Carolina Forest is growing denser. Can Horry County fix it, or are residents stuck?

Before Dan Kniola could speak before Horry County Council on Tuesday to oppose a new housing development in Carolina Forest, he had to make a journey.

“It took me an hour and 10 minutes to get here tonight because of traffic, seven miles,” he said. “I think the issue we have here is that there’s just too much traffic for the infrastructure to be supported.”

Kniola was speaking to one of the overarching issues that’s afflicted Carolina Forest for years now: The area is growing increasingly dense, and residents complain more and more that the infrastructure — the roads, drainage and public services — aren’t keeping up. Neighborhoods flood more frequently, some residents have said, while others, like Kniola, bemoan the heavy traffic that can plague intersections along Carolina Forest Boulevard, Gardner Lacy Road and Postal Way. Some residents, including Kniola, also told council members that they worry the congestion is causing fire trucks and ambulances to have a harder time reaching people in need.

On Tuesday, the County Council approved a rezoning request that will allow the developer DDC Engineers to construct 330 townhomes at the intersection of Postal Way and Glenbriar Drive in Carolina Forest. The council also voted down a request by another developer to build 58 single-family homes along Gardner Lacy Road, a project many residents have organized against. But even though the council rejected that project, new homes or businesses could still be built on the land in question. Its current zoning, Commercial-Forest-Agriculture, allows for many uses, including storage facilities, other businesses and housing.

And then, Thursday evening, the Horry County Planning Commission voted to approve an additional 154 townhomes along Postal Way. That project will still need County Council approval.

All of those recent projects add up, residents say, to an untenable situation in which they’re left stuck in traffic, worried that stormwater could enter their homes, or left without emergency services when they need them.

“The communities keep getting put in and the infrastructure isn’t getting put in first,” said Carole vanSickler, a Carolina Forest resident and president of the Carolina Forest Civic Association. vanSickler noted that she was speaking as a homeowner and not on behalf of the association. “It’s build, build, build, but the people are not being protected by additional infrastructure.”

Developers, though, say they’re going above and beyond to appease residents and alleviate their concerns. And some officials say that the county is working as best it can to keep up with the growth and ensure there’s proper infrastructure to serve everyone.

“You always face the infrastructure-versus-development thing because property taxes never pay for infrastructure,” County Council member Johnny Vaught said. Both he and vanSickler noted that impact fees — a charge on new building and development the county is actively working to implement — could help.

“As far as infrastructure is concerned, Carolina Forest has been on the drawing board for a long time,” Vaught added.

New development causes tension

The proposed homes along Gardner Lacy Road served as the impetus for this latest conflict over the growth and density of Carolina Forest.

Originally planned as 97 townhomes, residents organized swiftly to oppose the project, saying they wished to keep that land as forest. More than 1,500 residents of several subdivisions in the area signed petitions against the project, nearly 150 attended a community meeting to oppose it, and more spoke publicly against the building at Planning Commission and County Council meetings.

Eventually, in response to the opposition, the developer shrunk its proposal to 58 single-family homes. But residents still weren’t happy. Throughout the process, the developers argued that the land’s current zoning could allow for “obnoxious and intrusive uses,” such as storage facilities or corner stores, and that their proposal to build homes was a better use, and that it fit in better with the surrounding neighborhoods.

That clash highlighted one of the key dynamics that plays out frequently in the county: The county’s planning and zoning regulations are relatively loose, meaning developers can do substantial building without approval from the council. To remedy that, county planners and officials frequently negotiate with developers to make projects fit in better with their surroundings and prevent problems. In exchange for a developer building new homes above flood levels, for example, something that isn’t yet required by county law, planners might allow that developer to build higher than they’d otherwise be allowed, or build closer to a road.

Vaught said that kind of negotiating is what he and county planners tried to do with the Gardner Lacy Road project.

“I was trying to get you guys the best deal possible,” he said.

But those efforts didn’t work out this time, meaning the single-family homes are off the table, but businesses or townhomes could be, which the developer could build without council approval. It’s “no holds barred, basically,” Vaught said.

“My standpoint is that you guys don’t know what you’re asking for, I do, and I’m going to vote my conscious, which is to give you the best use of that land possible,” he explained.

Carolina Forest was once a planned community

To best understand why growth and density seem to plague Carolina Forest more than other Horry County communities, it’s important to understand the history.

Before it was built up, Carolina Forest was, well, mostly forest and was used as part of a bombing range by the U.S. Army during World War II. Un-exploded bombs, or ordinances, are still occasionally dug up as developers work. In the later half of the 20th century, after the federal government offloaded much of the land it had owned during World War II, the paper company International Paper bought thousands of acres of the forestland and used the trees to make paper and other products.

