Last Tuesday at the new Wando High School, hundreds of people gathered for a public meeting on where East Cooper’s new High School capacity would go. One of the presentations was by Demographer Jerome McKibben, who has been working for both the Town and School District to figure out what the Mount Pleasant of twenty years from now will look like.

Jerome is easily the most frightening person I’ve ever heard at a public meeting. The crowd was clearly unnerved by what he had to say.

Here is some of what Dr. McKibben’s research is telling us about what our community is going to look like in the future. Next week, I’ll write about what we may be able to do about it.

Mount Pleasant has been filled for the last decade by the growing families of the baby boomlet, an echo of the massively significant baby boom a generation earlier. People have been leaving the City of Charleston to move into more affordable, suburban houses with access to good schools and have moved into developments full of new houses and younger families. Migrations of older residents and people from other areas have also expanded the population, but Charleston’s large group of people in their 20s and 30s have been the source from Mount Pleasant’s boom.

I write about Mount Pleasant because the data for the Isle of Palms, Daniel Island and Sullivan’s Island are very different.

As of the 2005 special census 24.6% of houses in Mount Pleasant have school aged children under 18.  Thirty four percent of Mount Pleasant households have children under age 18.

McKibben is absolutely convinced unsatisfactory school options and the high cost of family oriented housing downtown is what drove people to Mount Pleasant between 1995 and 2005. He’s certain, based on his data, that newcomers were not so much attracted to Mount Pleasant as they were driven out of Charleston. Given a choice, people don’t want to move. They leave when they have to.

There are still a lot of people in Charleston. College students, recent graduates and young working people are a big part of that population. This group of people aged 18 to 30 is almost completely absent from the Mount Pleasant population mix. They don’t need the schools. We have very little multifamily housing. Transit is limited. They can find employment closer to where they live.

Young people leave Mount Pleasant at High School graduation. Most never return. Other people move here to find affordable family housing and schools for their children.

Of course there are a lot of older people in Mount Pleasant; boomers holding on to their houses closer to town.  Most of those people haven’t come from anywhere. They’ve just grown old here. That source of older population far outnumbers the people moving in.

That was probably what made the crowd at Wando nervous last week. Mount  Pleasant’s monoculture of large developments of very similar houses means the consequences of aging can be drastic.  Older residents forced to move lose their neighborhood, their friends, their church, familiar business relationships and their home. Naturally people resist this. Much of Mt. Pleasant wasn’t planned to allow people to live their whole lives there. Nobody minded because nobody was planning to grow old, have their kids move away or find themselves unable to drive. Dr. McKibben is scary because he had proof these things may happen to you and me and will for absolute certain happen to lots of people.

Population Density has been dropping for 60 years throughout the United States. An aging society will need a denser landscape, more multifamily housing and transit.

Our average household size (including single person households)  is 2.46. Average family size is 3.01. A quarter of Mount Pleasant’s households are a single person. Only 1500 of those people are currently over 65.

Mount Pleasant’s racial mix continues to change. The fastest growing minority group in the East Cooper are Asians, 1.5%, African Americans are 5.5% and Hispanics are 2%.  We tend to focus on race in the South, but time and aging are what we need to watch.

The almost universal assumption has been that Mt. Pleasant and the East Cooper area would continue to grow forever, however McKibbin is certain that while there is some growth ahead, we’re never going to see a Mount Pleasant of 125 thousand people.  The thousand empty houses on the market aren’t merely symptoms of the economic cycle, but indications of a demographic change. Over the next two decades new developments will face competition from older residents selling off their homes, who can afford to price their houses below the cost of new construction. He believes the massive credit expansion of the last five years carried residential building far past the point where it should have slowed down. Though even I don’t believe it, he swears we’re not ever going to see houses packed solid to the edge of the Francis Marion Forest.

The Mount Pleasant of the last twenty years, relentlessly expanding to the Northeast as legions of young families find relatively inexpensive land near good schools on the suburban fringe will be coming to an end. Our new family neighborhoods will eventually be the older neighborhoods built decades ago, however, neighborhoods of people who are all nearly the same age isn’t likely to be the future pattern.

Mount Pleasant will have to do two critical things in the future. It must adapt to provide quality of life for its older residents, including transit, flexible housing choices and accessible health care. It must also attract young families in their 20s and 30s to established neighborhoods to retain its economic and civic vitality.  These younger families are unlikely to be composed of people who grew up here. We’ll have to compete for them.

The young families are critical because they provide the employment and economic activity that allows the community to function. Without them, the value of real estate, and government tax revenue, will fall.

This isn’t Mayberry or the Brady Bunch. This will be a complex mix of possibly competing needs. The reaction of the crowd at Wando last week made it clear we’re not yet prepared to consider these realities or the options connected to them.

We’re not bad people. We just want to stay with our neighbors and our kids, going to the weekly soccer games and church socials in our SUVs forever. Most of us remember the stressful efforts we made to move here. We wanted Mount Pleasant to be the place. What makes a chat with Dr. McKibben frightening is realizing that the Mount Pleasant we understand isn’t going to be the place. It’s either going to adapt or we’re going to leave. For a conservative community, nothing is more difficult than planning to change.

Next week, I’ll write about some of the things we can do.  It won’t be the last word on the subject. McKibben makes a powerful case that the world is changing and our lives are going to change too.

William Hamilton (wjhamilton@wjhamilton.com) is an attorney who lives in I’On Village. You can read other columns by him on www.moultrienews.com.

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