods. And in a region worried about environmental impact of development on its treasured sea islands, there's enough space in the New Neck for well over 100,000 new residences.

The New Neck is already home to a group of imaginative redevelopment initiatives: the Noisette project in and near the former Charleston Navy Base, the ambitious Magnolia project on the Ashley River, the nostalgic Mixson project, upcoming projects by Ginn Development and others. Massive chunks of brownfield remediation have been undertaken.

Plus, a historic shift in black-white relations is shaping up. At Magnolia, for example, developer Robert Clement's team found historic black neighborhoods deeply suspicious that the new high-rises would drive up property values, and thus, property taxes, forcing out established homeowners. The creative response: a Magnolia fund to cover the homeowners' increased tax bills — a first, as far as we know, in creative developer practice anywhere in the United States.

Black leaders speak with enthusiasm about Magnolia's early outreach to them, asking their input on how the area could and should develop. Developers and city governments across America should take note of the precedent.

But putting a hard squeeze on the New Neck are a bunch of big decisions, all coming at once, with the clock ticking. The size and routing of Interstate 26 road access to the port terminal, the potential of better freight railroad connections — all are in the hands of assorted government agencies and private companies that generally see little need to talk with each other. Here's how the scene of compound dilemmas looked like to outsiders' eyes:

Expanding the port

The Port of Charleston got its permit from the Army Corps of Engineers last April to build a $600 million expansion of container capacity on a portion of the old Navy base. Preliminary construction is already under way, but outstanding issues remain. Some deal with the issue of fine particulate air pollution, now raising some alarm in the national public health community. But the question of port access still raises concerns:

Getting cargo to I-26.

Up to now it's seemed that the flood of cargo from the new terminal will all go by road — a 1.4-mile access road to I-26, then up the interstate to the north. Concerns about the access road's impact — significant visual, polluted air and noise challenges for the closest neighborhoods — remain.

Widening I-26?

The State Transportation Department is considering a widening of I-26, from the port access road to the Mark Clark, to accommodate the thousands of added trucks that will flow out each day. But some say that's the wrong idea— that the more serious congestion on I-26 is north of the Mark Clark, up to the Ashley Phosphate Road area.

A rail freight option? The rail connection seems the most intriguing. Two hard-charging railroad companies own track lines that could serve expanded port cargo — CSX and Norfolk Southern. So far they've not indicated any willingness to work together to sort out where tracks might connect or where spurs might improve connections. Nor has South Carolina Public Railways, which controls some spurs to the main tracks and could be the "honest broker."

If rail could work, there might be a way for trains to haul the port's cargo directly by train to an intermodal site further inland, such as Summerville, or even on longer-distance trains headed to major distribution points across the Southeast U.S.

Up to now, the Port Authority has shown little public interest in a train option, because it believes trucks involve less repeat handling of cargo (and thus less expense). Still, rail is an alternative that cries out for an inventive solution — a prospect we'll return to in our article next week focused on region-wide transportation issues.

Local rail at last?

In another big decision affecting the future of the Neck, there's a solid case, in already-complete feasibility studies, for commuter rail service running from Summerville to job centers in North Charleston and through the New Neck to the peninsula, potentially a serious reliever for rush-hour traffic. But how would it relate to major freight movement by rail? Only some serious study would tell, we suspect. We'll take a more careful look at commuter rail in next week's article, focused specifically on transportation.

"Truck trains."

Another idea for getting shipments out from the port comes from Paul Nelson, the now retired founding head of the College of Charleston's Global Logistics and Transportation Center. He suggests another kind of "train," a tractor as the locomotive, a series of standard truck trailers in tow. Nelson recommends a roadway exclusively for freight-grade trucks, connected into I-26 with a flyover and kept separate from autos in the center median of the interstate. Our transportation article will take this up.

The "grand spine" option.

Couldn't today's dull, grimy entrance into historic Charleston be improved? There's been talk in recent years of a grand boulevard for King Street, or even more likely, Meeting Street, connecting to the redeveloped areas in the New Neck and on to North Charleston.

