With minor tweaks, Horry County looks to change growth and development in big ways
Earlier this year, when a developer sought to build single family homes on a pair of thin tracts in Carolina Forest, their agent made a curious argument: County leaders should approve the land rezoning they sought because, if they didn’t, the developers could build anything from warehouse storage units to apartments for nearby Coastal Carolina University students, projects that would upset neighbors even more than they already were.
“There’s a lot more noxious, offensive uses that are allowed on the property than what we’re proposing,” said Felix Pitts, one of the leaders of G3 Engineering, a development firm in Horry County. “That’s pretty key to me, that the multifamily uses are already allowed on the property.”
Pitts even suggested that teenagers who lived in the surrounding neighborhoods could rent one of the warehouse units, start a band and bother sleeping residents late into the night with loud music.
Carolina Forest residents had turned out in force against the development project along Gardner Lacy Road, and county leaders eventually voted down the rezoning request, but Pitts had given voice to one of the ways developers have been able to push growth further West : Horry County’s zoning code contained enough loopholes that a development could be profitable whether or not land rezoning was approved.
One loophole was this: Say you purchased 100 acres of land that bordered the Waccamaw River on one side. Chances are, that land was zoned as Commercial Forest Agriculture (CFA), one of the county’s broadest zoning categories that allows for everything from homes to apartments to businesses, churches and farms. If you wanted to build homes on your 100 acres, CFA zoning would allow you to build 200 houses, or two per acre. If you wanted to build townhomes, you could bump that figure up to three units per acre, for a total of 300 townhomes.
But let’s say you can’t build on all 100 acres of your land, and that much of the property, because of its proximity to the low-lying river, is swamp or wetlands. Even if 90% of the land is unusable, CFA zoning allows the housing units that would have spread out over the whole property to concentrate on the buildable land. That means a 300-unit apartment building could take up merely 10% of your land, but be allowed under county rules.
County planners and leaders are now moving to close that loophole.
And in another significant tweak, county planners and leaders are aiming to push back new building even further from the edges of roadways in an effort to make widening certain roads easier.
Put together, those changes — passed by a subcommittee of county council last week — amount to the Horry County government moving to take more control of the rapid growth the county’s experienced. Nearly 82,000 new residents moved to the county between 2010 and 2020, U.S. Census data shows.
“It would be more planning, it would be more planned development, locating density where density needs to be,” Horry County Planning Director David Jordan said of the changes.
But those changes could bring opposition from local developers.
“You have to ask yourself, ‘What can someone do with their property today, and as a result of this change will they be able to do more or do less?’ And I think you can come to your own conclusion about what’s happening here,” Pitts said. “If this passes it’s a clear change to what people can do with their property.”
Changes to CFA
To understand why a seemingly minor change to Horry County’s zoning code could have significant implications, it’s important to understand the history of the county’s planning and zoning laws.
All land in Horry County did not have a formal zoning classification until the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some county leaders have said one reason the county put all-encompassing zoning in place was to prevent private waste companies building landfills around Horry.
But despite opposition to landfills, members of the public opposed zoning, former county planners have said, leading county leaders to draft broad zoning categories that would bar landfills but allow for a multitude of other uses.
One of those broad zoning categories was CFA, which allows multifamily housing, strip malls, many other uses.
The county is now seeking to limit the multifamily building allowed in CFAwhich would still allow two homes per acre or three townhomes per acre but get rid of the other apartment building currently allowed.
“It would lead to more thought out and planned (development), and there’s places where CFA probably should have more density than what’s allowed by CFA and those would still go through,” Jordan said.
The change, Jordan said, would push developers who wish to build high-density projects to rezone their land from CFA to another zoning category, giving the county more leverage to decide if such a project is right for a particular area. The change would also limit the fallback options developers have if the county doesn’t approve their requests.
In the Gardner Lacy Road project, for example, the county voted down the residential rezoning and Pitts said it was likely that the property owner would pursue a commercial development allowed under the CFA zoning.
