Opinion: Protecting Land-Owner Rights Important, But Costly to Our Way of Life
“They're growing houses in the fields between the towns
And the Starlight drive-in movie's closing down
The road is gone to the way it was before
And the spaces won't be spaces anymore…” -John Gorka - Houses in the Fields
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
There is a song that may lodge itself in the mind of anyone who has watched a certain kind of American landscape disappear in real time. “Houses in the Fields” offers a premise exactly as plain as its title: the land that once grew things is now growing subdivisions, and the transformation, however lucrative, entails a loss that profit does not quite know how to count. The song is not subtle. It does not need to be. Its subject has a clarity that resists prettifying.
Citizens of Anderson County know the song by heart, even those who may have never heard it.
Drive the corridors that feed into Anderson from the north and east — Highway 81, Highway 29, the sprawling arterials that connect the county seat to Greenville and beyond — and the evidence accumulates in plain sight. The fields, forests, and pastures that once defined the visual grammar of this part of the Piedmont are disappearing behind grading equipment and erosion fencing.
Pastures tended by farming families for generations are being surveyed and staked. The announcement signs go up first, rendered in the optimistic typography of the developer’s imagination: “Coming Soon. New Homes from the Low $300s. A Community Built for You.” What those signs do not say, and are not required to say, is what was there before.
What was there before was, in many cases, working farmland or broad, open vistas — the kind the Upstate has been losing for decades, but with particular velocity in the years since the pandemic further rearranged the American map and steered a significant share of the remote-working, equity-flush migration toward the Sun Belt. South Carolina is now the fastest-growing state in the nation by percentage of population, adding roughly 80,000 new residents each year. Many of them are coming to Anderson County which grew by more than 10 percent last year flying past 220,000 citizens.
“Oh, I guess no one should be afraid of change
But tell me why is there a fence for every open range?
It's a sign I'm getting on in years
When nothing new is welcome to these eyes and ears…”
Few have witnessed these changes from the front row in the way my family has. When we built our house on a large lot on Midway Road in the 1980s, there were only a handful of others on what was then called Calhoun Street Extension, though it lay well beyond the city limits and is closer to Crestview Road than to Simpson Road. Before Midway Elementary School and Glenview Middle School existed, or even had been imagined, the speed limit on our road was 55, a reflection that traffic was light at the busiest times, and at night it was almost nonexistent. Dogs ran free and were only rarely struck by cars. It was quiet.
Behind us, there was at first a field that, by the early 1990s, had become a forest of tall pines and small hardwoods, a place where the family walked and the children roamed freely for more than 15 years. We were told that the owner meant to sell those lots to the neighbors on the border of the woods when she died. But the deceased’s relatives had other plans. They sold to a developer who not only clear-cut the property and erased the natural contours of the land, but, after the city annexed it, presented a misleading picture of what he intended to build there, promising a gated subdivision with privacy fencing all around. Instead, after securing the concessions he wanted, he sold the property to another developer who fulfilled none of those promises.
So, I am no stranger to the frustrations of unbridled development, or to the sequence of losses that follows the sale of large tracts nearby and the arrival of multiple new subdivisions and thousands of housing units.
Ten miles away, near the northwestern edge of the county, my grandfather’s farm — where I spent much of my youth — still stretches across most of the pasture and woods I remember so well, though it has been chipped away at the edges. It remains a farm, though not still in the family. I often fear that when I drive by that area, I will see a sign announcing lots for sale and, eventually, another crowded subdivision: houses in the fields.
Many others are experiencing the similar frustrations, and for those who have lived here less than a couple of decades and came to Anderson County precisely because of its wide-open spaces, the shock can feel especially sharp.
