There's no question our area needs more affordable housing, particularly in downtown Charleston, one of our region's major employment centers and one of the easiest places to get by without the added expense of owning a car. It's also where land is both pricey and scarce.

One only has to read our letters to the editor to appreciate that many Charleston area residents have deep misgivings about the way the current period of economic growth is altering the character and feel of the city’s peninsula, giving old church steeples and traditional buildings more comp…

We probably should be pleased that efforts to improve electrical service in and around McClellanville have pivoted from an ill-conceived proposal to run a new 115-volt transmission line across a broad section of the picturesque and ecologically sensitive Santee River Delta toward a new plan …

You’ve already heard the latest bad news from our classrooms: As The Post and Courier’s Hillary Flynn reported Tuesday, South Carolina started this school year with more than 1,000 teacher vacancies — the most since the state started tracking the numbers in 2001 and likely the most ever.

Charleston County was once widely regarded among real estate lawyers as being the most efficient place in South Carolina to file the deeds, mortgages and other legal documents that make land transactions official.

For two consecutive years, not only has South Carolina been spared a direct hit from a hurricane, but no storm has even gotten close enough for us to become glued to weather forecasts or ponder our evacuation plans.

President Joe Biden recently faced a difficult choice of his own making: a continued good neighbor policy following the rules of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade, or pursuit of his buy-American polices embedded in the infrastructure bill he signed into law Nov. 15 and in th…

We’re glad to see S.C. legislators returning to work this week and next to debate new legislative and congressional districts for the 2022 elections, rather than handing incumbents yet another advantage by delaying action until next year.

Those less familiar with Charleston's history might not understand our strong links with the Caribbean's easternmost island, a small nation that marked a major milestone Tuesday. During the day's earliest hours, while most of us were still in bed, Barbados held a formal ceremony to become a …

Post-high school education in the United States has been moving for more than a decade toward helping students acquire skills needed by employers, a direction pioneered by the South Carolina Technical College System over the past half-century. Registered apprenticeships are one way to do so …

We’ve seen a lot of evidence over the past few years that South Carolina is blessed with an overabundance of incompetent and ethically challenged magistrate judges: judges who preside over cases where they have clear conflicts of interest, who refuse to listen to defendants’ claims of self-d…

Years before John Tecklenburg was elected Charleston’s mayor, he was a city department head who encouraged Upper King Street business and property owners to agree to tax themselves to help the city revitalize the iconic shopping and dining hub. The effort included placing power lines undergr…

As automobiles allowed Charleston’s population to grow dramatically outward in the 20th century, particularly into West Ashley, the land beyond the peninsula’s first bridge, the city didn’t officially grow with it. The municipal government did not annex across the Ashley River until 1960, lo…

On Nov. 8, South Africa reported just 116 new COVID-19 infections. That was a bit of an aberration, but the 7-day average for the country of 59 million was just 264. Ten days later, on Nov. 18, the 7-day average was still below 300. Then the spike: 586 new infections on Monday; 1,275 on Wedn…

It is not true, as the interim director of South Carolina's State Election Commission declared while the polls were still open in the Nov. 16 Columbia runoff election, that “Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong in Richland County today.”

When the city of Charleston announced this week that it had reached 99.7% compliance with its vaccine mandate, few should have been surprised.

The October jobs report from the S.C. Department of Employment and Workforce was encouragingly upbeat. The state is recovering from the COVID shutdowns faster than the national average, and its unemployment rate in October was a healthy 3.9%, well below the U.S. average of 4.6%.

Giving thanks is a central part of most religions. Indeed, the American celebration of Thanksgiving that we trace (accurately or not) to 1621, that was first officially declared by George Washington and made permanent by Abraham Lincoln and later enshrined in law by the Congress was conceive…

The Lowcountry Food Bank is distributing almost 50 tons of turkey (5,500 whole birds; 2,600 breasts) to families in need across coastal South Carolina this week, and that’s not simply because these birds are a good source of protein. As the nonprofit’s motto states, its work is about more th…

The U.S. House on Friday passed a huge, $1.75 trillion spending bill. The Senate needs to take a hard look at its effects on the deficit and inflation.

You can have the best laws against gang violence or insider trading or identity fraud or … well, anything, and you can have the best trained and staffed police agency with the most effective investigative tools to track down suspected wrongdoers, but it won’t do you any good if prosecutors a…

Reading is the essential building block to … everything. Kids who can’t read can’t learn history or science or civics or foreign languages or, past the very basic introductory stuff, math. If they struggle to read, they’re not going to get into a liberal arts college, and they’re not going t…

The nationwide labor shortage isn’t simply affecting those looking to hire; it’s affecting all of us, whether we’re waiting longer in drive-through lines, having a harder time finding customer service in a store or scheduling an appointment. In Charleston, it threatens to affect police respo…

So this is what we have to look forward during the next 12 months. Not just irresponsible and misleading pandering from Gov. Henry McMaster, as he attempts to fend off a challenge from the right, but pandering from former U.S. Rep. Joe Cunningham, as he attempts to win the Democratic nominat…

We have encouraged governments across South Carolina to use their COVID relief dollars to make large, impactful changes rather than dribbling out the money among many initiatives where its overall effect would be felt less or spending the one-time windfall for ongoing expenses, such as pay i…

Apart from harsh words from China on the future of Taiwan, President Joe Biden’s three-hour video chat Monday with Chinese President Xi Jinping seemed to go well, cautiously signaling a welcome reduction in tension.

