The Charleston development map

Every permit a city issues is a small bet on the future. I started with the City of Charleston's active permit file, about 19,000 records. Then I went and got the other permit offices too: Mount Pleasant, Summerville, North Charleston, and the county's file for the islands and Awendaw. One map, about 4,500 mapped projects. Here is what the whole metro is actually building, tearing down, and densifying in 2026.

The listing feed shows you what is for sale today. The permit file shows you what an area will look like in three years, which streets are being scraped and rebuilt, where the next 285-unit apartment building is going, and which quiet field is about to become a subdivision. It is one of the most honest signals in real estate, because a permit is money already spent and hard to reverse.

The catch is that no single office holds it. Charleston, Mount Pleasant, Summerville, Goose Creek, and North Charleston each run their own permit desks, and Charleston County issues permits for Awendaw, McClellanville, Hollywood, Ravenel, and much of the island country in between. Nobody publishes them together, so I did. Below is the combined map: new construction, additions, and demolitions, colored by what they are. Tap any dot for the address, the project, and the date. For the full map with schools, flood zones, traffic, and market layers, open Charleston Pulse. For statewide data centers and corridor projects outside the metro, see SC Pulse. Then I will walk you through what jumps out, jurisdiction by jurisdiction.

How to read the map

Each dot is one permit (or, for North Charleston, one pipeline application; more on that below). Blue is a new single-family home, orange is new multifamily or townhomes, purple is new commercial, tan is an addition or expansion, and red is a demolition, and berry is the newest layer: a state construction stormwater permit, the land-disturbance approval a developer needs before clearing more than an acre. Those are the projects in the pipeline, often before a single building permit exists. Tap an area button above the map to jump straight there, and use the filter link if you want to switch a permit office's dots on or off. The peninsula, the Cainhoy corridor, north Mount Pleasant and the Summerville edge are the busiest.

The metro at a glance: what each office is permitting

Before the street-level stories, here is the whole file rolled up by permit type. A few things pop immediately: Goose Creek out-permits everyone but the City of Charleston on new houses, and Mount Pleasant leads the entire metro in additions, with more addition permits than the City of Charleston itself. The islands and Awendaw are almost purely new single-family. And Summerville's multifamily count is nearly all townhomes, not apartments.

Tap any office to expand it.

Counts are mapped permits only, same filters as the map above, and coverage windows differ by office (see the source note under the map). North Charleston's row is rezoning applications, not building permits.

What a permit file is actually made of

One more cut of the data, because it answers a question I get all the time: what are all those other permits? The map plots new construction, additions, and demolitions, but they are a minority of any permit file. Here is the full type breakdown for the three offices that publish complete files, every permit, not just the mapped ones.

Windows differ by office: Mount Pleasant January 2024 to July 2026, Goose Creek May 2025 to May 2026, Summerville 2024 plus spring 2026. Summerville's file also logs non-building items (tree removals, zoning letters), which inflates its "everything else" row.

The ratio is the tell. In Mount Pleasant, only about one permit in twenty is a new build, and nearly half the file is trade work on existing homes: the signature of a mature, built-out market where money flows into what already stands. In Goose Creek, one permit in four is new construction, the signature of a market still being built. Summerville sits in between, and the City of Charleston's own active file tells the same mature-market story: roughly 1,300 new-construction permits out of about 19,000, or about seven percent. When someone asks me whether an area is "still growing," this ratio is often a better answer than the price chart.

The trends underneath the file: what is changing

The tables above are a snapshot. Read them across time and a handful of shifts stand out, and the biggest one is about who a house is being built for, not just how many are going up. Tap each to open it.

Cainhoy and Point Hope are the growth engine, and it is not close

If you want to know where Charleston is betting on itself, look northeast to the Cainhoy peninsula. The 29492 ZIP that covers Cainhoy, Point Hope and Daniel Island has more active new-home permits than any other ZIP in the city, roughly 490 new single-family permits plus about 160 new multifamily permits. There is a brand-new Del Webb Point Hope, Pulte's 55-plus community, under construction, its amenity center and boathouse already permitted. And the corridor is not slowing: local reporting counts over 2,200 homes in the 2026 pipeline for the Daniel Island and Clements Ferry area, including a 242-unit apartment project on Parkline Avenue and a 450-unit build at Point Hope.