By the 1990s, International Paper was looking to develop the land it had previously used into homes, golf courses and businesses. At that time, little of the county was formally zoned under the rules that are currently in place and dictate what can be built where. In 1998, Horry County leaders and International Paper struck a deal on a 20-year master plan for Carolina Forest, in which the company agreed to build roads and other infrastructure in exchange for getting a blanket-approval on new subdivisions, golf courses, hotels, schools and more. In total, the master plan called for International paper to build nearly 12 miles of new roads — today known as Carolina Forest Boulevard and River Oaks Drive — along with with pipes for water, sewer and drainage, and would allow for 56,000 residents to live in one of 40 neighborhoods. The master plan also allowed for hospitals, schools and retail centers.

As part of the plan, International Paper also gave Horry County the land it needed to build Highway 31. Ultimately, the plan led to dozens of subdivisions and housing developments scattered throughout the area with large commercial areas on either end. Carolina Forest Boulevard, though only two lanes initially, was built with enough land on either side to be expanded to four lanes, which Horry County is working to finish by this summer.

Issues with the master plan, and possible solutions

But the way the master plan was designed contained flaws.

“The one mistake that was made was not requiring every development to have turn lanes,” said developer Mike Wooten, who founded DDC Engineers in the 1980s and built many of the Carolina Forest developments. “If every development had turn lanes you wouldn’t have internalized traffic problems from one end to the other. A lack of turn lanes is costly. The congestion is at both ends, you have large retail commercial on each end of the project.”

That helps explain why drivers can cruise down Carolina Forest Boulevard with relative ease, but get snarled in traffic along Postal Way.

Wooten said interchanges at either end could alleviate that problem, but those interchanges would come with their own consequences.

“That was the highest and best use of that property, it was a commercial node, and the only way to overcome that would be to have an interchange at both those locations,” he said. “But that would wipe out all of those commercial developments. The traffic would be better but people would have to drive even further to go to a grocery store.”

Residents like vanSickler, as well as county officials, believe additional roads in Carolina Forest could alleviate some of the traffic, solving at least one of the problems. The county, council member Johnny Vaught said, currently has plans to extend Gardner Lacy Road so it intersects with International Drive but lacks the funding. The county bought the land it would need for the road under its current major infrastructure program, RIDE 3, and has begun early-stage designs, Vaught said.

“We’ve recognized the fact that eventually there needs to be a road through there,” Vaught said, noting that a future RIDE 4 program would likely provide the needed funding. “It’s going to happen.”

Another road project vanSickler said she would like to see, and one that the county has begun plans for, is connecting Revolutionary War Way, near the Carolina Forest Library and recreation center, to Highway 31, building an interchange there, and further connecting the road to Augusta Plantation Drive. Such a plan would connect River Oaks Drive to Highway 31 and Carolina Forest Boulevard and give the center of Carolina Forest access in and out of the area.

Felix Pitts, a developer with G3 Engineering, the firm that sought to build the homes along Gardner Lacy Road, agreed: “Inter-connectivity is always a good thing,” he said.

vanSickler also noted that the Carolina Forest master plan, which expired in late 2017, didn’t allow for commercial developments along Carolina Forest Boulevard. As more building occurs in that area, including a planned hospital, restaurants, gas stations and other businesses that could begin springing up, it allows residents to access goods and services without traveling to one end of the road or the other.

Short of new roads and other infrastructure, vanSickler said, she’d like to see the county slow down its pace of rezoning and approving building in Carolina Forest, demand more concessions from developers and implement impact fees to help pay for future infrastructure.

“If you offered smart rezoning and smart ways to give us the infrastructure we need prior to the building, you wouldn’t have the complaints,” she said.

Other residents agreed, and said they feel there’s a lack of foresight on the county’s part.

“Where is any evidence of planning that looks even weeks ahead, not years?” Frank Parini, the president of the Southcreek homeowners association. “Or is that too much to ask of our planners?”

Living with density

Developers and county officials often quip that even though more and more people keep moving to Horry County, no one likes the growth.

Council member Al Allen, who represents Aynor and much of the western, rural area of Horry County, put it this way: “We’ve got to be able to learn to work with this growth because I hear it all the time: The last one to move in wants to be the last one that moved in. They want to shut the gate.”

Even though some residents in other parts of the county have called for a building moratorium — and some council members have entertained the idea — a building stoppage or slowdown is unlikely.

Another factor is the fact that Carolina Forest is nearing a time when most of its land is developed, Vaught said. The density is hear to stay.

“A lot of the density is already out there, what the county needs to look at … is how do you make things a better situation than what we got,” Pitts, the developer, said.

According to Wooten, the density is a good thing. Putting the influx of new residents to Horry County in areas where roads, water lines, fire stations and businesses already exist is better than eating up the county’s rural land. That’s a tension currently playing out in the Highway 90 and Highway 905 corridors.

“These people are coming. Do you want to put them in the highly-populated areas where you already have fire and police and water and sewer and roads, do you want to do that?” Wooten said. “Or do you want to put them in Loris or Aynor or Green Sea? That’s called urban sprawl and the last thing this county needs is urban sprawl. We need focus, and to keep people where the infrastructure is in place.”