Mic Smith/AP Photo
A storm drain bubbles over as a king tide rolls into the Battery in Charleston, South Carolina, November 15, 2020.
Every year, some seven million vacationers descend on Charleston, South Carolina, one of the country’s top tourism destinations. Visitors with means can lose themselves in dreamy world-class hotels, sumptuous restaurants, and stunning seascapes. But anyone charmed enough to move there buys into a mirage. The reality is waterlogged sprawl in a metro area of nearly one million people, with a grim past. Whether they live in townhouses or public housing, their homes sit on top of former marshlands, some 40,000 tiny interconnected watersheds that were filled in by enslaved Africans.
Charleston’s antebellum and Civil War history fuels the economy, but the white powers that be are as in denial about slavery’s legacies as they are about their climate risks: sea level rise, sinking land, and high-tide “sunny-day” flooding. One former resident, a science journalist, said, “A Category 3 hurricane hitting Kiawah Island,” a barrier island on the coast just south of the city, “would blast Charleston to smithereens.” At a public meeting, bringing up a subject like moving people out of flood zones is a good way to get your microphone shut off.
“You also don’t have to be terribly observant to notice how rapidly the place developed over the last 30 years in concert with the explosive growth in risky coastal regions over those same decades—it is really a profit-at-all-costs mentality,” says Susan Crawford, the author of the new book Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm. “But nature wants her land back and the waters will flow to where they’re going to go.”
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
Gabrielle Gurley: You say Charleston has “an amnesiac, ahistorical quality that is highly attractive to white celebrants,” while the Rev. Joseph Darby, the Charleston community leader, calls it a “Confederate Disneyland.” What’s the appeal to visitors?
Susan Crawford: Over time, that historic peninsula has become less and less a place where actual people raise families and live and more and more a place chockablock with restaurants and beauty like Disneyland, almost perfectly maintained for a visitor. There was a time not too long ago when there weren’t any hotels. Now some of them are the highest-rated in the country. You can imagine as a white arriver that there is no history, that you’ve just arrived, you’ve stepped foot in a place that provides a perfect environment for hedonistic enjoyment. I’m not passing judgment on that. Not being confronted with anything the least bit gritty is part of the vacation experience.
Why did you decide to investigate Charleston’s climate risks?
As a locus of risk and a repository for a lot of America’s history, Charleston seemed to me the ideal vessel for telling the narrative of sea level rise for the United States. We’re really living at a point when we have to think about our past and try to imagine our future in a way that has not been forced on civilizations before. Charleston was British North America’s largest slave port, and 40 percent of all the enslaved people who were dragged from Africa to the United States first stepped foot in Charleston.
How do Black Charlestonians understand their city?
What struck me was the uniformity of their descriptions, that there was in the air a kind of benign, paternalistic “we know what’s best for you people” approach by city leaders that has now been persistent over generations. When white residents of Charleston write the local newspaper and express their opinions about this relationship, they saw it as a very positive, grace-given, affirmative part of the Charleston experience.
There was just a complete disconnect.
Rev. Darby gave detailed descriptions of how odd it felt to him to be active in Charleston, where he felt there was an atmosphere of “raging politeness.” Any Black resident who spoke the truth about the absence of Black advisers to the mayor or the absence of frank conversations at any level in the city would be excluded from further consultation, essentially. It was very different from his childhood in a middle-class neighborhood in Columbia, South Carolina. Its leaders had a sense of community and involvement in business that he felt is absent in Charleston.
Why are transplants’ views so skewed?
Its great beauty has a strong effect on people from the Northeast who are just looking for a second home on that historical peninsula. Those homes have a genuine elegance of beauty, depth of feeling to them that a Northerner might just want to snap up and enjoy. A second home in Charleston remains a lot cheaper than it might be in another marketplace. It’s a low-tax state. The low country and the marshland are very attractive to newcomers, as are the literary and wine and food festivals, and Spoleto.
There are no laws requiring that the flood history of a house be disclosed to a buyer. That’s true of two-thirds of American states, not something special about South Carolina. You may not care about the absence of public transit or flooding risks, if you’re older and only plan to be there a couple of decades. But if you don’t live there, you may not know how bad the traffic is when you’re coming in from the outlying suburbs.
If Charleston had been sited further north roughly where the suburb of Summerville is today, the city would be somewhat better off. What happened?
The investors in that initial group that came to Charleston from Barbados in the 17th century begged them to move 30 miles inland. The original siting of this place was reckless. To build directly on an ocean is deranged. New York City did the same thing. Amitav Ghosh writes beautifully about this in The Great Derangement. It was an outgrowth of colonial belief that you can tame and reshape land to your own devices and that nature is exterior.