Why it matters: this is the fastest-changing part of the city, and it is changing in every direction at once, detached homes, townhomes, apartments and amenities. If you are buying out there, the permit map is the difference between a quiet cul-de-sac and a 95-unit building going up across the field. I wrote a full Point Hope and Cainhoy guide for exactly this reason.

The teardown belt: the peninsula is being rebuilt one lot at a time

There are roughly 135 active structural demolition permits in the file, full or partial teardowns, and they cluster on the peninsula, the 29403 upper peninsula and 29401 downtown, and in West Ashley's 29407. On the map they read as a scatter of red dots across those older neighborhoods. (Interior-only demolition permits, the gut-renovation kind, are far more numerous but are not teardowns, so I have left them off the map.)

Why it matters: concentrated demolition is a redevelopment signal. Older, smaller or storm-worn structures get scraped and replaced with new builds, and that churn usually precedes rising values on those blocks. If you own on the peninsula, your neighbors' demolition permits are quietly repricing your own lot. If you are buying, a block with several teardowns is a block the market is voting on.

Charleston is densifying, not just spreading

The orange on the map is the story a lot of people miss. Active permits include about 200 new multifamily projects. The largest single one is a 285-unit mixed-use apartment building with retail at 1010 Conservation Place. Out on Cainhoy, there is a 14-building townhome program at Boathouse Row and a wave of master-permitted multifamily along Waterline Street, including 95-unit buildings.

Why it matters: new apartment and townhome supply changes a submarket. It brings rooftops that support retail and restaurants, it adds rental competition, and it reshapes traffic. For a buyer it can be a plus, walkable amenities follow density, or a minus, if you wanted quiet. Either way, you want to know it is coming before you close, not after.

Where the new single-family homes are actually going

Beyond Cainhoy, the new detached-home permits concentrate on Johns Island (29455), West Ashley (29414), and James Island (29412), the three areas where land inside or near the city still pencils out for builders. The peninsula, by contrast, grows almost entirely through demolition and infill, not new subdivisions, because there is simply no open land left.

Why it matters: these are the corridors where a first-time or move-up buyer will find genuinely new inventory at something short of downtown prices. The trade is that new-construction neighborhoods compete with their own builder for years, which caps how fast a two-year-old resale can appreciate.

The amenities are following the growth

The permit file is not just homes. It shows a 21,000-square-foot West Ashley Aquatic Center, and out on Cainhoy, the Del Webb amenity center and boathouse. Public and private amenity spending tends to track where a city expects people to live, which lines up with the same story I told in what Charleston is building next.

Cross the Cooper: Mount Pleasant is two towns wearing one name

Mount Pleasant is my home market, so this is the layer I read closest. Since January 2024 the town has issued about 1,150 permits for new construction, additions, and demolitions, and they split into two completely different stories along the 29464 and 29466 line.

The 29466 side is the growth market: 224 new-home permits. The engine is Liberty Hill Farm, K. Hovnanian's 337-home community off Rifle Range Road, where Cultivation Lane alone accounts for about 50 permits and Siloh Drive another 30, plus the closing phases of Carolina Park, whose Riverside section is selling its final custom homesites. Here is the wrinkle most buyers never hear about: Mount Pleasant caps residential building at roughly 600 permits a year through 2029, but Carolina Park and Liberty Hill Farm are exempt under older vested development agreements. That is why the map shows the town's new construction funneling into a handful of streets. It also means once these two communities finish, new-home supply in Mount Pleasant gets structurally scarce. One thing to watch on this side of town: the $245 million Highway 41 widening is scheduled to go out for construction bids in September 2026. On July 14, 2026, Mount Pleasant Town Council voted 5 to 4 to keep municipal consent for Charleston County's 4-3-4 plan cutting through Laurel Hill County Park, and 5 to 4 again to let the county obtain permits to start breaking ground.

