Union Pier’s new planning team is doing a lot of listening as it works to take the future of the 70-acre area in a new direction. They held the first round of public workshops Jan. 24 and Jan. 25 for what the team is calling “a reset” for the design.
“The previous effort had a developer that was hired and went and tried to put a bunch of stuff on the site,” explained Fred Merrill, senior planner at Boston-based Sasaki, the firm leading the design team. “That’s totally fine. That’s normally how it works. But we’re doing this 180 degrees in the other direction.
“This planning should be about the future generations — those with the most to gain, the biggest stakeholders,” he said. “Whatever happens on Union Pier — places to live, places to work, places to play — it needs to be a place where everybody can feel comfortable. It’s really a front porch to Charleston. It has to hit on a lot of different levels.”
Merrill gave kudos to the S.C. Ports Authority for its decision to take a step back from the first rollout of the plan for Union Pier’s future and letting the community take over what he called an “experiment.” He added that equity has been a huge part of the new planning process.
“We want a development that tells stories that haven’t been told,” he said. “Charleston is gentrified — the peninsula is gentrified. A lot of people who were longtime Charleston residents have been pushed out of the peninsula, especially with the rise of tourism in the area. We’re trying to develop a process that has an outcome that is equitable and has a major public benefit for everybody.”
A step in the right direction
Public workshops held Jan. 24 and Jan. 25 brought more than 300 people across the two days, according to Ali Moriarty, assistant director with the Riley Center for Liveable Communities at the College of Charleston. The Riley Center is tasked with implementing community feedback on the project.
The workshops featured the design teams, including Sasaki and two partnering farms: James Lima Planning and Development (which is focusing on the economic framework for the project) and Nelson Byrd Woltz (which is undergirding the design with an ecological and cultural focus).
“We’ve been working behind the scenes since last June to get here,” Moriarty said. “It feels like it’s taken a long time, but we built this whole structure and team and are finally able to say, ‘OK, we’re ready.’ For us, that really feels like an accomplishment.”
Moriarty stressed the significance of the engagement efforts underway with the new Union Pier project, especially in the wake of a previous design that many community members felt excluded them.
“You can definitely just do engagement,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be complicated. But when you have all these complexities with the site itself and all these agencies coming together to make it happen — that takes a lot of administrative heavy lifting, so we’re really proud that we’ve been able to do this.”
What we do and don’t want
Participants at the two workshops used sticky notes to leave comments, wants and more on several design boards presented by project leaders.
“We had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of notes from participants,” Merrill said. “We’re still working on transcribing them all and distilling it down.”
While the data isn’t totally available yet, Moriarity said, there was a pretty clear consensus on a couple important issues.
“The biggest point, if I had to guess, was public access to the waterfront,” Moriarty said. “We’ve heard a lot of that since we first started on this. We also saw a decent consensus around making sure the history of the site is honored in a way that does it justice — Mosquito Fleet for example. People had a range of ideas about that from historical markers to living monuments to programming on-site to pay homage to the role they played here.”
Other popular asks from the public were for the project to include plenty of green space, affordable housing options and a visual design that doesn’t conflict with Charleston’s architectural style. But the public was also just as quick to write down what it didn’t want to see.
“No more hotels, no tall buildings, not just another King Street,” Merrill said. “These are all manageable things, of course. People want it to be of Charleston, like Charleston, authentically Charleston. I don’t think that’s anything surprising. We understand that whole dynamic.”
Hurdles to get over
Between rising sea levels and increasing storm frequency, Merrill said, designing a mixed-use development on the site presents several challenges.
“Whatever is built there is going to have to be future-proof,” he said. “You have to address these environmental conditions that are very real, and it’s going to be more expensive than what would normally be done.”
And the site’s history as a landfill with poor soil conditions doesn’t help.
“If you had a perfectly high and dry site, it would cost ‘X’ to develop there,” Merrill explained. “But this is going to cost ‘X-plus.’ We’re just trying to figure out what that plus really is.”
The cost of development is always a factor to keep in mind, too, he added. Previous proposals included a hefty economic development to help offset the cost of the project, but a dense commercial retail sector isn’t what anybody is asking for, he said.
“That’s not the right way.”
What’s next?
A second batch of public workshops is planned for early March — the dates aren’t yet set in stone — and Moriarty is assuring people that it’s going to be more than a rehash of the first sessions.
“This isn’t just going to be a round two,” she said. “Everything is built from the workshops that came before. There’s a few really exciting points for March we’re excited about. We’re going behind the fence, so to speak, to show people what it really feels like to be on that site.”
The March sessions will also shed light on some of the economic challenges and possibilities on the site, Moriarty said, to tamper some of the higher expectations people may be holding onto.
“We’re doing this sort of closing-of-the-loop idea. We want to show people, ‘This is what you had to say,’ and then taking it deeper and talking about how the team is navigating your feedback and the conditions of the site.
“We’re going to continue fine-tuning the conversation and bringing it into the reality of Union Pier,” she added. “You all have this beautiful vision, it’s up to us working together to make it feasible.”
In the meantime, those who missed out on the first round of workshops can still give feedback through the Riley Center’s newly relaunched website, unionpiersc.com. The interactive site features virtual engagement opportunities for community members who couldn’t make it to the in-person events or had more to say about the project.
“We have a great opportunity here to get in front of a lot of the questions people have,” Moriarty said. “I’m not trying to say the team is going to come back in March with all of the answers, but I do think we’re getting closer. When we do have a draft of the plan we’re showing, it’s not coming out of left field. Everyone will have been a part of the process from the beginning.”
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