St Simon's has changed over the years. It's finally succumbing to development though they are being careful about it so as not to kill the golden goose (a very private feeling island). Most of the people that lived there prior to its rise in popularity have been driven out by high prices or cashed out if they were lucky enough to own land. The Eastern part of the island has become much more accessible to lower income populations. (edit: I've got this next sentence wrong as corrected in a comment below)Rich homeowners, as a result, erected a guarded gate in front of Sea Island (basically part of SSI) to keep everyone out.
I still love SSI. My only hope is that it doesn't continue on the path it's currently on. Privacy and exclusion are separate ideas. SSI can still be private, but it doesn't necessarily have to exclusive. My hope is that can change. However, my head tells me that everything I like about SSI is scarce and prices will only continue to climb, driving away those not fortunate enough to afford it.
You're conflating two islands here -- Sea Island is a separate island that has been privately owned since at least the 1920s. You have to drive across St Simons to get to Sea Island. For sure, Sea Island is a high end, gated resort community of a few hundred people.
St Simons is home to about 12k people. It has been an expensive place to live since at least the 80s. I, too, share your concerns about the current development going on -- I'm not sure the developers are in fact being careful about killing the golden goose. Developers are cutting down our historic oak trees and indiscriminately putting up cheaply built condos as fast as the corrupt planning commission will let them.
This is the perfect opportunity to plug the St Simons Land Trust: https://www.sslt.org/
Unlike national conservation organizations (which are great and have their place), local land trusts can really take on the priorities of the local area.
For example, the land trust I'm involved with here in the Inland Northwest does a lot of work to make sure that land used for agriculture and forestry is preserved for those uses, doesn't turn into housing developments and can even be passed down from generation-to-generation of family farmers without a prohibitive tax burden.
In Montana where there's been tons issues over access to public lands blocked by private landowners, they're playing a key role in preserving that access.
The Land Trust Alliance is a great place to find your local land trust: https://www.findalandtrust.org/
I expect you'll be surprised at the amount of "good for your community" work they're doing.
What's worse is when things don't pan out, and you are left with hundreds of half finished condos.
You're right developers are destroying trees. I guess what I was alluding to was the historical restrictions on building sizes and things like that.
Perhaps what's happening in the bay is the result of responsible, long sighted policies designed to mitigate or forestall a population collapse during a proverbial gold rush in what could become a future Rust Belt.
I'm curious to hear your views. Where should we meet to talk about it? Galveston, Atlantic City, Detroit, Buffalo, New Orleans...?
You're forgetting the great quake of 1906 which destroyed nearly 80% of San Francisco, and the continuing threat of the San Andreas fault.
Society moves forwards, people who want to "preserve" really don't want us to move forward. Whether they are killing mass transit plans because they want to "preserve" their small city culture or not allowing the building of high-density housing to meet the demands to our ever growing population.
Preserve is even more sinister as it uses justify racism and oppression or south likes to refer to as "preserving their southern culture" as they fly confederate flags and put up statues of Confederate leaders.
My biggest hope is that Cumberland Island, GA can avoid this fate. It has no bridge to it, and most of it is preserved as wilderness area, but the county seems to be trying its hardest to develop what private land remains on the island. It's a real shame, because it's one of the last wild, preserved islands anyone can get to by booking a ferry with the park service.
Hilton Head native here, I don't think the HHI history is quite the same. Prior to Fraser kicking off the island as we know it in the '50s, it was basically just a handful of Freedmen farmers, Gullah natives and a rather large hunting reserve for the rich. Also, while some of the gated communities don't allow the riff-raff in, unless you decide to bike or make a restaurant reservation, some still do, most notably Sea Pines.
Also, the Town of is rather cognizant of their place as a very natural, family-friendly island and goes to great pains to preserve land[0] and limit what and how folks build[1][2] to preserve the nature of the island.
I think Kiawah or Seabrook up the coast make for a more apt comparison.
> Hunting Island, SC as well - Fripp Island is a gated community.
Wait, Hunting Island and Fripp Island are discrete, separate islands with Hunting Island being a State Park. What's the problem with Hunting Island?
[0] - https://www.hiltonheadislandsc.gov/council/landacquisition.c...
[1] - https://www.islandpacket.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/david...
[2] - https://www.islandpacket.com/news/business/article33627555.h...
I'm not sure how much of the beach is considered public in east coast states, I know CA has laws against full privatization. But by gating the only road access, you've effectively privatized the beach unless you kayak there or something.
They sell tourist passes for $6 (Used to be $5... damn inflation).
> I'm not sure how much of the beach is considered public in east coast states
In the state of SC, there is no such thing as a private beach. Of course if the island is fully gated, it would require boat access.
In the case of Fripp, there is no public parking insofar as I'm aware but one could park at the edge of Hunting Island, walk across the bridge, then access the beach as the gates are inset.
Of course I'm also sure the security folks would try and make you feel unwelcome. One of those "can't beat the ride, can beat the rap" situations.
Ironically, it was a gated community before that was cool, but had to be evacuated during World War II because of German U-Boat threat.
So now anyone can visit. As long as the ferry is running.
This is happening all over the South Carolina coast as well.