South Mount Pleasant, 29464, is a different animal. It logged 201 new-home permits, but also 73 of the town's 77 demolitions and 368 of its 549 additions, a fast-growing share of them accessory dwelling units: garage apartments and in-law suites, which the town permitted about 10 times in 2024 and 24 times in 2025. Put those together and you see what is really happening: the old grid between Coleman and Ben Sawyer is being renovated, expanded, and scrape-and-rebuilt one lot at a time, exactly like the peninsula's teardown belt. And it is speeding up: 20 demolition permits in all of 2024, 24 in 2025, and 33 in just the first half of 2026. If you own a 1970s ranch in old Mount Pleasant, the permit map says your land is worth more than your house, and your neighbors are acting on it.

The commercial file backs it up: a new ALDI and two new banks on Highway 17 North, a Floor and Decor, the new Residence Inn at Patriots Point (100 rooms, part of Bennett Hospitality's 31-acre Ferry Wharf development), a four-story self-storage building on Coleman, and a healthcare land rush: HCA opened a freestanding ER on Long Point Road, Novant just opened a 40,000-square-foot Center for Women's Health at East Cooper, and Roper St. Francis is starting a medical pavilion on Johnnie Dodds. Add Gather MTP, the food-hall and entertainment hub planned at Midtown with Crooked Hammock Brewery as anchor, and you have retail, hospitality and healthcare all placing bets on the same rooftops.

Summerville: Six Oaks and the townhome wave

Summerville publishes its issued permits in batches, and the file I could assemble covers 2024 plus this spring. Even with that gap it is clear where the growth is: about 250 new single-family permits and, notably, 95 townhome permits. Six Oaks, Mungo Homes' community off 17-A near Summerville High, is the single busiest subdivision with 73 new-home permits, and its townhome collection starts in the low $300s. Behind it come Sheep Island, the new roughly 660-home planned development at the Nexton Parkway interchange where D.R. Horton is building, Lennar's Limehouse Village on the 17-A corridor, and Sweetgrass Station by Dream Finders and Crescent. By permit count the builder leaderboard is Mungo (91), Lennar (69), and D.R. Horton (51). The commercial permits follow the same corridors: the Atelier office campus on Brighton Park Boulevard in Downtown Nexton, a medical office building and convenience store at Sawmill Centre, and core-and-shell buildings on Scholar Way.

Two things worth knowing behind those numbers. First, the pace is accelerating: the town's spring 2026 permit list runs at roughly three times the monthly rate of 2024, driven by townhome batches. Second, there is no slowdown coming from policy. The town has publicly declined to pursue a building moratorium, thousands of residential permits are already pre-approved in its pipeline (about 5,000 by a Post and Courier count), and the fight over Nexton's proposed 738-acre Creekside annexation (up to 1,200 homes, currently postponed after resident pushback) shows how much growth is still queued at the edges. Also note that Nexton itself straddles the town line with Berkeley County, so a chunk of that area's building never appears in this file at all.

Why it matters: Summerville is where the metro's attainable new construction lives, and the townhome share tells you builders are solving for price. If you are weighing Mount Pleasant versus Summerville, this is the sharpest picture of the trade: additions and rebuilds on one side of the metro, whole new neighborhoods on the other.

Goose Creek: the uncapped boomtown

Goose Creek was the surprise of this whole project. The city publishes a monthly issued-permit list, and the thirteen months I could assemble (May 2025 through May 2026) show about 534 new-home permits. For scale, that is roughly triple Mount Pleasant's yearly pace, in a city with no permit cap. The dots stack up in the new subdivisions on the Carnes Crossroads side, streets like Denham, Baldric, and Bloomsbury, and the contractor column is wall-to-wall Lennar and D.R. Horton. Add 128 addition and remodel permits and you get a city quietly absorbing a huge share of the metro's attainable growth.

