Emma Abbott Chapel demolition + your sales tax questions answered

City of Charleston · Committee on Real Estate
💬 Contested West Edge housing agreement deferred over 7% guarantee dispute
A proposed agreement with the MUSC Foundation to restructure ownership of the remaining TIF properties at West Edge — with approximately $15 million in balance to be covered by a third-party housing developer — was deferred after Council Member Waring objected to a provision guaranteeing MUSC Foundation a 7% annual return (roughly $1,050,000/year) over a 36-month period. Waring argued that real estate is an equity product subject to market risk and that the city, with a budget under $400 million, should not guarantee the time value of money to an institution with an $8.4 billion backdrop. The committee will meet with staff and the Foundation before the next meeting to explore alternatives to the guarantee provision.

City of Charleston · Committee on Real Estate
🏗️ Long Savannah deal amended to allow home construction before parkway opens
The committee approved amending Section 6.6.B of the 2015 Long Savannah Development Agreement to shift the trigger for the 1,295-unit cap from building permits to certificates of occupancy, allowing homes to be built — but not occupied — before Long Savannah Parkway opens to vehicular traffic. The change allows developers to sell lots and generate revenue to fund the expensive parkway construction, while the city retains the CO as an enforcement tool ensuring no residents move in until the road is complete. The mayor also flagged pending matters including a fire station site (at least 2 acres to be donated) and approximately 10.65 acres of land set aside for affordable housing under the agreement.

City of Folly Beach · City Council
⚖️ Council votes 4-3 to authorize appeal transfer to SC Supreme Court
Resolution 5126 authorizes city attorneys to consent to the plaintiff's motion to transfer or certify the Park Lane versus Folly Beach appeal to the South Carolina Supreme Court. The resolution passed on a close 4-3 vote. The divided vote signals meaningful disagreement on the city's litigation strategy in this ongoing legal matter.

City of Charleston · Board of Architectural Review – Small (BAR-S)
🏙️ Rooftop bar at former Stars Restaurant on King Street wins conceptual approval
The new owner of 495 King Street (formerly Stars Restaurant) received unanimous conceptual approval to redesign the existing 2011-era rooftop bar, lowering the flat roof to a sloped standing seam metal form, relocating mechanical equipment, and installing a cable railing pushed back from the King Street façade to minimize street visibility. A non-historic 2012 storefront segment will also be replaced to center the entry door. Staff noted the changes have minimal visibility primarily from Orange and St. Philip Streets.

City of North Charleston · City Council
🏛️ Liberty Hill residents renew three-year-old plea for historic overlay designation
Residents representing the Liberty Hill community, founded approximately 155 years ago and described as one of the first settlements in North Charleston, told council their historic overlay request has been pending without action for three years despite conversations with Councilman Hudson. Councilman Hudson responded that the designation process goes through the mayor's office, not the council. A second speaker accused Hudson of being more accessible to developers and business owners than to ordinary constituents, urging equal attention to neighborhood needs.

On July 1, the City of Charleston issued a permit describing the work at 52 Cooper Street as a substantial improvement to an existing historic structure. One week later, the developer applied to demolish the chapel while saving its four gable walls. By the morning of September 23, the 134-year-old building had been reduced to rubble following a brief city-requested pause.

The Emma Abbott Memorial Chapel stood at Cooper and America streets in Charleston's Eastside neighborhood. Citadel Square Baptist Church built it in 1892 as a mission church serving the surrounding community.

It was named for 19th-century opera singer Emma Abbott, who worshiped with the church while visiting Charleston. Her $5,000 gift helped fund the building. Construction cost more than anticipated, and the planned steeple was never built.

Beginning in 1977, the chapel was occupied by Mt. Sinai Holiness Church of Deliverance. The city later described it as a sacred place connected to generations of Eastside families and Charleston's African American history.

The property was purchased in 2021. City records identify the owner as 52 Cooper LLC.

The original proposal called for adaptive reuse. Plans reviewed through the city's Technical Review Committee would convert the chapel into six residential units and add two townhomes while preserving historic shingles and gable features.

That approach remained active into 2026. On April 22, the developer applied for permit DEM2026-02250 to remove drywall at the gable-end walls so a structural engineer could inspect the concealed framing. The permit called the work part of an "ongoing Substantial Improvement project," and the city approved it on May 15.

