2 Years In and Union Pier has NO Masterplan

City of Charleston · Design Review Board
🏗️ 332-unit mixed-use project on former Pepsi site earns preliminary approval with conditions
The DRB granted preliminary approval for a five-story, 332-unit mixed-use development at 1450 Meeting Street on the upper peninsula, the former Pepsi bottling site bounded by Meeting Street, Algonquin Street, and Lemon Street. The board praised substantial material upgrades since the April conceptual review — particularly the shift to brick — but attached eight categories of conditions covering window materials, facade composition, brick datum continuity, stucco elimination, and a mandatory TRC pass before final submission. Final approval must return to the full DRB, and a material mockup panel will be required at that stage.

City of Charleston · State of Our City – Johns Island Community Meeting
📋 City to pilot stormwater-style traffic permit holds near failing intersections
The mayor announced a new draft policy that would withhold building permits for projects near failing intersections until improvements are made or funded — mirroring the city's existing stormwater regulations that have already blocked a 91-unit apartment project three times. The policy is being developed with city legal counsel and has not yet been legally challenged; it stops short of downzoning, avoiding a property-rights taking under state law. Officials described the announcement as specifically timed for Johns Island because it has the city's worst traffic conditions.

City of Charleston · State of Our City – Johns Island Community Meeting
🏗️ $65 million recreation center breaks ground within six months; fire station nearly complete
The city is investing $65 million in a new recreation center adjacent to Hayes Park/Fleming Fields on Johns Island, featuring a pool, splash pad, and programs; construction begins within six months. A new fire station on Maybank Road is nearly complete, with a second station planned, and the HCA 247 emergency room on Maybank Highway is set to open before end of 2026. These amenities are designed to reduce residents' need to cross bridges for services, directly addressing traffic by keeping trips on the island.

Town of Kiawah Island · Town Council
🌳 Town completes $1.2 million acquisition of 2.7-acre conservation parcel adjacent to Town Hall
As of October 5, 2026, the Town of Kiawah Island acquired a 2.7-acre parcel immediately adjacent to Town Hall in a joint transaction with the Conservancy of Sea Islands for $1.2 million. The parcel is subject to a conservation easement restricting residential, commercial, and industrial use, and currently sits in unincorporated Charleston County despite being surrounded by town municipal boundaries. An annexation process will follow, and the acquisition will require a mid-year budget amendment as the expenditure was unbudgeted.

City of Folly Beach · Board of Zoning Appeals
⛳ Board unanimously denies mini golf special exception at 50 Center Street
Folly Beach Miniolf LLC sought a special exception permit to build a 12-hole outdoor miniature golf facility at 50 Center Street on a lot directly adjacent to Our Lady of Good Counsel Catholic Church and its rosary prayer garden. Staff recommended approval under downtown commercial zoning, but the board voted 0-5 to deny after extensive public opposition focused on noise incompatibility with daily religious services, parking deficits, and failure to meet special-exception standards two and three regarding compatibility and minimization of adverse impacts.

I recently sat down with Architect Christian Sottile and Beemok Designer Miller Harper to talk about Union Pier. I walked in not really knowing what to expect, and learned that there is no master plan for Union Pier by design. Over the past two years, they have been studying and collecting data to make sure when a shovel goes in the ground, they aren’t just building a new development but re-incorporating this waterfront property back into the historic fabric of Charleston.

This was the biggest surprise for me. Christian and Miller told me they aren't publishing a single, render-heavy master plan for Union Pier. They've dropped the term entirely and call it a "framework" instead.

Their reasoning: a typical master plan is drawn all at once, from the inside out, and is often built around marketing control and fast timelines. They're doing the opposite. They call it "Charleston First," and the idea is stewardship over speed.

The plan is to start at the edges where Union Pier meets the existing city along East Bay Street, Market Street, and Washington Street. Fix those first, so people naturally keep walking from the neighborhoods they already know into whatever comes next.

The goal is that decades from now, you look at an aerial photo and can't tell where historic Charleston ends and Union Pier begins.

If you've followed this site for a while, you know there have been plenty of plans before. There have been efforts in 1996, 2007, 2011, and 2023.

Their take is that none of those stalled because of weak real estate fundamentals. They stalled because Charleston has high standards and wanted something that felt true to the city.

So the team says it's committed to not having the whole district designed by a single hand. The "framework" is meant to be a living structure that guides growth over time, not a fixed blueprint.

When Ben Navarro began everything, they inherited nearly 30 years of plans, studies, and data to begin an even deeper dive into what makes Charleston…well, Charleston.

This is the part I found the most interesting. Before making any design decisions, they spent about two years on what they informally call Union Pier University.

It's built around five research pillars pulled from the future land use district language City Council already adopted:

Each pillar is run like its own course, led by what they call a "masterclass instructor," with advocacy groups, neighborhood leaders, and partners at the table. They told me they've held roughly 600 small-group meetings as part of it.

The point, as they explained it, is to have a documented "why" behind every future decision, and to learn from how Charleston already works instead of importing ideas from somewhere else.

Here's what came out of each pillar.

The transportation work is led by engineer Rick Hall, who they described as a national figure in context-sensitive design.

Rick measures walkability with hard numbers: intersections per square mile, block length, block perimeter, and street character. The basic idea is simple. More intersections mean more choices for people on foot.

For context, Copenhagen sits at 244 intersections per square mile, and Rick's minimum threshold for a walkable place is 100. Now check out the peninsula:

On the flip side, they said blocks longer than 500 feet and block perimeters over 3,000 feet hurt walkability. Their example was the medical district.

Rick also mapped every street on the peninsula as either urban, built for people, or suburban, built for cars.

