North Charleston was founded on June 12, 1972. City of New Charleston will depart from the Lowcountry’s obsession with the past to imagine the possibilities of a Transit enabled, future adapted North Charleston at its centennial, fifty years ahead of now.
Upcoming Events- We do more than talk about the future
See our Facebook Transit Events page for upcoming transit oriented events in this effort.
See our Lowcountry Up is Good page for events involving the Schools, Affordable Housing, and the Living wage efforts.
Sponsors and Background
Best Friends of Lowcountry Transit, Inc. & Lowcountry Up Is Good, PAC, Inc. have now been working towards a transit enabled North Charleston with many other organizations for 10 years.
Marvin Pendarvis has been a partner in our efforts since he stepped on the #11 Dorchester Airport bus during his first campaign. He was impressed by the number of people riding in N. Charleston and shocked at how long and slow their bus trips were. From that moment, he's joined us in working for something better. So have many other officials and organizations focused on planning, affordable housing, human needs and education.
Best Friends helped win the Transit Complete the Penny Campaign to fund construction of the LCRT in 2016. We worked with Rep. Marvin Pendarvis to obtain the SCDOT’s commitment to a complete streets policy in 2019 and are currently working with him to pass his Transit Oriented Development bill, no pending in the SC Legislature. In 2017 we canvassed every business we could reach along the full length of Rivers Ave. with information on the voter approved rapid transit project, helping start the ongoing transit planning process. In 2016 we build and deployed the Tiny House Fit for a King as part of what ultimately became a short lived tiny house village of five residences attached to a group home on Carner Ave. We’ve worked to improve the quality of life of residents in North Charleston with demonstrations and political actions to win the living wage and defend the independence of the community’s public schools.
While we continue to work in other Lowcountry Communities and have dedicated projects on the Sea Islands, in Mt. Pleasant, in Lincolnville, Summerville and Ridgeville, we have always seen North Charleston as the Lowcountry’s essential hub. It still has functional communities focused on the needs of its own people. It has a magnificent store of installed infrastructure and will have the state’s first Rapid Transit System. While it struggles with problems and a sprawling, diverse landscape it has the potential for greatness as a home for the varied families of the future.
The City of Charleston, while still essential to the region, has gentrified its urban care out of relevance to the future. It has largely become a tourist-oriented city of the past. It’s decision to accept having no portion of the planned rapid transit line within its boundaries, but instead to merely have LCRT buses operating in traffic south of Reynolds Ave. in N. Charleston is conclusive proof that while the future will happen to Charleston, the pressures of sea level rise and the need to accommodate competing for tourism income will shape its future.
A Year Long Effort Has Started
Citadel Cadets and North Charleston Citizen, North Charleston Public School Teacher Jennifer Saunders planning a transit system for the Lowcountry at Park Circle Creamery in N. Charleston in October 2016 as part of the Transit Complete the Penny Campaign.
City of New Charleston will be a year long effort to imagine the transit enabled community of tomorrow which can grow up along and within one walkable mile of the LCRT line.
The effort began on Feb. 23, 2023 when SC State Representative Marvin Pendarvis (D-CHS) introduced bill H. 4013 in the SC House of Representatives to amend Title 6 of the S. C. Code by adding Chapter 39 regarding Transit-Oriented Development Projects.
On March 1st. a lobbying, outreach team from Best Friends and Midland's Transit Riders went to the SC Statehouse to help build support for the Transit Oriented Bill, talking to over 250 people, including 50 members of the SC Legislature and SC DOT Transit office about the bill and planning a SC transit enabled future. We also made contact with over a dozen organizations representing the disabled, the Governor of SC, the University of SC and attended and leafleted a reception for all the State's transit agencies at the Columbia Convention Center. Co sponsors began signing on to the TOD bill by the end of the day.
City of New Charleston will continue by organizing and funding a youth driven visioning project for the City’s future involving College and High School students across the state of South Carolina. These young citizens will be charged with imagining what the city could best become by its North Charleston centennial in 2072 and South Carolina’s Quadro Centennially in 2070. The students will use the internet and wireless technologies which have been integral to their life experience to share their work with the people of South Carolina, beginning with a preliminary statement of scope and goals before the end of the Spring, 2023 school term.
An informal group discussion of the project is planned for Sunday Afternoon at Emergence, the burning may style event outside Summerville in April.
There will be events sharing parts of the work with the community throughout the summer and early fall. Online and real world conferences, meetings and workshops will be held to both formulate detailed plans and to develop the real world capacity of these young people to lead the state towards a future which rewards its citizens with mobility, prosperity and the gifts of creative patrimony.
The initial effort will conclude in late Fall of 2023 with the New Charleston Future Festival, where to the extent that we can, we’ll share all that they have learned and dreamed with the community and the entire state with participatory activities which will extend the creative process of shaping the future to everyone willing to join the effort.
Once we have begun the future with the Festival, we’ll continue to support our young planners and visionaries as they join the traditional, often challenging effort to drive government controlled planning efforts towards the future they dream of, in N. Charleston an d across the state.
The target for funding this effort is Eight Thousand, Five Hundred Dollars ($8,500.00) in cash funding, and an additional contribution in kind support of supplies, facilities and transportation services. Fifteen hundred dollars has already been raised by a grant of support from Marvin Pendarvis and the project can launch as soon as we have Twenty five hundred dollars committed, which will be sufficient to fund the largest visioning unit composed of undergraduates at one of the State’s Colleges or Universities for the first half of the project.
More Information
Support and Contact Us
- You can support our continuing efforts for better transit by making a contribution online on Act Blue
- Contact State Rep. Maving Pendarvis through his office at the State Legislature in Columbia
- You can reach us by emailing executive director William Hamilton at wjhamilton29464@gmail.com or by calling 843-870-5299.
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