When Ben and Kelly Navarro unveiled their Meeting Street Scholarship Fund 11 months ago, we hoped that beyond transforming the lives of the low-income Charleston County students who receive scholarships — no small thing, that — it would spur the Legislature to do more to improve the educatio…

The deteriorating conditions inside Joseph Floyd Manor made news more than a year ago when The Post and Courier exposed residents' ongoing battles with mold, leaks and bedbugs. Despite this spotlight, too little has been done to solve their problems, and the county-run public housing high ri…

Those who follow the news can find much to be concerned about these days — including but not necessarily limited to our warming planet, a lingering pandemic, deep political divisions, rising crime and drug abuse. But we think it's important to realize that this is also a time of amazing achi…

The first COVID lesson about education was that for most students, remote learning is a far-from-adequate substitute for in-person learning, and it’s not particularly good for the economy, given all the parental involvement it requires.

So this is what we have to look forward to between now and June — maybe even November. Less than a week after his John C. Calhoun impersonation, S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster is back again pandering to his political base — this time not over vaccine mandates but over what he described as “obscene…

Road rage isn’t a crime per se — it's what the enraged drivers do as a result of that rage that can be criminal — so there aren't great statistics about how much more or less of it we're seeing these days. But it was difficult to overlook the back-to-back road-rage incidents in Charleston ea…

It might seem strange that a Charleston City Council member who represents most of the peninsula’s most persistently flooded streets also is among the most skeptical about the city’s $1.1 billion potential partnership with the Army Corps of Engineers to protect the peninsula from ever higher…

Hugh Leatherman started his Statehouse career as a flamethrower. Five years in, he took what critics termed his “pugnacious” style to the 1986 race for governor, attacking his opponents as soft on crime and hard on taxpayers while promising a business-friendly approach that he said his fello…

It’s not going to solve all of Johns Island’s challenges, but the city of Charleston has a new tool to ensure new development pays more for needed infrastructure upgrades on the rapidly growing sea island. The money won’t start trickling in for a few years, but now is the time to begin consi…

President Joe Biden and his European Union counterpart last week agreed to set up a welcome study of how to use tariffs to promote green industry and exclude low-cost, high-emission products from their markets. At the same time, they settled a major trade dispute stemming from Trump administ…

For decades, governments and advocates across the Charleston region have called for better pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure not only to give us more ways to get around but also to improve our quality of life. For just as long, the greatest obstacle has been finding a safe way across our…

It’s understandable why some reacted with concern, even shock, when Roper St. Francis Healthcare recently announced that its 10-year, $500 million plan involves relocating Roper Hospital off Charleston’s peninsula to a yet-to-be-named site.

The American Society of Civil Engineers every four years takes a look at the condition of the physical infrastructure that comprises and supports our nation’s bridges, highways, ports, electrical grid, broadband communications and water supply. This year, it put the price of bringing these e…

It’s not clear what if any effect S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster’s order barring his Cabinet agencies from enforcing the new OSHA vaccine mandate would have had even if a federal court hadn’t temporarily blocked the Biden administration’s most aggressive attempt to date to get our nation past the …

The S.C. Governor’s School for Agriculture at John de la Howe circumvented both its own and state human resources policies in its dealings with a now-disgruntled employee who was one of the driving forces in reviving the moribund residential school for kids with behavioral problems. Since th…

Despite efforts to eliminate racial bias, the Charleston Police Department continues to arrest a disproportionate number of African Americans, a fact that by itself makes it more difficult for the police to gain the trust of many of the city’s most crime-plagued neighborhoods. It must do better.

What we know today as North Charleston began taking shape decades before the city was incorporated in 1972, and two of its oldest civic buildings are long overdue for major renovations. We urge City Council to proceed apace and strive for excellence with its $45 million plan to make the nece…

Most S.C. students didn’t spend September ripping soap dispensers off the walls of their school bathrooms while a friend videoed the vandalism. Most students didn’t spend the month of October slapping their teachers, and most won’t spend December exposing themselves for the camera or January…

The huge backups of ships waiting to unload cargo in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach on the West Coast — and Savannah on the East Coast — are part of the global supply chain tie-up, but there’s fortunately no sign of that at the Port of Charleston, which is poised for significant growth.

Russian cyber intrusions have only increased in the months since President Joe Biden imposed sanctions on Russia and issued a warning in person to Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to organizations that track cyber attacks and media reports. These relentless assaults illustrate our…

Although most South Carolinians get our water from large systems such as the city-owned utility that serves Charleston, about 1 in 6 rely on nearly 600 smaller water systems, run by local governments, trailer parks and private companies such as Blue Granite. The S.C. Department of Health and…

We’ve been talking a lot about cannabis at the national and state levels in recent years, but there are really three or four separate debates going on. And as we were reminded by a recent Post and Courier report on South Carolina’s struggling hemp industry, people who hope to win converts to…

Several U.S. Senate Democrats are backing a bill to ban stock market trading by top officials of the Federal Reserve banks and board of governors. This is a welcome and needed reform. While they’re at it, congressional leaders should apply a similar restriction to themselves.