By Bill Davis | South Carolina may find itself in “deep, deep yogurt” if nothing is done to address the imbalances in its population growth, according to experts and scholars who track and study growth.
For the better part of a decade, a report from the Strom Thurmond Institute, a public policy research center at Clemson University, said Charleston would be the same size as Charlotte by 2050. Through the years, the report helped fuel big policy decisions in the Statehouse, such as talks about road and infrastructure funding.
“Be ready; they’re coming.” That’s the takeaway from the 2003 report, “Modeling and Prediction of Future Urban Growth in the Charleston Region of South Carolina.” But a cursory glance today at comparative population growth curves between South Carolina and neighboring states Georgia and North Carolina tells a different story.
Next door
Based on the steeper inclines on growth in those states, perhaps the takeaway for South Carolina is more appropriately, “Be ready; they’re kind of coming, but they’re really moving next door.”
James H. Johnson Jr., a demographer and distinguished professor and director of the Urban Investment Strategies Center at UNC-Chapel Hill, said much of the gap is due to Georgia and North Carolina enjoying a more attractive mix of urban centers, more robust economies, better education and access to world-class health care. Not to mention international airports, professional sports teams, banking and finance centers and the like.
Johnson talked this week with key policymakers and legislative staff in Columbia in which he said, in part, that the South’s population would continue to grow, but that the “magnet states” are Texas, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia – not South Carolina.
South Carolina, he said, has been on the advance, but at nowhere near the pace of the other Sunbelt states.
Widening gap in the Palmetto State
But a deeper look at the demographic changes within South Carolina shows a deeper problem, one that has bedeviled policymakers in the Palmetto State: a widening gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Jeffrey Allen, the director at the Strom Thurmond Institute and the author of the exploding Charleston report, said this week that because of relocation and in-migration patterns, the “rich counties will likely get richer, and the poor counties will get poorer.”
Growing areas are, no surprise to some, surrounding the Charlotte metro area along the state line in and around Rock Hill; coastal counties, like Charleston and Horry; the Midlands around Columbia; and the Greenville-Spartanburg corridor along I-85.
The rest of the state? There’s not as much of an upside.
Rifling through numbers and stats on his desk, Allen used Dorchester and Allendale counties as stark opposites. Between the 2000 and 2010 U.S. Census, Dorchester grew by 42 percent, while Allendale shrunk by 7 percent.
This represents an ages-old and widening gap politically that can also be tracked in terms incarceration rates, educational attainment rates, diabetes and multiple indicators highlighted over the years by the Center for Better South.
Population in the have-not counties is on the decrease, according to UNC’s Johnson, who said 13 poorer South Carolina counties saw deaths exceed births between the last two censuses.
Allendale County, specifically, has long been the focus of statisticians, demographers and filmmakers, such as Bud Ferillo who made the apocryphal “Corridor of Shame” documentary.
Johnson uncorked this chilling statistic – in Allendale County for every 100 member of the workforce, there are 173 “dependents” – people too old or too young or too sick to work. Balanced counties, he said, keep it at one-to-one ratio.
Johnson added that, looking at 25-year population trends in which people are living longer and fertility rates are “way, way down,” if South Carolina doesn’t maintain an open door to immigrants, the state’s rural areas could be in “deep, deep yogurt.”
Going beyond one-size-fits-all
Clemson’s Allen said he worried how lawmakers will be able to craft “one size fits all” policy when the state’s population is trending in two different directions.
“We see it all the time with federal laws that don’t apply to everyone and every situation,” he said.
Doug Woodward, professor of economics and director of the Division of Research at the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina, has found some bright spots delving into South Carolina’s numbers.
Greenville and Charleston are attracting a higher share of college graduates than the rest of the state, with a “real entrepreneurial class taking off in Charleston” attracted to its medical industry and growing tech sector.
But even then, both cities pale in comparison to the Raleigh-Durham in that matrix, said Woodward, due to the Research Triangle being “off the chart in every measure of competitiveness and quality of life” and leading the nation.
Woodward agreed with Allen’s assessment that South Carolina would continue to increase in population by about 15 percent a decade as it has since the 1950s.
Experts say urban and suburban areas can look forward to lots of that growth. But rural areas will continue to be left behind, continuing a modern legacy of being the have-nots of South Carolina.
“But that has always been the story of South Carolina,” said Allen, slyly referring to the state’s history with slavery.
We Can Do Better, South Carolina!