Why it matters: Goose Creek is where a first-time or BAH-budget buyer can still get a brand-new house from a production builder at Berkeley County prices, twenty minutes from the Navy base and the airport corridor. If you are stationed at the Naval Weapons Station, this is your permit map.

The quiet southwest, and the towns that publish nothing

For balance, the same county file that shows Awendaw booming shows the southwest corridor barely moving: Hollywood, Ravenel, Meggett, and Lincolnville combined logged about 38 mappable permits in 2025 against Awendaw's 130. If you want land on that side of the metro, you are early, which cuts both ways.

And one honest note about the gaps. I tried to pull every jurisdiction around the metro, and several simply do not publish their permit files in any usable form: Hanahan and Moncks Corner (login-only systems), Georgetown County, the City of Georgetown, Andrews, and Pawleys Island (internal system, paper applications), and the Holly Hill, Santee, and Eutawville area, where Orangeburg County still runs on paper. Those areas are absent from the metro map above not because nothing is being built there, but because their records require a formal records request. The corridor and data-center pins in the next section, and the full SC Pulse map, cover what I am tracking beyond the Lowcountry edge. (For Hanahan and the Berkeley towns, the comprehensive plans at the BCD Council of Governments are the best public window into what is coming.) When that changes, I will add them.

North Charleston: the quiet upzoning wave

One honest caveat: North Charleston does not publish its building-permit file, so its dots on my map are the planning pipeline instead, every rezoning application filed with the Planning Commission since 2024. That pipeline tells its own story, and as far as I know nobody has mapped it before. Of the roughly 60 mapped applications, 38 ask to go to multifamily zoning, and they cluster hard in the older neck-area neighborhoods around Park Circle and south of it: Sumner Avenue, Leiderman Street, Attaway Street, Meeting Street Road, North Rhett. Most are small lots moving from R-1 single-family to R-2 multifamily. Not all of them pass; a Liberty Hill application from an affordable-housing developer was denied in committee this year. But the direction of the requests is unmistakable.

The timing matters too. Roper St. Francis broke ground in 2025 on its $1.2 billion replacement hospital campus off Mall Drive, which will move the metro's flagship hospital from the peninsula into North Charleston by about 2029. And the city is in the middle of its first full zoning-code rewrite in roughly 50 years, and city leaders have framed it explicitly around housing variety and the missing middle, the duplexes and small multifamily buildings its current code barely allows. Meanwhile Park Circle sales now run in the low-to-mid $500s, several times what those houses traded for two decades ago, even after a softer 2025. Landowners can read that combination as well as anyone, and the rezoning map is them acting on it.

Why it matters: a rezoning is the step before the permit. This is the part of the metro where a single-family block can become a duplex-and-quadplex block within a few years, which is opportunity if you are an investor and information you deserve to have if you are buying a house next door.

The islands and Awendaw: the county's permit counter

Charleston County issues permits for Awendaw, McClellanville, and most of the sea island country, and its 2025 file surprised me. Awendaw, a town of fewer than 1,800 people, logged about 130 county-issued new-home permits, which makes that little stretch of Highway 17 North one of the busiest new-home corridors in the county file. Here is the part that makes it interesting: almost none of it is subdivision work, and that is by design. Awendaw has a moratorium on subdivisions larger than five lots and on rezonings, its new mayor moved to extend it this year, the state Supreme Court halted the town's contested 200-home development next to Cape Romain in December, and the town has deliberately kept sewer lines out to deter large developers. Individual homes are exempt from all of it. So Awendaw is growing anyway, one custom house on well and septic at a time, at a median declared build cost around $450,000 before land. I wrote a full Awendaw and McClellanville guide for buyers who want the long version.

The Johns Island and Kiawah-Seabrook area added about 160 more permits, and James Island, Isle of Palms, Seabrook, Sullivan's Island and Edisto round out the rest, overwhelmingly new single-family homes. On the beach islands the numbers stop being about volume and start being about magnitude: the median declared construction cost, building cost alone, not land, runs about $1.8 million on Isle of Palms, $2 million on Seabrook, and $1.6 million on Sullivan's Island, and the single largest is an $8.1 million build on Palm Boulevard. Ninety-nine island-area permits crossed the $1 million construction mark in 2025.

