The vacant parcel at the northwestern corner of Calhoun and Concord streets, just east of the city of Charleston’s large parking garage, is an excellent site for affordable housing for a few reasons. City Council should approve the rezoning that would give it a green light.
Not only is the downtown location near jobs, shopping and services, but it’s also only a short walk from bus lines and parks. In a city struggling with rising rents and home prices, building a housing complex here — even one that’s a mix of market rate and subsidized units — would certainly help.
The city has owned this property for decades, and it once was going to become the site for the International African American Museum. But after architect Henry Cobb was hired, he urged then-Mayor Joe Riley to consider a site with a clear view of Charleston Harbor, where the museum was ultimately built.
Mayor William Cogswell now has identified the unused site as a parcel that can help the city reach its ambitious goal of adding 3,500 affordable units by 2032 — a goal that, as The Post and Courier’s Ali Rockett recently reported, already has moved back two years since it was set last year.
The Charleston Planning Commission took a key step last month by recommending the rezoning to allow up to seven stories for mixed-use workforce housing, and City Council should give its stamp of approval. The new zoning essentially would limit the density only through limiting the height, but at a maximum of only seven stories, it would not be appreciably taller than many current and planned neighboring structures. (Across the street, the vacant Dockside building is 19 stories.)
The addition of more affordable units in this area — the Charleston Housing Authority’s award-winning Williams Terrace complex for seniors is only about a block away — also would help heal an old wound.
This general area was once home to the authority’s Ansonborough Homes complex, which had 162 units of public housing. The city made the correct decision 35 years ago to abandon plans for a $3 million renovation and instead raze the Ansonborough complex — a decision driven not only by the fact that Hurricane Hugo inundated many units with seven feet of water but also because creosote was discovered in the common yards, posing a long-term health risk to residents. Still, its loss left bad feelings among some who believed that black residents, especially poorer ones, were being pushed off the peninsula at a time when it was becoming a safer, more desirable place to live.
Instead of rebuilding Ansonborough Homes, the city built new public housing scattered across the city, right around the time the federal government’s policies of building large public complexes were being discarded in favor of more mixed-use projects in which market rate and subsidized units co-exist and don’t differ much, if at all, in appearance. Indeed, the city is looking to raze most of its remaining public housing so it can redevelop the sites with such mixes and far more residences (and at least as many subsidized ones as currently exist).
Using the vacant parcel at 24 Calhoun St. for new housing — the city is expected to contract with a private developer to build it — would not technically be part of that larger plan, but it would be built in much the same spirit.
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