Remember the notion of homeless pallets in Charleston?
Sure you do. They were Charleston Mayor William Cogswell’s first official Big Bold Idea after taking office in January 2024 — a plan to erect 120 prefab pallets at a site near the North Charleston border to house the city’s homeless.
As you’ll likely recall, it arrived with what we’ve since come to recognize as the Full Cogswell Launch: the buzzword-compliant press release (Transformative! Proven effective! Housing First!), the sexy watercolor renderings, the faintly comic can-do timeline. Not to mention the now-familiar promise that someone else — in this case, other regional governments — would pay for most of it.
On the record, those other governments did, indeed, call Cogswell’s pallet plan big and bold. But off the record, most tended to use a different “b” word — the one that family newspapers typically describe as a “barnyard epithet” — and quietly killed the whole thing by not funding it in their own budgets.
And so it came to pass that the mayor’s Big Bold homeless pallets, well, never came to pass — an outcome that should surprise precisely no one. After all, it’s not like Cogswell was asking his city council to appropriate Charleston taxpayers’ money to solve problems in, say, Goose Creek.
Which brings us, of course, to Cogswell’s biggest Big Bold Idea to date: a plan to build 3,500 units of subsidized affordable housing that his always launch-ready public relations team has helpfully branded Project 3500.
The price tag? More than $800 million, according to the Bloomberg Philanthropies expert who developed the plan alongside city officials, based on a $250,000 per-unit subsidy.
But earlier this year, when the plan received its version of the Full Cogswell Launch at a three-day public event at the Dock Street Theater, all talk of costs had disappeared, replaced — we barnyard-epithet you not — with watercolor renderings of imaginary affordable housing developments designed by a tony London architect to look like Charleston single houses.
Even more remarkably, Cogswell followed that up last week by inviting firms to bid on the job of designing those units on 57.5 acres in the city — 55 of which are currently owned or co-owned by other area governments and independent public institutions that haven’t signed onto the plan.
Sound familiar? Now, to be clear: Charleston’s housing crisis is real, and we’re all for building 3,500 affordable city units. Credit to Cogswell for working with Bloomberg to come up with the idea.
But there’s a reason the Charleston Housing Authority board, including Cogswell’s appointees, voted unanimously last week to stick with their own rebuilding plan instead of partnering with the city on Project 3500.
It’s because the economics of affordable housing are brutal. And the only way anyone has ever solved them is by carefully matching their financing — subsidies, tax credits, federal assistance, market-rate unit support — to the development they want to build. In fact, as the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development makes clear in its own project requirements, that’s the only way to solve them.
We sincerely hope Cogswell has an ace up his sleeve the rest of us can’t see. But right now, the whole thing looks less like Project 3500 and more like Project Hail Mary — a desperate long ball thrown up by a mayor who seems better at Big Bold Ideas and Full Cogswell Launches than at the boring business of finding the money and getting it done.
Oh and by the way — there’s an election coming up next year. Want to take bets that Project 3500 is a Big Bold Talking Point?
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