On July 1, the city issued permit MFN2025-03636 for the "Substantial Improvement to existing historic structure to create 6 new residential units." Changes to the Technical Review Committee-approved plans had to be returned for review before construction.

On July 8, the developer submitted application DEM2026-02329. It called for demolishing the two-story church while saving all four gable walls and reattaching them to a new structure under the approved BAR plans.

The city's online record labels the filing an "INCOMPLETE SUBMITTAL" and lists it as "Void (By City)." The available record does not explain what was missing or establish that the proposal was rejected on its merits.

On August 19, the developer submitted a second application, DEM2026-02365. Synchronicity LLC filed the accompanying Board of Architectural Review application for property owner 52 Cooper LLC.

The application called for removing historic cladding and demolishing the remaining construction. It said the work was "predicated by structural failure/demolition order from the chief building official."

The documents reference that order but do not include it. They do not show its date, complete findings or whether it required complete demolition rather than correction or stabilization.

The city issued the demolition permit and staff-level BAR approval on August 21. The preservation review did not go before the full BAR for a public meeting or vote.

Preservation staff approved removal and reinstallation under the attached documents and required historic materials to be preserved "to the greatest extent possible." Any change in scope required preservation-staff approval.

The attached procedure focused on the historic wood-shingle siding. It said removing the complete gables intact had been evaluated and found technically infeasible.

Before removing the siding, the contractor was to stabilize the gables from the exterior with pole braces. Crews were then to photograph the siding in place, assign identification numbers to individual pieces and remove accessible shingles one at a time using hand tools and preservation-oriented techniques.

Reusable shingles were to be labeled, photographed, inventoried and moved into protected storage. After reconstruction, serviceable pieces were to return as close as practicable to their original locations. Approved matching material could supplement insufficient historic siding.

The procedure placed worker safety and structural stability ahead of preservation. It required work to stop if crews encountered movement, falling material, loss of support, significant deterioration or signs of collapse. It also guaranteed no minimum quantity or percentage of salvaged siding.

The community learned of the planned demolition on Monday, September 21. I spoke to a colleague, designer and preservation advocate Julie O'Connor, who said a neighbor learned about it after speaking with a subcontractor at the property. According to O'Connor, the information reached community members and Councilmember Aaron Polkey.

The Mayor's Office placed a temporary hold on the demolition. The city said the pause was intended "to get a better understanding of the directives city staff had given the developer."

The city said the permit was a "demolition with exceptions." Its statement said the facade would be disassembled, preserved and reassembled after a sturdy framework was built.

The statement also said the permit was issued because an exterior wall was on the verge of collapse and had closed nearby rights-of-way. The city said the parties were committed to reassembling the structure with its facade intact, preserving salvageable original interior wood and respecting the original architectural details.

Polkey wrote that those involved had learned more about the permit and that "we ... concurred" that careful disassembly, documentation, salvage and reassembly best balanced preservation with public safety. His statement did not identify every person included in "we."

O'Connor said she attended an on-site meeting Tuesday with city officials, community representatives and the project team. She said participants understood that the building official had determined the structure needed to come down, so they discussed dismantling, salvage and community communication.

O'Connor said the development team agreed to attend the Eastside Community Development Corporation's neighborhood meeting scheduled for Wednesday evening. She also said the team sent an email promising to salvage as much reusable material as possible. That email was not among the materials supplied for this article.

She said participants discussed recovering framing, beams, flooring and other wood. The formal procedure focused on shingle siding, while the city's statement referred more broadly to the facade and salvageable interior wood. The sources did not describe the preservation scope identically.

Work resumed on September 23 before the neighborhood meeting. O'Connor said heavy equipment reduced the building to rubble. She said the decorative shingle siding had been removed, but she did not observe the broader careful disassembly of framing, beams and flooring discussed the previous day.

Polkey wrote that he was hearing the project had resumed "without the level of care I had expected late last night." He said he was monitoring the work and was concerned.

Those accounts do not establish whether the developer violated the legal terms of the permit. The permit guaranteed no minimum quantity of salvaged shingles, and its safety provisions allowed preservation work to stop if instability or collapse risks emerged.