The historic oak-lined entrance boulevard that Frederick Law Olmsted praised could return to life. And the new roadway, first suggested by residents of the area, could reknit black neighborhoods that were decimated by the interstate's construction in the 1960s. It could be a "healing highway," the Rev. Sydney Davis of the Greater Charleston Empowerment Corp. has suggested.

Initially, such a "grand spine" was seen as single project, concurrent with truncating I-26 as it approaches the city. Mayors Joe Riley and Keith Summey, developer Robert Clement, church leaders and the Coastal Conservation League all endorsed the idea of lowering and realigning the two-mile stretch of I-26 between Cosgrove Avenue and Mount Pleasant Street.

Recent reports that this section of I-26 is structurally sound now make that less likely. But the case for a radically improved, people-friendly entrance to the city — perhaps Meeting Street for tourists, King Street for truck traffic, running from as far north as Cosgrove, remains.

There's no real long-term reason for the interstate to enter the city; other regions, with far more through-traffic than Charleston — San Francisco, Portland, Milwaukee, for example — are starting to learn that stretches of supposedly "indispensable" interstate are, in fact, not needed.

Turning concrete arteries into neighborly boulevards

Even with redevelopment now under way, Rivers and East Montague avenues are way out of scale as connecting streets. And though they're not crowded, they intimidate any serious prospects for real density of neighborhood shops and offices. These roadways were designed primarily to move cars and trucks through as rapidly as possible. We heard developers talking about how both could be assets to the community, transformed into tree-lined boulevards. They could possibly even shrink to one lane of traffic each way, with curb cuts for turns, so that traffic would move at less-intimidating speeds. Such changes, say advocates, could be key to creating truly desirable neighborhoods.

A collision of deciders

Here's the problem: Each of these issues, opportunities and threats is being deliberated separately by some different arm of government or private industry. The region's in serious danger of ending up with a hodgepodge of decisions that don't add up, or worse, directly collide.

The reason's clear: What the port decides about truck versus rail use, or where intermodal facilities get located, impacts the whole transportation grid and whether eternal gridlock is inevitable on I-26.

When the state's Department of Transportation gives a green or red light on a proposed highway move, the impacts ricochet through the region. Other regulatory bodies get to set rules on critical environmental issues such as closed containers or open cars for raw materials. Charleston and North Charleston are busy approving new neighborhoods, committing themselves to critical street, curb and water pipe decisions, though they're often in the dark as to whether some highway or port decision will undercut their investment of the peoples' dollars.

The region's major planning organization, the Dorchester, Berkeley and Charleston Council of Governments, has the basic tools, and also the staff expertise, to pull these various strands of decisions together. But any decision the COG makes can be overridden in a heartbeat by the port, the state Transportation Department, or any local government.

Last spring a first bid for full collaboration came from a newly formed Ashley-Cooper Alliance initiated by such major development companies as the I'On Group, Magnolia and Ginn, top planners (Keane & Co.) and the Coastal Conservation League.

Mayors Riley and Summey took part in a critical workshop on the future of the New Neck. Initially, there was real hope this alliance could galvanize governments, state and local, plus the port and the railroads, to all work together. But neither the port, nor the railways, nor the state Transportation Department showed any desire to join the search for collaborative solutions.

And the transportation issues aren't the whole story. Respectful accommodations need to be reached with black communities, some on land held by their ancestors since the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. And the Neck, notwithstanding its image, has areas of often-abused but salvageable nature to be protected: marshes that provide habitat for wildlife, as well as soft, relaxing scenes to enjoy — streams winding through the lowlands, plus all the varieties of river shoreline. Once destroyed, these watery assets, the birthright of the Lowcountry, are too rarely restored.

The harsh truth is that every one of those values is at risk from the way decisions are typically made in the region. Unless the parties can gather around a table, exchange views and research findings and work to fashion "win-win" decisions rather than "I have the power and you obey" edicts, the future of the New Neck is bracketed with dark question marks.