Aerial of downtown Charleston, South Carolina, which may see a major coastal resiliency project built to protect from rising seas and a sinking land mass. Shown on July 28, 2025. (Photo by Jeffrey Basinger/Floodlight)
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On a quiet street near the marsh in Charleston, South Carolina’s Rosemont neighborhood, Luvenia Brown watches the weather reports more than she used to. She’s lost lawn mowers, bikes and outdoor furniture to the rising waters that have repeatedly crept into her yard.
Luvenia Brown, a resident of Rosemont in Charleston, discusses on July 29, 2025, regular flooding in her neighborhood. (Photo by Jeffrey Basinger/Floodlight)
Brown’s home is elevated, so the water hasn’t reached the interior. Not yet. But she’s deeply worried about what the future will bring.
“If the water continues rising the way it is, I don’t want to be here,” said Brown, 58, who works as a medical driver. “… I love my area. But I think my life is more important.”
Just a half mile to the south, a massive new development — expected to bring stores, offices and 4,000 homes — is springing up. Brown fears that all the new concrete and pavement will only make flooding where she lives worse.
Charleston is one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities — and one of the most flood-prone. As climate change prompts sea levels to rise and storms to grow more intense, this historic city has become a warning bell for what’s to come along America’s coasts: Some neighborhoods will retreat and others will be protected, and still others — often lower-income communities — may be left behind.
Homes reflected in water on the streets of the Rosemont community in Charleston, on July 29, 2025, after a short thunderstorm. (Photo by Jeffrey Basinger/Floodlight)
In Charleston, those futures are colliding. The city and the federal government are planning a $1.3 billion seawall to defend the iconic downtown peninsula with its regal, pre-Civil War mansions and majestic moss-covered live oak trees.
On Sept. 9, the City Council approved spending $2.5 million for continued design work and authorized an agreement between the city and Army Corps of Engineers. The city’s share of the total price tag is $455 million, reported The Post and Courier.
But under the current plans, the wall would not extend to lower-income neighborhoods like Rosemont, a historically Black community bordered by a freeway and hemmed in by industrial sites. That could leave those families more exposed than ever.
“I’ve seen how all those floodwaters demolish people’s houses,” Brown said. “I don’t think I want to be part of that.”
What’s happening in Charleston is playing out in dozens of coastal cities from New York to California.
Driven largely by sea level rise, flooding in the coastal United States is projected to occur 10 times more often over the next 25 years, according to a recent analysis by the nonprofit Climate Central.
An estimated 2.5 million Americans could be forced to relocate over the next 25 years, the group found.
The increasing floods are prompting insurance companies to raise premiums and decline policy renewals. In fact, ZIP codes in coastal South Carolina are among those with the highest insurance nonrenewal rates, according to a Brookings Institution analysis. All of that is likely to push some residents to higher, or drier, ground.
To understand how Charleston reached this tipping point — and what makes it especially vulnerable — you have to start with its geography.
Rising water, growing crisis
Built along the confluence of three rivers and the Atlantic Ocean, the city was founded on marshland and mud flats. Flooding there was once far less frequent.
But now, even an afternoon thunderstorm or an unusually high tide can overwhelm drainage systems and submerge streets.
The problem isn’t just more rain — it’s higher water. The sea level in Charleston rose about 13 inches over the past century. But by 2050, scientists project it will accelerate, rising an additional 1.2 feet. And by the end of the century, the water is expected to be about 4 feet higher than it is today.
The ground is sinking, too.
Charleston is one of the most rapidly subsiding cities in the United States, mainly because of groundwater pumping and the settling of natural sediments and filled marsh areas. That double threat — rising seas and sinking land — leaves the city increasingly exposed to flooding.
According to Climate Central’s Coastal Risk Finder, more than 8,000 people and 4,700 homes in Charleston County will be at risk of annual flooding by 2050, even under moderate climate action scenarios. By 2100, more than 60,000 people could be affected.
The Lowcountry, as this region is known, was always low. But now, it’s getting lower, wetter and harder to protect.
Rapid development, meanwhile, is paving over forests and wetlands that once soaked up stormwater. Every new subdivision and strip mall replaces absorbent ground with impervious surfaces — asphalt, rooftops, parking lots — that send rainwater rushing into neighborhoods like Rosemont.
The uneven fight against the sea
After Hurricane Matthew sent water surging over Charleston’s iconic Battery wall in 2016, then-Mayor John Tecklenburg and other officials consulted with Dutch flood experts, seeking to tap the know-how of a country renowned for its expertise in holding back the sea.
Skip Mikell, a community leader in Charleston, pictured July 29, 2025, in the Rosemont community which floods regularly. (Photo by Jeffrey Basinger/Floodlight)
Charleston developed a comprehensive city water plan to protect itself while promoting resilient growth. Federal officials proposed an 8-mile-long, $1.3 billion seawall to shield the city’s historic peninsula from future storm surges and sea level rise.
The city’s share will likely be more than $450 million. Tecklenburg said that won’t be an easy sell. But to the former mayor, the choice is clear.
He told Floodlight, “If you give up the peninsula, you might as well head for the hills.”
But neighborhoods like Rosemont — just beyond the wall’s reach — will remain exposed. Parts of the neighborhood are projected to be underwater by the end of the century. And some fear the wall could actually make flooding worse in unprotected areas.
Skip Mikell, a longtime community leader in Union Heights, a historically Black neighborhood, stood at the end of Peace Street in Rosemont, looking out over a nearby marsh.
“In 70 years, where we’re standing, if nothing’s done, it’s going to be water,” Mikell said, adding: “The gentry of Charleston have connections, they have money, they have a voice. These communities are voiceless.”