The available record therefore leaves two questions: whether the demolition followed the permit's enforceable conditions and whether it matched the broader preservation process described publicly on September 22.

After the demolition, the city issued a second statement recognizing the chapel's connection to Eastside families and African American history. It said it is conducting "a full review of how this unfolded," including whether the demolition-permit conditions were followed.

As of the records and statements supplied for this article, the city had not announced a conclusion about compliance or possible enforcement.

The city also acknowledged gaps in its process, including the lack of neighborhood involvement before demolition of a historic structure. It committed to meaningful public notice before future historic demolitions, a funded survey of downtown historic buildings and adding cultural significance to the factors considered in future decisions.

The plans on file called for six residential units within a reconstructed chapel form and two new townhomes. The city's first statement said the facade would be reassembled after a new structural framework was in place. The siding procedure similarly required reusable shingles to be reinstalled on the reconstructed elevations.

O'Connor raised a separate concern about future design oversight. She said the property is in an area where the BAR reviews demolition of historic materials rather than the appearance of all replacement construction. She also said the project had already gone through Technical Review Committee review. Those jurisdictional claims come from O'Connor's interview and are not resolved by the demolition-permit documents supplied for this article.

I sat down with Logan McVey, the executive director of YES for CHS, earlier this week to discuss the Transportation Sales Tax and CCSD Tax that will be on ballot in November. Instead of asking him all of my questions, I brought him the questions you sent me.

Yes for CHS is an advocacy campaign in favor of the sales tax, so the answers below are the campaign's positions. I'm passing along what he said, not telling you how to vote. Logan started things off by saying he does not work for the county and was not hired by it, which he said allows him to be blunt about mistakes he believes the county has made in the past.

He said the county has previously pushed plans through without asking residents what they wanted, and credited this year's public input process with putting the plan in a better starting position. This time around, Charleston County collected 29,000 public comments and held 87 public meetings while building this year's transportation sales tax plan.

McVey said he began putting the campaign together last summer and left his job with the City of Charleston to do it.

He said part of the idea came from Richland County, which he said passed its transportation sales tax but rejected the accompanying bond. Without the bond, he said, projects were delayed while revenue was collected, which critics then pointed to as proof the projects weren't being built.

McVey said the campaign's goal is to do what he believes the 2024 campaign failed to do: explain how the plan's pieces work together. He described those pieces as road and intersection improvements, bike and pedestrian infrastructure, public transit, and conservation. He said the county's transit discussions include an on-demand service that would pick people up on James Island.

He said school projects are also on the ballot, and that the campaign ties them into the same idea of community infrastructure. His example was Long Savannah Elementary, which he said has about $120 million allocated. He said the city worked with the school district and developers to place the school so it keeps cars off Highway 17, and that "there's nothing that we could do that would impact traffic more than where we put that school."

On conservation, McVey cited population figures for the peninsula: 73,000 residents in 1943 and 33,000 in 2023. He said those residents moved farther out, and that increasing density in some places while reducing sprawl in others helps the road network.

McVey said the 2016 transportation sales tax did not include a bond. He said two 2016 projects, the Main Road flyover and Highway 41, saw their budgets increase significantly by the time they were approved, and drew money away from other projects.

He said the bond in this plan is $284 million. According to McVey, it lets the county start certain projects in the first five years while sales tax revenue comes in, then use that revenue for the next round of projects on a rolling basis.

He said the county used bonding the same way with the 2004 sales tax, which he credited with building the Ravenel Bridge, Johnnie Dodds Boulevard, Bees Ferry Road in West Ashley, and Harbor View Road on James Island.

"Work stops," McVey said.

He described four ways to pay for transportation projects:

McVey said 24.6 percent of the sales tax is paid by tourism and roughly another 25 percent by visitors and commuters from other counties. He estimated the cost to the average Charleston County household at about $10 a month.

He said the campaign surveyed residents, asking whether they would rather keep several hundred dollars a year if the tax failed. According to McVey, fewer than half said yes.

McVey said this program is set up differently than past ones in three ways.

First, he said the plan includes money for a professional project management firm to run the whole program, rather than the county managing it directly. He said a private firm would be accountable for mistakes in a way the county has not been.

