Beaufort County is a great place to live, but many people can’t afford to live here
Beverly Ladson hasn’t had air conditioning for two years.
Ladson, who lives at the Hilton Head Gardens apartment complex, said maintenance has come to fix it 14 times.
“I don’t like it too much,” said Ladson, 60. “Things have not changed since this place was built.”
The Gardens is one of only a few affordable housing complexes on the island and a better alternative than her previous home. After several options fell through, Ladson decided to buy a utility shed from a company in Savannah.
“It was miserable. I had no bathroom, no water, no nothing,” Ladson said.
The shed also had no electricity, and Ladson was paying $384 a month to buy the shed located on a family member’s property. She couldn’t work due to a chronic medical condition, and her only source of income was a $600 monthly disability check.
Ladson lived in the shed for three years but in 2019 she fell behind on her monthly payments and was at risk of losing it.
That’s when she reached out to The Deep Well Project, a Hilton Head nonprofit that helps people “in emergency situations.” The organization helped Ladson secure her current apartment at Hilton Gardens.
Affordable housing is in short supply on Hilton Head Island and across Beaufort County. Affluent residents and tourists flock to area beaches while low-income residents struggle to put a roof over their heads. Local governments have grappled with the problem for years and businesses struggle to keep workers who cannot afford to live near their jobs.
In 2018, the county released an assessment of its housing needs. There were 812 affordable housing units operated by the Beaufort County Housing Authority and no openings. Little has changed since.
Beaufort Housing Authority Executive Director Angela Childers estimated the county needed thousands more units to meet the demand for affordable housing, sometimes known as workforce housing. Childers and the Beaufort Housing Authority offer county residents affordable housing options via voucher programs and public housing.
“Conservatively, I’d say we could use easy 4,000 more units,” she said.
The housing authority oversees more than 900 houses and apartments for low-income residents. Childers said the wait list to get public housing in the county can be up to three years.
The Beaufort Housing Authority recently reopened the application process for housing vouchers, which subsidizes rent. Families are eligible to apply if they make 50% below the county’s annual median income of $71,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The agency received about 1,400 applications for the affordable housing vouchers during the week of June 13-17.
The agency has more voucher recipients than places that accept them, Childers said.
“We have about 71 open vouchers on the street,” Childers said, referring to people who have been approved for vouchers but can’t find an affordable place to live. “If we had the availability, we could help them.”
Childers also said the stigma surrounding housing vouchers, particularly Section 8, has led some apartment buildings to not accept them.
While there are several affordable housing options in the county, controversy often surrounds them. Sandalwood Terrace on Hilton Head Island, which caught on fire in 2020, has been criticized by residents in the past for having unresponsive management, bed bugs, roaches, suspected mold, and other building deficiencies.
Hilton Head Gardens tenants have complained about poor repairs, lack of communication from building management, and in some cases, theft and property damage by people working on a remodeling project underway there.
Hilton Head Gardens was bought by Vitus Group LLC in 2021, and in a statement to the Island Packet, Vitus Development Manager Paige Miyazaki said local management was looking into the matter.
“At Vitus we take our affordable housing property renovations very seriously. We always follow HUD guidelines and work with local partners that are in good standing and have strong reputations. Our residents are our top priority.”
Affordable housing is lacking
The lack of affordable housing in Beaufort County forces some to live in poor conditions. In 2021, the county’s Human Services Department released a report that found 36% of houses in the county are considered suboptimal, meaning they lack sufficient plumbing, kitchens, or were overcrowded, compared with 29% for South Carolina.
According to the report, residents of Beaufort County face the reality of a high cost of living, indicated by a cost of living index score of 108. This means that it is more expensive to live in Beaufort County than the national (100) or South Carolina (88) averages. Residents of Beaufort may find that groceries, utilities, housing, restaurants, entertainment, and clothing cost more than they do in other parts of the country, the report said.
Beaufort County residents, despite having the highest annual median income in the state in 2020, also spend most of their money living in the region. Twenty five percent of Beaufort County renters are spending half their income on housing, according to a 2021 report by the South Carolina State Housing Finance and Development Authority.
Exacerbating the problem, wages in the county overall are too low for many to afford housing. According to S.C. Housing Chief Communications Officer Chris Winston, the gap between the average Beaufort County resident’s wage of $12.13 and affording a two-bedroom apartment is almost $8 an hour.
The high cost of living in the county is a serious problem, Director of Beaufort County Human Services Alliance Fred Leyda said. Neighboring Jasper County is more affordable but the average wage is nearly the same, Leyda added.
“So, when we’re talking about affordable housing, we really need to be talking about people who are earning a living wage — can they afford to live here?”
Part of the lack of affordable housing is due to the physical limitations of places like Hilton Head Island, Beaufort County Councilman Stu Rodman said.
“If you look at Hilton Head, it’s basically built out,” Rodman said. “We have a very large number of workers that need affordable housing, but there’s really very little opportunity to create any significant amount when you compare the number of workers.”
The lack of housing in the county is so acute, some companies are buying housing and renting it to their employees at reduced rates.
Sandy Gillis, executive director of The Deep Well Project, said the non-profit has had three to five people show up at its doors every week since June in who were homeless. Gillis added a common theme among this group was they had come to the county for work, were living with friends, but didn’t make enough money to live on their own.
“That’s where people get trapped,” Gillis said. “Because housing is so hard to find, they (new residents) still don’t have cash in their pocket to cover first month’s rent, first month security deposit, deposits for utilities. And that’s the kind of barrier that tends to keep people homeless a lot longer than they thought.”
Is housing insecurity decreasing?
County officials worry the lack of affordable housing might lead to a rise in homelessness, but the data tell a different story.
Beaufort County tracks housing insecurity and homelessness with a tool called Charity Tracker. The system was first implemented in 2012, and relies on self-reporting. During the pandemic, homelessness and housing insecure individuals actually decreased. In 2021, there were 593 residents who self-reported, the lowest number since the tracker was implemented.
Ben Boswell, administrative manager for the Beaufort County Human Services Department, said he’s not sure Charity Tracker’s data is as accurate in the post-COVID era.
“You’re only tracking people who’ve actually shown up to an agency and asked for assistance. Given the amount of assistance out there, as a result of the pandemic, I think people are showing up to charities less,” Boswell said. “I think those (numbers) are under counted.”
Local non-profits play an integral role in addressing the county’s lack of housing. Organizations like The Deep Well Project help people by providing food, showers, laundry, and other services, including helping pay rent and finding suitable housing.
But long term, the solution is to build more affordable housing. The Beaufort Housing Authority recently built eight one-bedroom apartments, which were quickly occupied. In June 2022, the county bought land from the Technical College of The Lowcountry to build more housing.
The state also has invested in trying to alleviate the lack of affordable housing. South Carolina State Housing Finance and Development Authority created the Affordable Housing Trust Fund to build more affordable housing units, and the department helps about a thousand low-wage county residents with paying rent.
But affordable housing is a controversial topic in the region that some don’t want to address, and negative attitudes can impede progress, Leyda said.
“One of the neighbors in the community said, ‘I know we need a community, affordable housing. We just don’t want it here,’” Childers said after a recent public meeting where an affordable housing project was discussed.
“Some of the comments that I’ve heard is, ‘We don’t want those people here.’ I’m assuming they mean low-income people, but they are part of our community.”
This story was originally published August 3, 2022 at 4:55 AM.