There are lots of people in Charleston who are living ten feet or less above sea level. Which is really, truly low. Mayor Joseph Riley told Congress in 1989 that with just three feet of sea level rise, much of his city would be chronically inundated. So everybody knew. But developers saw an opportunity, and the city needed those developers to generate the property taxes that allow them to run their city. It’s the same pattern that plays out in many coastal cities. It’s just particularly strange in Charleston, which is so self-evidently a marshy, low place with beaches.
Real estate websites show gorgeous homes plopped down in marshlands in the middle of sandy beaches on islands off the coast.
Yet a billion dollars in real estate changed hands on Kiawah Island recently.
How does sunny-day flooding create complacency?
Because people nod to each other and say, “Oh, it always floods.” John Tibbetts, the science journalist who moved to Minneapolis, said, “This is deranged madness, I don’t understand the real estate market down here.” But growth in Charleston and elsewhere depends on turning a blind eye to risk. You’re a developer, you’ll be out of there after you build your property in five years or so. If you’re a mayor, there is very little upside to making everybody worry about flooding.
There are a lot of incremental steps that Charleston is taking for which it should get credit. It’s a spiral of risk for which there really isn’t an exit—unless and until some coastal cities go bankrupt because they are no longer able to collect the property tax that allows them to continue their operations.
But why applaud these incremental steps?
They’re doing more than many other coastal cities. They outlawed building slab-on-grade housing in the suburbs, so building on fill is no longer allowed. They are moving towards elevation-based zoning and toward an integrated water plan for the entire area where they’re really going to try to understand where all their risks are and map them. They are working on this Army Corps of Engineers seawall plan—it’s at least a plan—for the peninsula.
Now, there are many ways you can attack it, but they’re working on it. There are other cities that are not doing nearly as much as Charleston is doing.
Which is an indictment of the entire Eastern Seaboard.
The economics of the problem are so vast and the incentives to change directions so limited, in short term, that it’s almost impossible to talk about for most coastal cities.
Another strange feature of displacement in Charleston: Black people are moved out of perilous but desirable areas and white people moved in to those exact same places—and the danger is the same.
That’s true. In both instances, evictions happened, the land was redeveloped, and a pricier form of housing was put up there. What’s going on is that all the engineering that has been imposed on the land is now being reversed. It’s very difficult, I would say, just about impossible to build your way out of that. You could say that’s just the city trying to, again, get greater amounts of property tax into its coffers that results in displacement of lower-income people. But we need to get away from the idea of government actors being bad; they are responding to perverse incentives that have been given. Charleston is not allowed to collect any form of tax other than property tax. They didn’t ask for that; that’s what they’re stuck with.
In 2019, a team of Dutch experts recommended relocation, building, and development strategies. The city watered down the public report.
Nobody wants to talk about this. But again, that’s true of all coastal cities. The only country that has the capacity to contemplate, much less implement, relocation from vulnerable locations is probably the Netherlands, and maybe China. From their perspectives, it makes no sense that we allow people to live in a floodplain in the first place. Sections of the Dutch government are now contemplating relocation because it makes no sense to spend billions on infrastructure in the next few years that will then succumb to the waves a few years after that.
Charleston’s climate strategy is that the federal government is going to ride to the rescue if there’s a disaster?
The only thing the city can do is to work with the Army Corps to plan for a wall that, according to the Army Corps’s own rules, has to be built where it will provide the greatest benefit for the least cost. That greatest benefit is seen on the historic peninsula where there are hospitals, university buildings, and other valuable assets that are worth protecting from storm surges.
The wall itself is a single-purpose wall. It’s built to protect against storm surge, not to deal with increasing rainstorms, high-tide flooding, rising groundwater, and all the other water assaults that are landing on Charleston. My worry is that the perimeter wall will be like the “Ike Dike” being built to protect Galveston. It will inevitably lead to a series of Katrinas where the infrastructure that’s built doesn’t match the risks and the reality of increasing sea level rise.
Is there any grassroots pressure to think differently about relocation in Charleston?
The federal absence of leadership is what’s making the absence of leadership possible at other levels. Because at the federal level, there’s no dedicated funding, there’s no dedicated lead agency, there’s no policy framework to guide communities who are in need of relocation.
Everybody has a short-term interest in shifting risks to somebody else. The banks keep giving out mortgages, but they’re in a very concentrated way selling those mortgages to [the government-sponsored enterprises] Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The federal government is hugely exposed to this coastal real estate risk. And Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have only recently begun even to consider the effects of climate on their portfolios. The localities don’t have the capacity. They could yell, I guess, but they don’t have money, staff, resources, budget, or authority to actually act on a regional basis, which is what you’d have to do.
I haven’t seen the pressure for relocation yet in Charleston. Individual Black residents of Charleston discuss it, but I didn’t see a group that had already arisen to take on this issue. So, there’s an institutional vacuum at every level and the private sector is rushing to fill that vacuum.