One caveat here: Isle of Palms, Sullivan's Island, Folly Beach and Kiawah run their own building desks and do not publish their permit data, so the beach-town dots you see are only the county-touched slice. Treat those as a floor, not a count.

Beyond the permit file: the big board

A few of the metro's largest stories are not on the dot map yet, either because they are pre-permit or because they are policy. As of early July 2026:

• Cane Bay wants to get much bigger. A roughly 5,500-home, 2,000-acre "Lake Village" expansion cleared Berkeley County's Planning Commission in late June after a divided hearing; County Council has the final say. If approved, it would be the largest single addition to the metro's pipeline in years. Moncks Corner is separately weighing about 400 more homes on Highway 52.
• The Mark Clark extension is dead, but the money question is back. After the 2024 referendum failed, the state pulled funding for I-526 to Johns Island. Charleston County is now sending a slimmed $4.25 billion transportation and greenbelt sales-tax referendum, built without Mark Clark, to the November 2026 ballot.
• Union Pier's cruise era just ended. The last cruise ship sailed June 30, 2026. Ben Navarro's team is buying the 65-acre waterfront site for $250 million (closing 2027) and says redevelopment will be deliberately incremental. Meanwhile Laurel Island stalled again after its developer withdrew in January, and The Magnolia on the upper peninsula is a year into site work, with buildings expected to start in 2027.
• West Ashley's biggest bet just cleared a real milestone. Woodfield Development has closed on its portion of the Ashley Landing redevelopment — the multifamily parcel of the aging shopping center on Sam Rittenberg Boulevard. Ashley Landing is EDENS's roughly $300 million overhaul of about 35 acres into 285 apartments, 100 townhomes, and 240,000 square feet of retail and green space, with the city committing about $45 million toward flood mitigation and infrastructure. That makes it the largest single investment in West Ashley's history. A residential partner closing on its land is the signal that vertical construction, not just planning, is next.
• The hospitals are voting with their cranes. Roper St. Francis is moving its flagship to a $1.2 billion North Charleston campus (about 2029), MUSC's Nexton hospital is under construction (about 2028), and HCA topped out an 80,000-square-foot expansion at Trident. Health systems build where the rooftops are going.
• Bus rapid transit is real. Lowcountry Rapid Transit's design is complete and construction is expected to begin in 2027, running 21 miles from Ladson to the peninsula along Rivers Avenue, straight through the same neck-area neighborhoods where the rezoning wave on my map is concentrated.
• Some land is leaving the board entirely. Charleston County's greenbelt program approved $11.5 million for conservation purchases this spring, including 97 acres at Humbert Woods on Johns Island, and Georgetown County has cut the allowed buildout of the Waccamaw Neck roughly in half through its future land-use map.

Where building is legally restricted right now

The permit map only makes sense next to the rulebook, because several of the quietest areas on it are quiet by law, not by lack of demand. Here is every active growth restriction in the map’s footprint as of July 2026, verified against town ordinances and local reporting.

Recently expired: Hollywood’s 2025 subdivision moratorium and Ravenel’s comp-plan pause have both lapsed, and Mount Pleasant’s apartment ban ended in December 2024. Notably, none of the fastest-growing offices on this map (Summerville, Goose Creek, Moncks Corner, North Charleston, Dorchester County) has any moratorium at all, and Isle of Palms voters rejected a rental cap. Berkeley County granted its first big residential waiver of 2026 in May, for a 191-home Lennar subdivision near Moncks Corner, and Georgetown County has separately cut allowed density on the Waccamaw Neck roughly in half through its land-use plan. Elsewhere in the state, Fort Mill has paused new residential applications through September 2026 and Lancaster County has frozen new Indian Land subdivisions into August 2026, which tells you where this policy conversation is heading. Moratoriums are temporary by law and can end early or face challenge; verify current status before acting on any of them.