As CFA zoning stands now, developers often seek to rezone CFA land to residential or commercial, which comes with more constraints and restrictions, but can lead to greater profit. In some cases, developers have shown a willingness to use the broadness of CFA to argue that their residential or commercial project is better suited for an area, whether residents complain or not.
At council’s Infrastructure and Regulation meeting last week, council member Dennis DiSabato, who represents parts of Myrtle Beach and Carolina Forest, asked if the county couldn’t create new zoning categories to close even more loopholes that developers use.
“Yes, technically,” came Jordan’s reply. “It would be quite an undertaking.”
DiSabato said that if the county had a zoning category that only allowed for residential housing, it could make developers play by stricter rules.
“The reason I bring that up is let’s say you came up with a residential (zoning category), and took all the commercial uses out of it. That prohibits them, the developers, from coming to the meetings and saying, ‘Well, go ahead and don’t give us the rezoning we’re looking for, we’re going to go ahead and put a storage facility in,’” he said.
While a rewrite of the county’s zoning code may not be imminent, other council members agreed that tightening certain categories was a good thing.
“You’re just bringing it all together,” said council member Mark Causey, who represents a large district surrounding Loris.
Pitts, for his part, agreed that developers might not believe that the many uses of CFA are always good for a particular piece of land, but took issue with the number of recent changes the county has made to planning and zoning. In addition to the setback and CFA changes, Horry County has also recently implemented impact fees and new flood regulations, both of which increase the cost of building.
“It’s debatable whether or not multifamily is marketable on every piece of property zoned CFA,” Pitts said. “(But) there’s a whole lot of blanket decisions being made that we don’t need to be as broad brush in our thinking and I think there’s some middle ground out there that has not been explored.”
Changes to setbacks
In another seemingly minor move that could have big implications, Horry County officials this week moved to increase the setbacks of new buildings along several major roadways.
That means new buildings will have to be built further away from the road than they are now. The distance of the setback will vary depending on what land zoning exists in a particular area, but the county is broadening the setbacks from 25 feet in many cases to 40 feet, or even 60 feet.
In the CFA and Forest Agriculture zoning, for example, two zoning categories that are common along rural-but-growing corridors, the setbacks increase from 25 feet to 40 feet in the front, and vary for the back of a lot.
County leaders have said they’re pursuing this change to make it easier to widen those quickly-developing roads in the future. Council leaders and state lawmakers have already begun discussions on securing funding to widen parts of Highway 90, a project that could cost up to $500 million.
In a memo explaining the proposed changes — which will still have to pass three votes at county council — county planners gave an example: Highway 905 currently has a right-of-way of 75 feet, has Forest Agriculture zoning on either side, and 25-foot setbacks are currently in place. But if county leaders wanted to widen that road, they would need a right-of-way of 120 feet. Under the changes, the setbacks for the zoning that exists along Highway 905 would be increased to 40 or 60 feet, depending on the project.
That doesn’t mean Horry County is gearing up to widen Highway 905 later this year, or even next year, but the changes, county leaders said, create conditions that will allow the county to widen that road in coming years. Most notably, the changes will prevent the county from having to buy people out of their homes or businesses because they’re too close to the road.
“If that road gets widened in the future, you could lose the fronts of some of those homes,” Horry County Deputy Planning Director Leigh Kane said. “We wanted to come up with some tools that would avoid conflicts.”
The changes would largely affect the main corridor roads outside of Conway, including Highways 90, 905, 701 and 57, as well as Highway 9.
What comes next
These changes come as Horry County leaders have begun concentrating on the rapid growth outside of Conway, along the major corridors. Last week, county council member Al Allen announced that the county would form a task force to study what infrastructure and public safety projects those areas would need, and to report back to county leaders so they could begin budgeting for them.
Developers, though, said Pitts, may not accept all of the changes quietly. Combined with the impact fees and new flood regulations the county enacted earlier this summer, developers may be looking to have more of a say, Pitts said.
“I would just say there’s a lot of proposed regulatory changes lately and it’s got people’s eyes opened a little bit more than they have in the past,” Pitts said.
This story was originally published September 21, 2021 at 10:31 AM.