We carry both the burden and the blessing of exponential growth. Some counties never recovered from the collapse of textile manufacturing or the arrival of the interstate and the recreational lake; Anderson County, by contrast, finds itself in the beneficiary’s seat of that reshuffling. It lies close enough to Greenville — which has spent a decade remaking itself into an object of national admiration — to absorb the overflow. The county has land. It has relatively low costs, temperate weather, one of the nation’s great recreational lakes, and easy access to the Blue Ridge Mountains and, with a slightly longer drive, the Atlantic Ocean. It has what relocation brochures call “quality of life” and what longtime residents call, with equal parts pride and caution, home.
By ordinary measures, the growth is good news. The tax base expands. Restaurants open that would never have opened before. School enrollment figures, tracked by superintendents with the anxious attention of actuaries, begin to move in the right direction. Roads get widened, when funds allow. Strip malls fill up. A county that spent much of the late twentieth century watching its textile economy disappear has replaced it with more than 34 businesses representing 19 international companies.
But the ledger that records this as uncomplicated progress leaves out certain charges. It does not price the loss of the viewshed — that certain slant of light falling across an open field at dusk, which no landscaping ordinance has ever successfully reproduced in a subdivision common area. It does not measure the slow attrition of agricultural knowledge embedded in families who worked the same land for four or five generations, knowledge that does not transfer when the property is sold and the family disperses. It does not capture what happens to a county’s social texture when the people who have always lived there gradually find themselves outnumbered by people who arrived with different expectations, no obligation to honor the customs that preceded them, and no memory of the broad, pastoral expanse that once lay there.
What unbridled growth threatens in a place like this is not prosperity but particularity. The subdivision that replaces a farm does not inherit the farm’s memory. The family that moves into the new house on the cul-de-sac is not required to know that the drainage ditch behind the property line once fed a pond where another family fished for forty years. Commercial development, following residential growth, tends toward the national and the fungible: the same retailers, the same restaurant chains, the same beige-and-brick architectural vocabulary that announces, in every American market at once, that a place has reached a certain stage of economic development. The irony is that this stage is almost indistinguishable from every other place that has reached it. The very growth that promises vitality also carries the machinery of erasure.
Meanwhile, the county is bound by the handcuffs of legal restraints that have elevated, not always wrongly, property rights over the public good. And while the county and its municipalities can exercise some oversight through planning commissions, they cannot simply prevent heirs to what is often the generational family wealth of land from selling to the highest bidder.
What they can do is stop some ill-fitting uses of property — chemical manufacturers, for instance, or battery manufacturing and recycling operations, both of which county leaders have rejected after little more than cursory consideration — creating a kind of speed bump for undesirable suitors. But with other forms of growth, especially housing, the county can do little more than set some guidelines and restrictions.
And the pressure to house a growing population complicates the question of how much to restrict new construction. A thin inventory of homes pushes prices beyond the reach of many buyers, especially young families. That creates tension between developers eager to maximize profit and planning commissions trying to preserve livable neighborhoods and decent construction.
Because the area is so desirable, however, the county could do more: increase lot-size requirements, prohibit the cutting of mature hardwoods without additional permits and inspections, and mandate sidewalks to create neighborhoods that might actually belong to more than one generation. Tighter rules might scare off some developers — though perhaps those are precisely the developers the county should want to discourage.
Some areas, most recently Center Rock, are seeking to be masters of the land in their precinct. Three others have already done so, making the community the greater arbitrator of what can, and cannot be built in their neighborhoods. This is a step in the right direction, and an overlooked option long overdue.
And while the county works, with a consultant, through the slow machinery of rewriting development standards, the heavy equipment is already at work: moving red clay, clearing hardwoods, grading the fields. The signs are posted. The houses are coming. Somewhere beneath all that noise of becoming, the older thing the county was is receding — not vanishing, not yet, but growing quieter, the way a voice does after speaking for a long time and slowly realizing the room has changed around it. It’s echo is slowly being drowned out as we witness the proper register for a loss that is not a crime, that no one is solely responsible for, and one that cannot be undone by any act of political will short of the kind of land-use planning American communities have historically treated as an infringement on property rights until the alternative becomes visible and permanent. Meanwhile, the heavy equipment moves on to the next field, and the houses continue going up.
