As the Charleston region continues to grow, the community has to come together to grow in a way that will provide a stable financial future, according to one urban planning consultant.
Joe Minicozzi, principal at Urban3, said during this morning’s Charleston Regional Business Journal Power Breakfast that Charleston and surrounding cities need to be treated as a business with financial functionality. Community leaders do not emphasize data as much as business leaders do, he said.
“If we’re not measuring stuff, you can’t manage it,” he said.
Developing one-story buildings, Minicozzi said, isn’t nearly as valuable as multistory buildings that can house retail, offices and residences, bringing various taxes into the city’s and county’s coffers.
According to The Value of Placemaking, a report published using Urban3’s research and data, the Walmart store at Wando Crossing in Mount Pleasant has a taxable value of $564,085 per acre, while 79 Church St. in Charleston has a taxable value of $88 million per acre. And the building at 18 Broad St. is even more valuable, at nearly $104 million per acre — almost 184 times as much as the Walmart.
“It’s real simple folks: When you stack stories, you’re stacking dollars. Every layer of that building is paying taxes,” Minicozzi said of the Church Street building. “And anything over three stories is incredibly productive.”
The lower peninsula of Charleston accounts for 13% of taxes for the city and county on a minimal amount of land.
“There’s a reason why this stuff is productive; there’s a reason this stuff has been built for tens of thousands of years, and we’ve just been sleepwalking through the last 50 thinking that it’s working out,” Minicozzi said. “We built cities in urban environments because they’re good for us financially. The numbers prove it.”
Buildings in Charleston that predate the Declaration of Independence are worth a total of $16 million, bringing in $631,000 in just county taxes each year.
“You are one of the most potent downtowns that we’ve ever seen in any of our studies, and this is mostly stuff that your great-grandparents left you,” Minicozzi said.
He added that the community needs to understand the value of what early Charlestonians built: buildings that have survived numerous natural disasters and a half-dozen wars, and still yield wealth after 240 years.
“Understand the wealth, the patterns that your ancestors have left for you, and learn from that,” Minicozzi said. “Grow your community’s wealth. ... Think long term about how you grow your wealth.”
Minicozzi said that, as a society, we’ve accepted a bias toward suburban real estate with low buildings and “miles of parking lots,” but that’s wasted potential and lost value.
“Let’s not go backwards and start to shrub everything up and bring down the building height,” he said. “There’s a moratorium still on multifamily (in Mount Pleasant), which is insane. ... Why would you throw away that value just because we have biases?”
Michelle Mapp, CEO of the S.C. Community Loan Fund, said the region has to decide at some point to act together and stop denying developers.
“Where we have infrastructure, we have landowners that we’re constantly telling that they cannot develop to a higher density and they can’t do the things that we have recognized need to be done,” she said.
Minicozzi was critical of the failure of the Lorelei project, which he said would have been worth $2.2 billion when completed — approximately the value of West Ashley, which is about 30 times the size of the Lorelei footprint.
“Pound for pound, dollar for dollar, this was an incredibly productive project for you all, and you missed an opportunity,” he said. “This is a conversation you need to continue to have, what’s yielding for your community.”
Minicozzi implored the business community to demand a continuous conversation about the Charleston region’s development, to provide a stable future for the community.
“The fundamental issue is that the inefficient use of land costs more than the efficient use of land,” he said. “Simply put, you buy more stuff, it costs more to maintain.”
