The Changing Face of Maryville & Ashleyville

More and more peninsular problems are finding a home in West Ashley — impacts of bars, flooding, parking, traffic, and now tricky redevelopment.
Downtown, gentrification has often tainted the redevelopment of neighborhoods, as it did in Radcliffeborough the West Side, where new white investment has displaced former black neighborhoods and even churches.
But it seems West Ashley, specifically in the historically black Maryville/Ashleyville neighborhood along St. Andrews Boulevard, has its own twist.
Maryville had been the state’s first black town, and was split in two when the boulevard was laid through it, with the waterside being called by many Ashelyville, and the other side Maryville.
In Ashleyville, Gary Hardy, the white vice president of the neighborhood association, is sounding a warning that black City Councilman Keith Waring may be up to no good with a corner piece of property at the intersection of Tripe and Main streets.
“I like the guy,” says Hardy, who works in insurance. “I just do not like what he wants to do there.”
Hardy said he’s worried that Waring intends to build multi-family units on the vacant and overgrown lot, out of step with the nature of the surrounding single-family homes that comprise the existing neighborhood.
“[Waring] was initially bidding to sell the lot to the city, for who knows what,” said Hardy, who has been working on an unfinished home in the neighborhood for several years.
The corner property measures more than 300 feet wide and more than 90 feet deep. Using a 50-foot by 90-foot plot, Waring reckons six new affordable homes could be erected.
Hardy countered, saying most of the lots in the neighborhood are deeper, and some wider. He also wondered why Waring, who works in financial planning, didn’t have the city purchase it in the first place.
Waring said he has been clear since he purchased the property after the economic meltdown of the Great Recession: he wants to turn the land into single-family, owner-occupied homes to be sold as affordable housing stock.
Waring said he intends to give the city first crack at buying the land, but in the end doesn’t care who develops it, as long as it helps the neighborhood.
Waring said that the city couldn’t move as quickly as he could in purchasing the foreclosed land. “When you find a bank dumping something, you have to react real fast — government doesn’t act fast. And that was the case here.”
Waring rejects the idea he was pushing for multi-family “anything” there, cognizant of the years it would take to get the zoning change, as evidenced by the fight City Hall endured to have a porn shop removed from the neighborhood’s entrance on Sycamore Avenue.
Waring was able to guide the city into relative action earlier this year, when a multi-acre, riverfront plot in the neighborhood came up for sale there.
Worried that developers might swoop in and put in units that might benefit their pocketbooks and not the surrounding neighbors, Waring urged Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., and other councilmembers to hastily buy the acreage.
That waterfront piece of property has, in planning documents, been linked to a waterfront walk connecting Northbridge, county and state parks along the Ashley River, a former horse plantation, and a new municipal Higgins Pier park.
Waring said Maryville/Ashleyville already had two distinct advantages in fighting gentrification that its peninsular analogs didn’t.
One, it had homeowners. Many of the downtown neighborhoods that were gentrified were largely rental communities. This side of the river, the neighborhoods are largely owner-occupied.
Second, downtown, the color lines are fairly set in stone. Over here, whites and blacks have been intermingled longer and more effectively, according to Waring, who points to the largely white trailer park located near the center of the Ashleyville side.
Waring said gentrification exposed the dividing lines between investors with good information about what’s coming, and renters who never saw it coming. As such, he hopes everyone in Maryville/Ashleyville stays informed and welcomes any questions about his intentions. Even if he finds some of the questions “disingenuous,” but he promises to answer them all.