Behre: Once reviled, now revered, Seven Farms Apartments serve up lessons on Daniel Island

Seven Farms Apartments on Daniel Island. File/Brad Nettles/The Post and Courier Staff

By Robert Behre | The Post and Courier | January 1, 2022

A potential source of crime. A blow to island property values. An unwise effort to concentrate residents who need a subsidized place to live rather than scattering them into smaller groups. An injustice to the residents of Daniel Island caused by the island’s developer and Charleston officials.

All that and more was said about 16 years ago as the Humanities Foundation worked with the city to build one aspect of the Daniel Island Master Plan: a new affordable apartment complex near the town center. Only the State Ports Authority’s plans to build a container terminal — an idea later abandoned — ever generated as much uproar on the island.

But the substance of all that public opposition now seems, as Mark Twain once said about reports of his own death, an exaggeration. The foundation’s project, Seven Farms Apartments, has fit in fine with the upscale planned community surrounding it. Crime didn’t soar, but property values did. Today, the complex is virtually indistinguishable from other privately owned market-rate apartments on the island.

Perhaps no one has had a better view of this evolution in public opinion than Jane Baker, who worked as the city’s neighborhood association coordinator during the Seven Farms controversy and heard from many residents opposed to the project. A decade ago, she began working for the Daniel Island Town Association and now serves as its president. If there’s a stop sign askew on the island or if someone’s holiday lights are still up after Feb. 1, she hears about it.

“I can say, without a doubt, that the success of the Seven Farms Apartments has been key to the ability of Daniel Island to have a stronger sense of neighborhood character, inclusiveness and sense of community, principles which guided the development of the island since day one,” she says.

So the success story of Seven Farms Apartments holds important lessons as our region continues to grapple with providing more affordable places for people to live near their jobs.

The first and most obvious is that not-in-my-backyard concerns might be heartfelt, but elected officials shouldn’t let such worries rule the day — especially when they’re based on little more than fear of the unknown.

Especially because our region needs more apartments, townhomes and so-called “missing middle” housing, subsidized or not.

These projects often generate political blowback: Many consider density a bad word. But it doesn’t have to be if it’s done right.

And Seven Farms was: It was built in the right place, in the heart of the island at Seven Farms and Daniel Island drives. Many residents have cars, but they don’t need them to get to the grocery store, most island schools, shops, churches and parks.

And it was built well: Its design was handsome, and while the project was subsidized, it didn’t scrimp on materials or construction.

Equally important, the foundation has done a good job of maintaining it while keeping it affordable. Its one- to three-bedroom apartments are available to people based on their income. (The income limit was about $28,000 for a family of four when it first opened; it’s about $41,050 to $49,260 for that family today.)

In fact, the public uproar had faded shortly after the apartment complex opened. The Humanities Foundation expanded it in 2010 by adding 42 more affordable units for seniors. (Of the island’s 5,660 residential units, about 1,525 are apartments.)

“There was some negativity at first, but the community has really embraced them,” Foundation president Tracy Doran said at the time, when the 42-unit expansion failed to trigger any of the furor that the original building did.

Lastly, though, the Seven Farms Apartment saga shows how government and the business community need to work together proactively to plan for such housing as early as possible.

When the city annexed Daniel Island three decades ago, Mayor Joe Riley justified the move by saying the city’s involvement would ensure the island would not become a gated community and would serve as home to people of different income levels.

Perhaps no other building project on the island delivered as much toward that pledge as Seven Farms Apartments did.

One wonders if it would have been built had such a complex not been part of the island’s original plan — a plan the city adopted before the first person moved in.