East Bay Street was their example of the "suburban playbook": four moving lanes, no on-street parking, buildings set back behind parking lots, and sidewalks they described as unsafe. King Street, with two lanes, on-street parking, and buildings right up to the back of the curb, is green.

Three of the north-south streets around Union Pier currently show up as suburban.

Right now, East Bay Street and Washington Street are controlled by the state DOT. The team told me they plan to study and redesign both once they move to city control.

The history pillar is led by Dr. Nic Butler from the Charleston County Library and host of The Charleston Time Machine Podcast. Check it out Here!

The headline from his research: Union Pier was Charleston's original working waterfront. Old maps show the walled city ending near the Customs House at Craven's Bastion, with growth in the early 1700s pushing out toward Anson Street.

In the 1920s and 1930s, according to the research, the city consolidated and cut back the waterfront to make room for industrial port use, wiping out a lot of the mixed-use fabric that was there. That's why the team says Union Pier is so tied to the historic districts next to it. For about 200 years, it was part of them.

Some of the lost features Nic's research brought back into focus:

They also layered old plats over modern aerials and found things like a yard at Pritchard and Concord streets.

From talking about my love of the history of Charleston, I received a parting gift from Miller and Christian…a copy of Dr Nic’s book about the history of Union Pier. You can pick up a copy at the Preservation Society of Charleston’s Gift Shop, or order online HERE

This one is led by stormwater experts Aaron Aiken and Ryan Phillips, and it's a serious data project. And it wouldn’t be a proper Charleston project if stormwater and flooding weren’t a main component.

They mapped the pipes, inlets, outfalls, and seven interconnected watersheds around Union Pier. One thing they pointed out: water doesn't stay in its lane. Water from the Calhoun Street watershed can end up in the Hazel Street watershed. So you can't solve flooding one block at a time.

They pulled public records on hundreds of projects to build what they described as the first comprehensive set of these maps since the 1980s.

Then they used all of it to build a "digital twin" of the peninsula that can simulate specific storms. To check its accuracy, they used residents' photos from a nor'easter. Those photos carry time, date, and location data, which let them test the model minute by minute.

Along the waterfront, three marsh areas are designated as potential polders, which they described as "store and release" zones that would tie into the city's planned Battery extension. The engineers re-ran that same nor'easter in the model with the Battery extension in place to test protection for about 180 acres.

Their bigger point: projects like the Battery extension and the Low Line aren't only flood protection. They can also become a connected network of public spaces.

Landscape architect Sheila Wurtimer leads this pillar, building on William Whyte's research into how people use public spaces. The key takeaway they shared: a public space is only as good as its edges, and people gather along the edges, not in the empty middle.

To see how Charleston's parks actually get used, they partnered with Placer.ai to geo-fence the parks and study anonymized location data.

A couple of numbers that stuck with me from Waterfront Park:

The “professor” for this pillar was none other than the man sitting across the table from me, Architect Christian Sottile.

The architecture study draws on Leon Krier's framework: cities start with the public realm, civic landmarks give a place its identity, and private buildings form the walls of the outdoor rooms.

They described Charleston's skyline as "living," like an EKG with intentional highs and lows. The contrast is the "flatline" rooflines you see on a lot of newer buildings. These flat, boring rooflines take the life out of what could be an otherwise interesting skyline.

They also talked about craft. They pointed to Elizabeth Berner's drawings and to the American College of the Building Arts, which I learned is the only school of its kind in the country. Their summary of the strategy: make the world by hand again.

The team also joined a delegation of preservation and city leaders to study traditional urbanism abroad.

In London, they visited Richmond Riverside, a 1980s waterfront project by architect Quinlan Terry, developed with Prince Charles. They held it up as a human-scaled waterfront that has aged well.

They also looked at Amsterdam and Copenhagen for their long history of living with water and building waterfronts where you can actually be on the water, not only next to it.

Here's where things stand, based on what Christian and Miller told me.

The property closing is scheduled for next year, and work has already started on the edges. Near-term priorities:

They plan to keep engaging the same way they have been: lots of small conversations instead of one big public meeting with 800 people.

There's no set timeline yet for the street redesigns, the Market Street projects, or the Carroll Building. They talked about this as a decades-long effort, comparing it to an old-growth tree adding rings slowly. For the next few months, the focus is on measuring, testing, and refining those edges before anything bigger moves forward.

When I asked if they had any thoughts on when the whole thing would be finished, their answer wasn’t what you would expect. They said it won’t ever be finished. It is being designed to become a living part of Charleston. It will constantly evolve based on what is working, what is and isn’t being incorporated into the fabric of Charleston, and so on.

I'll keep following this one closely and report back as those first edge projects take shape.

Here’s what the local real estate market is looking like. If you want to know what’s happening in your zipcode/town specifically, either reply to this email and let me know the area, or click HERE to sign up for updates, or click the graph and search by area.

Want to know how the projects, developments, and civic decisions being made could affect the value of your home or where you should be looking to buy? Just reply to this email.

1️⃣ Have a tip for us?
Got the inside scoop on something coming or changing? Reply to this email and let me know! Happy to give you credit if it makes it in the newsletter or on Instagram.

2️⃣ Curious what’s happening?
See some land being cleared or zoning notices popping up in your neighborhood? Send me all the details you can, and I’ll look into it and see what we can find.

3️⃣ Know someone who needs a REALTOR®?
If your friends or family ask if you know a good REALTOR®, that answer is always yes. Send them my way, I got a guy that help! 😉 Oh, and this goes for you too if you need my help!

And here’s 1 way you can help me…If this newsletter was informative, pass it on!

Forward this email to one person in Charleston who wants to pay attention to what's happening around them. Or send them here to sign up:
chucktownreport.com/subscribe

Until next week,
Bill Olson
Father • Husband • Realtor® • Civic Storyteller