The long road to retreat
About 12 miles northwest of downtown Charleston, a tranquil expanse of weeds, marsh grasses and black-eyed Susans stretches across what used to be a neighborhood. Bridge Pointe was once a compact community of 32 townhomes.
The site was returned to nature after the city and federal government bought out its flood-weary residents. But like many buyouts across the country, the process was slow and bureaucratic.
John Knipper was among those displaced. Newly retired, he moved from New York to Charleston in early 2015, buying a three-bedroom townhome in Bridge Pointe for $172,000.
But just six months after he moved in, an August thunderstorm turned a nearby creek into a river. Several inches of water crept into his living room. Then in October 2015, a stalled weather system dumped more than 15 inches of rain on the region. His first floor was submerged under 2 ½ feet of water.
Over the next few years, the storms and floods kept coming. In 2017, FEMA authorized $10 million to buy out Bridge Pointe residents and their neighbors. By then, it had flooded four times, making the homes, Knipper said, “really unsellable.”
It took nearly four years after buyout discussions began for residents to get money for relocation. A typical buyout can take more than five years, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office, meanwhile, found that there’s no national strategy for relocating people from flood-prone areas.
Building toward disaster
Just a mile away, many more homes are on the way.
A recent aerial view of the site along the Ashley River, in Charleston, where land is being cleared for the 4,000-home Magnolia Landing development. Critics say massive new developments like these are likely to exacerbate flooding in surrounding areas. (Photo by Jeffrey Basinger/Floodlight)
Long Savannah, a massive new development, is expected to bring up to 4,500 homes. It’s one of several high-profile projects rising in flood-prone areas across Charleston County.
Like other mega developments planned for Charleston, Long Savannah will likely destroy wetlands, which work like nature’s sponges, soaking up rain and slowly releasing it to keep flooding in check.
Other massive developments on the books include Magnolia Landing, the 4,000-home project underway near the Rosemont community, and Cainhoy, a 9,000-home development that would fill wetlands on a low-lying peninsula near Charleston where flooding is already a growing threat.
“Charleston has a history of building in repetitively flooded areas,” said Robby Maynor, a climate campaign associate with the Southern Environmental Law Center, which sued to save some of the wetlands in the Long Savannah project. “We absolutely must stop building in low-lying and flood-prone areas to avoid making an already difficult situation even worse.”
Charleston city officials say they now require flood protections — such as higher elevation standards and better stormwater systems — for new buildings in flood-prone areas. But scientists and residents question whether those measures are enough, or whether building in risky areas simply shifts the danger to others.
“A similar story is playing out in cities all across the United States,” reports NASA’s Earth Observatory, “but the Charleston area stands out in one critical way — much of the new development has happened on low-lying land that is especially vulnerable to sea level rise and flooding.”
When leaving isn’t a choice
Ana Zimmerman and her husband bought their modest, one-story house on Shoreham Road — part of a close-knit neighborhood where neighbors looked after each other’s kids — in 2005.
Ana Zimmerman reflected in standing water July 29, 2025, near the site of her former home where she spent years dealing with flooding, ultimately moving to a new location and losing 12 years of equity. (Photo by Jeffrey Basinger/Floodlight)
The first sign of trouble came early one morning in October 2015. It was still dark when she put her feet to the bedroom floor, water lapping at her ankles. A powerful storm had overwhelmed the street.
Zimmerman rushed to save photo albums and the family cats, but the house suffered more than $80,000 in damages.
With the insurance payout and their own labor, the Zimmermans repaired the home.
But when Tropical Storm Irma hit two years later, Zimmerman remembers hearing neighbors screaming as 7 inches of floodwaters poured into her home — causing it to be declared a total loss.
Ultimately the couple abandoned the flood-damaged home and let it go into foreclosure, walking away from 12 years of equity.
They now live nearby in a house on an elevated foundation. Zimmerman, who calls herself an “unintentional flood activist,” has pressed public officials for stricter building rules and clearer flood-risk disclosures.
She says her experience is a “canary in a coal mine” for other low-lying coastal communities.
“Entire neighborhoods will have to move,” said Zimmerman, a college biology professor. “But the vulnerable among us, there will be no one there to help them, save them, and they will not be able to save themselves.”
A new townhome development rises in Charleston’s flood-prone Church Creek area. The Ashley River and Church Creek can be seen in the background on July 28, 2025. (Photo by Jeffrey Basinger/Floodlight)
A creek runs through marshland to the Rosemont community from the Ashley River in Charleston, pictured July 29, 2025. Under the current plans, Charleston’s seawall will not extend to lower-income neighborhoods like Rosemont. (Photo by Jeffrey Basinger/Floodlight)
Ann Auburn and her husband moved from their historic Charleston home because they were fed up with the floods that repeatedly damaged and threatened the house. This photo, taken from across Gadsden Street, shows the floodwaters surrounding Auburn’s house in September 2017. (Photo courtesy of Ann Auburn)
A 2016 flood turned much of Charleston’s Bridge Pointe community into a lake. After four floods in three years repeatedly damaged the Bridge Pointe townhomes, the city of Charleston and the federal government bought out the community’s 32 homes. (Photo courtesy of John Knipper)
Aerial of marshland near downtown Charleston on July 28, 2025. (Photo by Jeffrey Basinger/Floodlight)
Darin Jones bikes on Shoreham Road after Hurricane Ian flooded the street in 2022. Jones and his wife, Ana Zimmerman, once lived on the street but moved after their home repeatedly flooded. Zimmerman predicts that entire neighborhoods will have to move as the sea level rises and storms grow more intense. (Photo courtesy of Ana Zimmerman)
Floodlight is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action.