Builders want to turn The Wizard into 683 homes. Neighbors want the golf course to stay.
Third time’s the charm?
That’s what developer Felix Pitts hopes, anyway, when it comes to The Wizard golf course in Carolina Forest. For the third time in 15 years, a developer — this time Pitts’ G3 Engineering — is seeking to turn the 168-acre golf course into new housing.
Plans unveiled at a community meeting Wednesday at the Carolina Forest Recreation Center show that G3 is looking to build a total of 683 new units of housing on the land the course currently occupies, with 400 of those being single-family homes and 283 being apartments. Plans call for the single-family homes to be about 8,000 square feet each.
But two other developers have pushed similar plans for the course over the past 15 years, both of them failing to win approval to rezone the land from Horry County leaders. Pitts said he hopes this time things will be different.
“I’ve been paying attention to where they failed and I know what the sticking points are,” he said.
“That’s why we tried to do something a little different and engage the community more directly and not run from them and have to meet them at planning commission or in council chambers and field questions, but actually involve them in a little bit more of the process and hopefully in the end that will benefit us,” Pitts added. “Maybe it won’t, time will tell.”
Residents, though, said Wednesday that they are opposed to developing The Wizard into housing at all. Several said they’d rather see the course remain open for golfers, or even as a nature preserve.
“Right now we have a view of the golf course, it’s beautiful, that’s one of the reasons we bought the condo. Then they come up with this,” said Raymond Britton, who owns a condo in the neighboring development The Fountains. “Now, we understand that it’s been shot down two other times, this is the third time. To be honest with you, we’re hoping it gets shot down again.”
Waterford Plantation resident Dennis Morrison, who also lives near the planned development, agreed: “Personally, my first choice would be (to) leave it.”
And Joseph Poggi, another Waterford Plantation resident, said attractions like The Wizard and the Myrtle Beach Speedway are part of what drew him to South Carolina from Long Island, New York, in the first place.
“When I first arrived here, one of the first things I heard was the sound of race cars coming from Myrtle Beach Speedway. I said, ‘This is the bomb, this is nice, to hear that sound, you know?’” he said. “And I’m not even here a year and it’s going down, it’s for sale, it’s going to be developed and I said ‘holy hell.’ It’s all these little things that are for leisure, pleasure and enjoyment. We don’t want to urbanize it.”
According to plans that G3 Engineering showed Wednesday, the multi-family homes and apartments would border Carolina Forest High School and The Fountains development on its Northern edge, and the existing 39-acre golf course lake on its Eastern edge. Postal Way hems the area in from the West, while the Windsor Greens neighborhood is to the South.
Roads significant issue
Though some said Wednesday that such a location is appropriate for hundreds of new homes and apartments, others worried about traffic on nearby roads, and how residents in the new neighborhood might get out.
In between The Wizard and Postal Way, for example, are railroad tracks that the freight company RJ Corman runs trains on. Company leaders recently asked Horry County officials to make improvements to the tracks in Carolina Forest so the company could run trains closer to the Intracoastal Waterway and the county could lure new industrial and wholesale companies to the area. The G3 drawings show two exits from the new development onto Postal Way, meaning that everyone living in the neighborhood may be stuck waiting for trains to pass before they can get in and out.
“They’re going to need to connect to Waterford, going over the railroad isn’t really going to work. When the train comes you’re going to be blocking all of those homes, so obviously that’s a public safety concern,” April O’Leary, the leader of the advocacy group Horry County Rising, said.
That’s an assessment that county planners agreed with.
Some at the community meeting suggested that developers would have to connect a road in the Southeastern corner of the lot to Gate Way Drive, which runs through Waterford Plantation. But Waterford Plantation residents said they were wholly against such an idea, saying that traffic cutting through the neighborhood to travel from Carolina Forest Boulevard to Gardner Lacy Road is already bad enough.
