Augusta has 10 more apartment complexes in the works, but saw fewer than 400 single-family housing starts last year. The issues are multifold.
That was the message from a sprawling conversation with builders, developers and city officials coordinated by the Augusta Commission Monday.
Mayor Garnett Johnson called the ratio of new houses to apartments revealed by Planning Director Carla Delaney a “paltry” showing soon to be “detrimental” to Augusta.
Tiffany Heitzman, executive director of the Homebuilders Association of the Greater Augusta-Aiken Region, had more numbers.
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Last year, Aiken County issued over 1,300 single-family housing permits. Columbia County issued over 800. Rural Edgefield County issued 225. Barnwell County is “welcoming us with open arms,” Heitzman said.
Meanwhile, builders attempting single-family projects in Richmond County are left with a “bad taste” that doesn’t come from city staff, she said.
“It’s the elected officials who continue to vote against us because they have a small pocket of people who are misinformed,” she said.
In addition, the “elephant in the room” is the quality of schools, as well as crime rates, Heitzman said.
Bernadette Kelliher, CEO of Augusta Habitat for Humanity, noted that if city leaders want a certain housing mix, it doesn’t happen by accident.
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“What would serve this committee well is to start actually planning what that would look like,” she said. “The successful cities are planned.”
Delaney, a former subdivision planner for Aiken County, said the department is in the process of comprehensively updating the city’s zoning ordinance for the first time in 20 years.
Aiken County “actively recruited” for its current residential boom, to grow its aging community, she said.
The study committee’s conversation Monday grew out of Mayor Pro Tem Wayne Guilfoyle’s recent call for a moratorium on new apartment complexes. Guilfoyle said he should have called it a “pause.”
Jason Whinghter, land development manager for Ivey Homes, said a moratorium would drive rents up and reduce profits landowners make selling their land while demonstrating government overreach.
“We’re always concerned in general of government control over the private sector,” he said.
But growth elsewhere isn’t all bad news for Richmond County, Whingter added.
That’s because soon, Aiken County, which supplies North Augusta and Edgefield County, will run low on sewer infrastructure, while Columbia County doesn’t want any more growth, he said.
Missing from Monday’s meeting were city engineering and utilities officials. They are “extremely important to be at the table,” he said.
Commissioner Stacy Pulliam, who co-chairs the study committee, called Monday’s discussion a good start to a discussion she hopes will continue.