Second, he said the county modeled the program on the school district's approach. The projects are listed in the ordinance and will be listed on the ballot, and any change requires a vote of County Council.

Third, he noted that sales tax programs are already tracked and audited under state law. He said execution, not accountability, has been the historic problem, and that the county has modernized how projects are delivered.

On the 526 money, McVey said some of it has been reallocated. He said money returned from the project, some of which had gone toward right-of-way purchases, is now funding an added lane on Maybank Highway, along with other carryover projects.

"Because we take cars off the road," McVey said. He said building roads alone does not solve traffic, pointing to Atlanta and Houston, and that the plan pairs roads with other ways of getting around and with decisions like where schools and rec centers go.

He used Johns Island as an example. He said bike and pedestrian infrastructure along Maybank Highway would let residents reach things like a rec center without leaving the island or getting in a car.

McVey said the Ashley River pedestrian bridge is mostly federally funded, not paid for with sales tax money. He said city leaders expect its biggest users to be people walking downtown, not medical district commuters.

He also argued that drivers who never bike or walk benefit the most from this kind of infrastructure, because every person who walks or bikes is one fewer car on the road they're driving.

McVey raised this one himself, saying people ask him about it often. He said the project draws funding from about a dozen sources.

He described it as a transportation project, not a project to protect waterfront and historic peninsula homes, which he said are already protected. According to McVey, a six-and-a-half-foot tide combined with two inches of rain forces the closure of 48 downtown streets, which backs up Folly Road, the Ravenel Bridge, and Highway 17. He said keeping the peninsula dry keeps the center of the region's road network open, including access to the medical district.

McVey said residents requested $68 billion in projects during the county's public input process, and that the county has $12.5 billion in shovel-ready projects.

He said this plan would generate $4.25 billion for infrastructure and $1.25 billion for schools. For comparison, he cited South Carolina's state budget at $15 billion and the school district's annual budget at $1.1 billion.

He said existing taxes already pay for public safety, trash pickup, and general operations, and that more than half of the City of Charleston's budget goes to public safety.

On the common suggestion to make developers pay via impact fees, McVey said there isn't enough development in Charleston County to cover it, since most new development is in Berkeley and Dorchester counties. He used a 96-unit project on Folly Road as an example: rounding up to 100 units with a $10,000 impact fee per unit would raise $1 million. Or even Long Savanna, with an estimated 2,000 homes at completion; that’s another $200 million, which sounds like a lot, but to put it into perspective, the Highway 17 South project costs about $400 million. So 2000 homes could cover half of one project. And those impact fees would be passed on to homebuyers, likely at a higher amount than the fee itself, and would take years upon years to collect all of the money, while project costs continue to rise.

This question came from a reader who pointed out that when the Mark Clark extension was canceled, its money went elsewhere and the island connection problem remained unsolved.

McVey said Yes for CHS supports the program as County Council designed it and as it appears on the ballot. He said the county's survey found 77 percent of residents agreed with the plan.

As discussed in the interview, moving money off a listed project requires a County Council vote to remove it and a vote on where the money goes. The vote threshold was described in the conversation as likely two-thirds, but was not confirmed.

McVey said residents told the county that projects like the Riverland Drive and Maybank Highway intersection, the light at Folly Road and Maybank Highway, and bike and pedestrian improvements along Maybank on Johns Island would make as much difference as 526.

This question came from a 30-year Charleston County resident.

On the school district, McVey said it delivered 97 percent of the projects from its 2020 referendum and had a similar success rate on its 2014 referendum. He credited the district's capital program staff and CFO.

On the county, McVey said the idea that nothing was built because 526 wasn't built is a misconception. He listed sales tax projects including the Ravenel Bridge, Rivers Avenue, Mall Drive, International Drive, Bees Ferry Road, Harbor View Road, Folly Road, and Coleman Boulevard. He said he was "pretty sure" the Crosstown was also funded by the sales tax.

He said both the county and the school district have online dashboards showing completed projects and where the money has gone.

McVey said the project lists are on the Yes for CHS website. He said the campaign is mailing pieces to 100,000 Charleston County voters, with a separate version for each part of the county listing local projects and QR codes linking to audits of past programs. So keep your eye out for those in your mailboxes soon.

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