‘Living Better Than It Presents’

City officials and local experts met last week in a downtown third-floor conference room to begin planning the future of West Ashley — and not just Citadel Mall.
Called by the present Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr., and prompted by five City Councilmen representing this part of town, the meeting featured a presentation by a local real estate market research firm, Permar, that was supposed to just focus on what can be done to help save Citadel Mall.
But what emerged was a change in thinking in City Hall, whereby the principals that have helped direct the peninsula’s ongoing renaissance  – quality of life, walkability, density, creating a sense of place, and others — will now be focused on improving West Ashley.
City planner Tim Keane said as much, saying that his thinking had moved beyond tackling Citadel Mall’s woes separate from issues affecting every one of the 125,000 residents living west of the Ashley River.
No longer would City Hall seek out what’s missing regionally to be put in West Ashley, but would instead work on polishing what was already present there, according to Keane.
Reading between Permar’s well-researched lines, a picture emerged of a part of the local region that missed out on Mt. Pleasant’s real estate — residential, office space, and retail — of the past decade.
And, if proper steps aren’t taken now, it could miss out on the explosion expected in North Charleston and the outer ‘burbs over the next decade. West Ashley was portrayed as having bad bones, but good meat.
Councilman Perry K. Waring lamented that he could stand in the empty parking lots at the mall and look across Interstate 526 and see cars competing for spots at Costco.
Consultant Emily Topham told the assembled, which included not only other municipal officials buy also local developers and builders, that West Ashley has far more retail space for its population, as compared to current national trends.
Driving the imbalance, she said, was a focus on smaller commercial footprints of stores competing with and working hand-in-hand with ecommerce. Nationally, the average of retail space per resident is roughly 23 square feet per person. In Charleston, as a whole, it’s 29 feet — not that surprising in a travel destination.
But in West Ashley, that ratio leaps to 42 square feet per resident. By international contrast, Topham, a West Ashley resident, said the number in Italy is six square feet per resident.
Six-mile radii drawn from the area’s four biggest malls — Citadel, Tanger, Northwoods, and Towne Centre — showed overlapping circles of competition on this side of the Cooper River. Whereas, Towne Centre has enjoyed an “isolated,” largely competition-free proximity, to annual household incomes nearly twice that of neighboring boroughs, including West Ashley.
Diana Permar presented extrapolations of likely demand for retail and office space in West Ashley brought on by growth in number of households expected shows a somewhat rosy ten-year future in those markets.
Permar said further separating West Ashley from its preferable future is a lack of sense of place that resonates on the peninsula. Driving around West Ashley, along the highway corridors of 17, 61, 7, and 171; she and her employees said they’d discovered a part of time that “lives better than it presents.”
Great neighborhoods and vistas, choked off from those corridors, seem to exist separately from other aspects of the area, Permar said.
One developer and builder speaking at the presentation warned that there would be no quick fix for a part of town that had “20 years, 30 years” of planning goofs and other mistakes from City Hall.
Trashy roads, economic feasibility, debris, unkempt commercial properties, lack of connectivity between key parts of West Ashley, multiple levels of governmental permitting in need of streamlining, the need for more office space development, improved gateways for the part of town laying between the history of the peninsula and the green swathes of the plantation district – everything hit the fan in the meeting.
Councilman Bill Moody called for accountability as the process of recasting West Ashley moved forward; Keane called for more and bigger public meetings; and Councilman Aubry Alexander called for tax increment funding (TIF) zones to be implemented this side of the river.
But perhaps the biggest call to prayer may have come from Riley, who stopped the meeting when one of the developers referred, tongue-in-cheek, to this part of town as “West Trashley.”