Thursday marks the 157th anniversary of the Confederate batteries opening fire on Fort Sumter, the first shot in a disastrous war that most South Carolinians — with the exception of our Republican candidates for governor — have come to acknowledge as a regrettable mistake.
Secession, though, is in our blood. And it’s time for those of us on the peninsula to again think about secession — not from the union, but the city itself.
For most of its long history, the peninsula was the city of Charleston, about 5 square miles of sacred ground between the Ashley and the Cooper (two rivers that join, as we all know, to form the Atlantic). Today, Charleston is South Carolina’s most sprawling city, stretching from the vast Daniel Island on one side of the peninsula to West Ashley, James Island and Johns Island on the other.
What we are left with is a city that is expensive to run and increasingly at war with itself. At the center is the golden goose, the peninsula, which underwrites the services for the suburbs that envy and scorn it. Why shouldn’t we all have a King Street?
It wasn’t always so. For more than a century, from 1849 to 1959, the city’s boundaries remained unchanged. And then two forces — one very American, the other very Southern — combined to start emptying out the peninsula.
As long-time downtown residents fled to the suburbs in search of green lawns and white schools, the peninsula’s population fell from 71,000 in 1940 to 40,000 in the late 1970s. Local businesses followed their customers.
Palmer Gaillard, or “Pamma” as we called our mayor, saw his voters and tax base heading to the exits and followed them, too, by leaping the river to annex the first neighborhoods in West Ashley. He tripled the size of the city to all of 18 square miles. Then Joe Riley was elected in 1975.
“Joe was an annexation maniac,” says Robert Rosen, a lawyer and historian who was part of Riley’s inner circle.
Riley’s annexation wars are legendary, some of the most colorful stories in his storied 40 years in office. They involved emergency City Council meetings in the middle of the night, endless court battles and generous incentives for developers. The opponents of his campaign for Daniel Island compared him to Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator whose attempt to annex Kuwait sparked the first Gulf War.
It all makes the current stare down between Charleston and North Charleston over 2,200 acres in West Ashley’s historic plantation district seem almost polite, so far at least, compared to the Days of Joe.
This era of annexation on steroids doubled the city’s population since 1950, the year I was born here, while increasing the land area 20-fold. It would be like a couple moving into a two bedroom, 1,000-square-foot house and then having two kids. But rather than add two bedrooms and another 1,000 square feet of space, the city added 40 bedrooms and 20,000 square feet.
This is an expensive way to go. Consider: Charleston is 128 square miles, Columbia (excluding Fort Jackson) is 54 square miles and Greenville just 29. This translates into 1,050 residents per square mile in Charleston compared with 2,500 for Columbia and 2,300 for Greenville. North Charleston has about 1,400 residents a mile, and suburban Mount Perfect has 1,870.
This matters because it costs more to deliver services such as police, fire, water and sewer and garbage collection in suburban areas than in dense urban neighborhoods. And the suburbs, with single-family housing developments and big-box stores surrounded by acres of surface parking lots, produce far less tax revenue than dense, walkable urban environments. Study after study has documented this.
“A mile of pipe costs a mile of pipe,” says Joe Minicozzi, an Asheville urban planner who has studied the economics of cities all over the country, Charleston included. “It is 100 times cheaper if you have 1,000 people on it rather than 10.”
The peninsula, by the way, has about 7,000 people a square mile, or almost nine times the density of everything else.
Today, the peninsula represents just 4 percent of the city land area and a quarter of the population. But it remains the economic engine and cultural heart of a region that annually draws 7 million platinium-card toting tourists. And it is the money machine that subsidizes the cost of all those cops and firefighters in the suburbs.
Those subsidies have been made possible, in no small part, by decades of deferred maintenance on the peninsula. Downtown has gotten parks and museums, a grand performance hall and an aquarium — all good things for residents and tourists alike — but much of the basic infrastructure has been underfunded. Think flood protection and public housing, just for starters.
Annexation has created a slow, silent drain on municipal finances — our version of the frog in the boiling pot — that helps explain tight city budgets at a time of a booming economy. To say nothing of the expensive problems we annexed like the flood-prone Church Creek Basin.
It has also has set up a scrum for resources that has pitted the peninsula against the suburbs. One thing politicians can do is count, and the votes aren’t downtown.
Joe Riley, the mayor of the downtown, spent his career fighting his annexation wars. The peninsula isn’t going to secede, but four decades later it’s clear the suburbs have won.
Steve Bailey writes regularly for the commentary page. He can be reached at sjbailey1060@yahoo.com. Follow him on Twitter @sjbailey1060.
