Would a new Carolina Forest townhome development increase ‘nightmare’ traffic or ease it?

When Cherie Reid moved to Carolina Forest 13 years ago, the area was quiet, a pleasant and spacious community to retire to, and a contrast to the crowded feel of New Jersey, where she used to live and work as a teacher.

With Gardner Lacy Road as her main access in and out of her neighborhood, she said, there have been times she’s left home to run an errand, only to turn around and come back because the traffic is too backed up. Her neighbors complain of having to sit at the same traffic light for three cycles — just to get out of the neighborhood. And don’t even think about leaving your house when school lets out at Carolina Forest High School, they say.

“It’s like a nightmare trying to get out of here,” Reid said. “And that’s not even summertime. It’s almost like people are being trapped, especially during certain times and certain seasons.”

Now, a developer is seeking to rezone two narrow stretches of land on either of Gardner Lacy Road to allow for 97 new townhomes. County planning documents show the project could potentially add nearly 700 more daily car trips along Gardner Lacy, a prospect that’s rankled nearby residents. Reid, and dozens of her neighbors, have begun organizing against the project, with some circulating petitions and others urging people to voice their opposition to the project at Planning Commission and County Council meetings in the coming weeks and months. Reid spent last Monday at a table along Gardner Lacy Road, talking to residents and asking them to sign a petition against the project.

“I don’t know anyone who wants this,” Reid said. “It’s a narrow strip of land that’s going to take away some of the only trees we have left, it’s going to make flooding worse, it’s going to make traffic worse.”

The conflict over the proposed townhome development has also brought a renewed focus to Gardner Lacy Road itself, a four-lane road that connects several neighborhoods to Highway 501, but eventually turns into a residential neighborhood road and has no other outflow. With Carolina Forest’s explosive growth in recent years, including near Gardner Lacy, some have begun asking the question: Could the county extend that road out to International Drive, and ease the traffic that’s plagued those neighborhoods?

“I think it needs to be done just for the simple fact that there needs to be a better way to get out of Gardner Lacy,” said County Council member Johnny Vaught, who represents part of the area. “There needs to be more than one way out.”

For years, county leaders have discussed extending Gardner Lacy, and even began laying the groundwork for the project several years ago. But throughout the years, other projects took precedent, including paving dirt roads, the Aynor bypass, Highway 22 and widening 501 and Carolina Forest Boulevard. In 2018, as the county pursued plans to buy hundreds of acres of wetlands and establish a mitigation bank for its RIDE 3 road program, leaders included the road extension in those plans. Since the county owned the land, it marked on maps submitted to the Army Corp of Engineers that it planned to reserve a strip of it for the road extension. But last spring, the county removed the road from its mitigation bank plans as a way to ensure federal authorities approve its mitigation bank.

The county needs the wetlands mitigation bank, located along International Drive and across from the Lewis Ocean Bay Heritage Preserve, to make up for wetland impacts from the RIDE 3 program. Still, county leaders say plans for the road aren’t dead yet, they’re just being reworked so that the county can ensure its mitigation bank is approved and $600 million RIDE 3 roads projects are completed.

“It’s still a plan that’s in process, but it’s just going to be a little bit down the road,” Vaught said.

More homes, more people in Carolina Forest

29579, the zip code that encompasses Carolina Forest, has grown rapidly over the past decade, much like Horry County as a whole. On average, more than 1,000 people moved to that area per year over the past decade, according to U.S. Census data, or nearly three new residents per day for 10 straight years in a single zip code. That mass arrival has been met by new homes, new apartments, new condos and new townhomes springing up anywhere where the land is cheap enough to build on.

And on a road like Gardner Lacy, those new arrivals have meant more traffic.

But the developer looking to build the townhomes argues that project, as opposed to other uses of that land, will produce less traffic overall. Currently, part of the property is zoned for commercial use, meaning a high-traffic business like a gas station or convenience store could locate there now without prior approval from the county.

“There’s a lot more noxious, offensive uses that are allowed on the property than what we’re proposing,” said Felix Pitts of G3 Engineering, an agent for the developer. He added that the townhomes the developer is proposing “isn’t a drastic change to what’s there now and you have the elimination of commercial uses along Gardner Lacy.”

Pitts made the case that a high-traffic business located along the road would be more of headache to nearby residents, in part because of people turning into the business from Gardner Lacy. The current zoning would also allow for single-family homes, and Pitts argued that those, too, would be more of a headache than townhomes because of all of the driveways for people to enter their homes.

By rezoning to allow for multi-family dwellings, he said, the developer is eliminating a future possibility that those less-desirable projects call Gardner Lacy Road home.

To make that case to the broader public, county planners and the developer will hold a meeting with the public at the Carolina Forest Recreation Center on March 8 at 6:30 p.m.

But not all of the neighbors are convinced yet.

“First of all, I don’t really want to look out my back window and see townhomes,” said Rick Dolce, a retired engineer from Connecticut who moved to a neighborhood along Gardner Lacy Road three years ago. “I think it’s going to hurt the value of our home. Right now you have a gorgeous golf course and trees.”

Dolce said he’s also concerned that clearing the trees that now stand where the townhomes would be built could make the flooding near his home worse. Heavy rains already can push water up into his front yard and nearly into the garage. He doesn’t see much benefit to building along Gardner Lacy as it exists now.

“I don’t know anyone who’s happy about it,” he said.

Could an extension ease the tension?

As areas like Carolina Forest have added people and homes by the hundreds each year in recent decades, Horry County government has trailed behind, working to add and widen roads in response to the growth. In the Carolina Forest area, that meant the construction of International Drive under the RIDE 2 program, as well as the widening of Highway 501 and Carolina Forest Boulevard under the current RIDE 3 program.

But, “in the cries for specific projects, there was no cry for the extension of Gardner Lacy,” said Liz Gilland, a former County Council member, and the body’s chairwoman from 2003 to 2010. During her tenure, Gilland was a part of both the original Ride Improvement & Development Effort and RIDE 2. “At the time, I think people were fairly satisfied with that one road in. It was manageable, and now it’s becoming not so manageable so now folks are starting to scream.”

As the county began its process for the RIDE 3 program several years ago, an extension of Gardner Lacy to International Drive was originally on the list of desired projects, but was later put on hold.

“That was going to be part of the mitigation plan,” explained Mark Lazarus, County Council’s chairman from 2013 to 2018 who helped lay the groundwork for RIDE 3. He said the 3,700 acres of wetlands the county purchased along International Drive in 2018 included plans for an extension of Gardner Lacy Road.

“Part of the mitigation, you have to come up with a plan. Part of the plan that I had proposed was utilizing a portion to extend Gardner Lacy,” Lazarus said.

County leaders scrapped that part of the plan for the mitigation bank last year, but still reserved part of the land for a potential road project in the future. Currently, funding the project is one of the biggest hurdles.

“We’ve still got plans for extending it,” Vaught said. “But that’s probably a RIDE 4 project to do that.”

In the meantime, residents on Gardner Lacy Road could have to live with more homes in their growing neck of the woods. But some of them have said they won’t do that without a fight.

“It has to stop sometime and this time I decided that if a lot of people get together we might be able to do something about it,” said Reid, the retired teacher. “When is it going to stop? Because it has to stop eventually.”