Where Charleston’s growth spills next: Santee, lake country, and data centers

The metro map above stops at the permit offices I can actually pull. The demand does not. Priced-out buyers, lake second-homes, I-95 logistics jobs, and now data-center campuses are pushing an hour inland into Orangeburg, Berkeley, and Colleton counties. Below is the corridor pipeline I am watching. Most of it is proposed, not built, and some of it is fiercely contested, so read every pin as a plan, not a promise. For the full statewide data-center map (Google, Meta Aiken, Cielo Cherokee, Colleton wave, and more), open SC Pulse.

Seven things in this file worth repeating at a dinner party

• Multi-generational living is showing up in the permit file. Accessory dwelling unit permits in Mount Pleasant roughly doubled in a year, from about 10 in 2024 to 24 in 2025: garage apartments and in-law suites for aging parents, adult kids at home, and rental income, in a town that caps new subdivisions.
• Mount Pleasant tears down faster every year. Twenty demolition permits in 2024, 24 in 2025, and 33 in just the first half of 2026. The old grid is being repriced lot by lot.
• Mount Pleasant files more addition permits than the City of Charleston. 549 versus 480, with a permit cap squeezing new supply. When a town caps building, the money goes into the houses that already exist.
• On the beach islands, construction alone is a seven-figure line item. Median declared build cost: about $2 million on Seabrook, $1.8 million on Isle of Palms, $1.6 million on Sullivan's, topping out at an $8.1 million build on Palm Boulevard.
• Summerville's permit pace roughly tripled. The spring 2026 list runs at about three times the monthly rate of 2024, and the leaderboard is Mungo, Lennar, D.R. Horton.
• Awendaw is the metro's quietest boomtown. A town of under 1,800 people with about 130 new-home permits in one year, all single houses, because its moratorium blocks subdivisions but not individual builds.
• North Charleston's next chapter is already filed. 38 applications to convert single-family lots to multifamily zoning around Park Circle, right as the city rewrites its 50-year-old zoning code around missing-middle housing, and as Roper St. Francis builds its $1.2 billion replacement hospital in the city.

What this means if you are buying or selling here

I do not read the permit file so I can quote you a number. I read it so I can tell you what is about to happen around a specific house. Before my clients write an offer, I check the same thing quietly in the background: what is permitted next door, is the block being rebuilt or left behind, is a field about to become 95 units, is the flood-prone lot two streets over being turned into a house or a drainage park.

You feel those answers years later, in your resale and your quality of life, long after you have forgotten the paint color. If you want me to read the permit map around a specific street or listing you are weighing, that is exactly the kind of homework I do before anyone I work with signs anything.

Charleston has always been a city that builds and rebuilds its own ground. This map is just the current chapter, drawn in permits. If you are trying to figure out where in it to put down roots, I would love to help you read it.

This map and the figures in this post are built from public records of five separate offices: the City of Charleston's active building-permit dataset, the Town of Mount Pleasant's issued-permit records (January 2024 onward), the Town of Summerville's published issued-permit lists (2024 and spring 2026), the City of North Charleston's Planning Commission rezoning applications (2024 onward, shown because the city does not publish its building-permit file), and Charleston County's 2025 issued permits for Awendaw, McClellanville and the sea islands. All were cleaned, classified and mapped by Jennifer Dane. Coverage windows differ by office, some beach towns do not publish permit data at all, and rezoning applications are proposals, not construction. Permit counts are approximate, reflect the files at the time of writing, and change as permits are filed, issued, completed or expire. A building permit represents planned or in-progress work, not a property listed for sale, and does not indicate availability, price or that any project will be completed as described. Nothing here is legal, financial, tax, or investment advice. Verify any specific permit, parcel, flood zone, or jurisdiction independently before relying on it. Jennifer Dane is a licensed REALTOR® in South Carolina with eXp Realty LLC. Equal Housing Opportunity.

Privacy Policy · Unsubscribe · Accessibility · Sitemap