“Six hundred and eighty-three proposed homes is ridiculous, and any type of cut-through to Gate Way is ridiculous and then the alternative is to have two crossovers of the railroad track on Postal Way and Postal Way is ridiculous,” said Carole vanSickler, a Waterford Plantation resident who also serves as president of the Carolina Forest Civic Association. “So in other words, it’s our opinion that they should just stop and don’t even bother filing.”
vanSickler said she and Carolina Forest residents have opposed past attempts to develop The Wizard and were successful. “I packed the Planning Commission, I packed County Council back in 2019 against this,” vanSickler said. “The answer is Waterford can’t handle the traffic it has right now.”
At Wednesday’s meeting, she told county planners that she could likely swing multiple homeowner associations in the area against the project, packing meetings once again.
Pitts said the road connection issues will be difficult to solve.
“I’m kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place, the community doesn’t want (a road connecting to Gate Way) but there are some other folks that think that connectivity is a good thing, rather than dumping all that traffic out on Postal Way,” he said.
Past development attempts have failed
In order to build homes on The Wizard course, G3 Engineering will have to win a rezoning approval from Horry County planners and leaders. Past attempts to rezone the land have failed, though. The land is currently under a form of zoning that allows golf courses to operate, and the zoning would have to be upgraded to residential to allow for the kind of dense housing the plans call for.
In 2019, a proposal to build 700 single-family and multifamily homes was met with strong opposition from area residents, and some council members at the time, including Danny Hardee, who represents the district that contains the course, said they wouldn’t consider any residential rezoning until the county finished widening Carolina Forest Boulevard to five lanes. That project was finished this summer.
And before that, in 2006, a requested rezoning to a Planned Development District (PDD) with a proposed 650 housing units was denied by Horry County Council.
That rezoning request was accompanied by a proposed mixed-use community adjacent to Man O’ War – which would have had a deed restriction requiring it to remain open space – including 435 single-family homes with 2.9 homes per acre and 216 multi-family dwellings with 11.5 units per acre. The PDD would have also featured lakes, parks and amenity centers.
The Wizard, Man O’War and The Witch — collectively known as Mystical Golf — comprise the golf course portfolio of DG Golf Management. The Witch is scheduled to close on Nov. 21, and a residential and commercial project on the back nine along S.C. 544 is planned.
The Wizard opened in 1996, along with Man O’ War. A possible sale to a developer of both The Wizard and Man O’War would appear to end DG Golf Management’s involvement in Grand Strand golf that dates 32 years with the opening of The Witch in 1989.
DG president Claude Pardue previously told The Sun News he wouldn’t comment on plans to redevelop the courses.
All of that — the courses’ history, the previous contentious developments and potential traffic concerns — have some residents in Carolina Forest wanting The Wizard to stay open.
“Traffic is already worse now than before they opened Carolina Forest Boulevard,” said George Serey, who lives in Waterford Plantation. “I’d rather see it stay as a golf course, just as is.”
Bill Rapp, a 92-year-old Windsor Green resident, said he opposed the building of new housing on the course not only because of traffic concerns now, but because he worries that the building developers are doing today won’t be sustainable in the future. While out-of-state retirees today might be able to afford a newly constructed home in Carolina Forest, families in the decades to come might be priced out of the area.
“I hope somebody buys the golf course...with all those older people buying homes, when they die, who’s going to be able to afford it?” he said. “They don’t pay (high) wages here, there’s no industry here, they all work at the McDonald’s or the hotels.”
For his part, Pitts said he and his firm presented preliminary plans to the public at this stage so that they could take the feedback into consideration, adjust plans to appease political leaders and residents, and hopefully win the rezoning he’s seeking.
“What the goal of this meeting was, was to identify those types of things to see if there’s anything worthwhile that’s worth exploring that potential development of this property could contribute into helping correct or resolve an issue the community is having,” he said. “This is just the start of a dialogue to see what people’s issues are and what ideas are worthwhile to explore to fix those issues.”
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The Sun News reporter Alan Blondin contributed to this story. Reach Alan at ablondin@thesunnews.com.
This story was originally published October 22, 2021 at 12:59 PM.
