The hubs — and the rub

North Charleston, long a poster child of haphazard growth in the Lowcountry, has embarked on an ambitious long-term plan to create a landscape similar to the high-rise necklace of little cities draped around downtown Atlanta.

If successful, this hub-based growth strategy could transform struggling neighborhoods, reduce transportation costs and help knit a new identity for the sprawling city of more than 85,000 residents.

And, as other tri-county areas face similar growth-related issues, North Charleston's approach could serve as a model for future development in Summerville, Moncks Corner, Goose Greek and other areas along the fast-growing Interstate 26 corridor.

North Charleston's "little cities" strategy is a key component of its comprehensive plan for growth.

Communities across the area are rewriting or updating their 10-year plans, a requirement under state law.

North Charleston is ahead of the pack. It recently approved its plan, and on Friday, City Council will hold a daylong workshop on how to put it into effect.

"Multiple nucleoid growth," North Charleston Planning Director Bill Gore said with a nod, using a biochemistry term to describe what's going on in the state's third largest city. "If you've got something that's 70-something square miles, it makes sense that you have multiple hubs."

North Charleston is building that way "because we never had a city," Mayor Keith Summey added.

"We were a suburb (when the city incorporated in the 1970s). We inherited industrial sites and thrown-up retail strips. We're growing our borders, but we're building an inner city."

The city's goal is to create the kinds of places that draw back people who were lost in the 1960s-70s wave of commuting to Goose Creek, Summerville and other bedroom communities. During this period, the city fell apart; people left, business followed or closed, opportunities shrank and crime rose, fueling the cycle. In the 1980s and 1990s, the city expanded, often in a seemingly random way, making it difficult for people like Charles Green.

No connections

Green lives on Good Street, in a brick home with huge aloe plants. He's lived in this woodsy neighborhood for half a century. It's called Highland Terrace, and it's in the heart of one of North Charleston's new "cityscapes": the coliseum and Tanger Outlet Center area. Convenient?

Tri-county governments are crafting in-depth plans to handle growth. Will their plans fit together?

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Not unless you have a car.

That drone coming from the dead-end of Good Street is Interstate 526, and the only way out of his neighborhood to the outlet mall is a two-lane road that snakes the other way, then under the intersecting ramps of I-26 and I-526, past the Coburg Dairy and a cement yard into the Mall Drive corporate district.

"I've really got no problem with the coliseum area, except getting to it," Green said. "You can't get to a Piggly Wiggly without jumping in your car."

Green's predicament reflects the challenge behind the city's drive to develop a series of dense downtown little cities while continuing its plan to annex areas on its outer edges.

"North Charleston is open to a lot of different ideas, 'green building,' redevelopment of (industrial) brownfields such as the Navy base, locating residential and business areas near to each other to take pressure of transportation corridors such as I-26," said Megan Desrosiers of the Coastal Conservation League, which champions dense development as a way to conserve green space around it. "Not a lot of other municipalities or even counties are doing things like this."

Desrosiers said that while the city is becoming a leader in green building and revitalization, "North Charleston is never going to be woods. The only way to improve the quality of life within that setting is to build an urban environment — everything should be planned on a walkable scale," she said, adding that North Charleston is filled with cautionary lessons.

International Boulevard in the coliseum and Tanger Outlet area, "is not the most walkable street," she said.

'Bling, bling, bling'

North Charleston's little cities plan also will focus on changing the dirty "brownfield" industrial landscape on the city's south side, an image the city has long tried to change.

So far, not a lot of the redevelopment has worked very far into those neighborhoods, and money spent on the ambitious Noisette project has heads shaking.

"If we can spend $60 million in the private Noisette project, you can put $10 million in the poor communities," said Elder James Johnson, a community activist who works in the low-income neighborhoods and describes himself, with a wry grin, as someone who doesn't bite his tongue. "Cherokee-Chicora is the largest district in North Charleston. There is no investment for these kids."

Affordable housing being built in new developments around the city isn't affordable in his neighborhoods, he said. "They see the drug deals. They see the bling, bling, bling. They see the shiny car rims, and that becomes their ideal."

The only progress he's seen so far is saturation patrols by North Charleston police that have ratcheted down violent street crime.

"The interest is in property and what they can make on it, not the people," Johnson said.

Will North Charleston's little cities approach remake this relatively young and sprawling city? The next decade could answer that question. Or it could take even longer.

It was eight years ago that Noisette, a private company, announced a long-range redevelopment of 3,000 acres in the guts of North Charleston, financed partly by the city, and became the bellwether of the city's overall drive to revitalize. The project labors on in fits and starts, hamstrung by difficulties finding money backers.

The stymied economy and burst housing bubble have slowed or stopped other projects. Five years after an affordable housing project named Joppa Way was launched in Green's Highland Terrace neighborhood, a few home constructions sit in overgrown grasses behind a signboard that carries no name. A new developer took it over in April.

"Right now, I think we're all in a difficult situation with the economy. I think we will have to wait and see," Gore said.

Liveable communities — that's a tall order for a city spanning rail lines and intersecting interstate highways with heavy port shipping, industries lining an abandoned Navy base, an Air Force base and an airport, among other odd-sized shoes in the same box.

"When I leave this office," North Charleston Mayor Summey said, "I want people to say he got out of the box and did things differently."