Having spent many a weekend in Savannah from youth through to being an adult, and now having lived in Charleston for the better part of a decade, I really think Savannah is a nicer city.
Perhaps because Savannah was planned or because Charleston is constrained by its peninsular nature, but Savannah always felt like a small city whereas Charleston really just seems like a haphazard, overgrown town.
If any of y'all reading ever consider a trip down to Savannah, it's well worth a long weekend at the very least.
I also grew up in a tourist destination. There's a reason it's a vacation destination and not somewhere people with a brain actually want to live year round. I could rant for hours about all the things that are terrible about it. I think it suffices to say that when ripping people off for a few months of the year is a large fraction of the local economy it that has a bunch of negative trickle down effects.
I grew up ~60 miles down the coast from Charleston, on Hilton Head Island. Totally different vibe, beautiful, natural island. The Town of actually made real efforts to manage development and prevent developers from doing the normal land-grab over-development.
I've lived in Charleston for 7+ years and, despite a temporary moratorium, the City of is letting developers raze the city to build more and more hotels with no damned parking. Very little is done to manage or plan development. It's a whole different vibe, and I'm actually going to be leaving Charleston with no intent to return here in the coming months.
My experience in Charleston has really made me appreciate the island I grew up on. Not all tourist towns are built alike.
If you visit, your first impression is that it is very pretty and quiet. When you're there for a more extended period, everything feels very...sterile. Everything looks the same. You can't find anything.
It's also this odd place in South Carolina where if you order tea it's unsweet and if you ask for sweet tea they'll either look at you strangely, give you sugar packets (not the same thing) or say they don't serve it. During the summer, all you see is Ohio license plates.
When I thought I was going to end up working there after college I was going to live in Beaufort just to avoid living there. Grew up in Florence.
I've lived in a variety of other small towns and a few cities. The pattern I've noticed is that when a large chunk of the community makes it's living by siphoning a few bucks off of people who don't live there permanently and have no plans to (tourists, university students, commuters) it creates a bunch of incentives for highly (more so than in a normal town/city) selfish behavior from all the local parties (business owners, politicians, town departments, individual property owners, etc) that basically boils down to everyone trying to squeeze every cent out of everyone else and nobody wants to live in a place where everyone is doing that because it sucks. I'm definitely in the "individuals are generally good and trustworthy when left to do their own thing" camp but a couple of the places I'v lived make me well aware of why some people believe that people are untrustworthy by default and need to be controlled.
In the case of tourist towns, the special snowflake image projected on top of all of this is just kind of a slap in the face for everyone living there. You've got your annual town parade for whatever and half the crowd is frowning because they know the backstory to everything they see in front of them. The local business that sponsored the float for a sports team is just doing it because a local offical's kid is on the team and he needs said official to not look too hard at his business. The fire department's 100ft ladder truck is just a waste because there's no more than a 3-story building in the town but the EMTs did a favor for the school superintendent who crashed his car while drunk (legend is that he had to be cut out by the FD and the EMTs recognized him and whisked him away before the cops could make him blow) so he called his friends and put in a good word for the fire department when it came to budget. The reason some of the town officials in the parade aren't behind bars is because the police know that scandals are bad for business and they'd rather just have it to hold over them anyway. The only reason the landscaping material company has money to blow on the nearly new trucks that are towing the floats (dirt moving is a low margin industry so you don't usually see that stuff) is because they have a local monopoly and overcharge everyone they deal with. It's just terrible to live in a place where everything is scummy but presented as quaint in order to fleece the tourists for a few months of the year and that's how most tourist towns become. No wonder everyone does drugs all winter. It wears on you. I suppose if you just take it all for granted or are just so overwhelmed by the quaintness that you don't notice it might be ok but that's just not me.
I think one of the real differences between a strictly-tourist town and the island I grew up on was that it also served as an upscale retirement destination for Snowbird types such that it has its own thriving economy and year-round population (in the 30,000 - 40,000 range) so it wasn't strictly dependent on tourism.
The surrounding area has also grown and developed into its own area since. Rather interesting to watch the sort-of bootstrapping of the surrounding sleepy town into a thriving area over the years.
very glad I left, never have regretted it.
It's not Orlando, It's not Miami, it's not even Jacksonville. It's a tiny little spot with decent beaches, a long history that's reasonably-well-preserved, and quiet relaxation.
The marsh that's pictured in this article (labelled "boardwalk over marsh") looks like the Bloody Marsh [0], the site of the battle that was the "last straw" for the Spanish in their attempts to claim land further up from Florida (which used to extend a bit farther north than it does today).
The colony of Georgia was chartered by Britain around this area in part as a response to that "invasion", in an attempt to protect the important British port of Charleston up in Carolina (before the NC/SC split). Of course, the other key motivation was to have a whole bunch of land to use as an alternative to overcrowded debtor's prisons, so there's that.
This is in part why Savannah (another beautiful historic coastal spot in Georgia, though a much larger one) was so significant to the state for so much of its early history: it was the first planned city in the state, as evidenced by the fact that it's home to the oldest still-standing building in the entire state (a gardener's shed built in the early 1700s, now part of a tourist-trap restaurant).
All this to say: yes, Georgia definitely has a coast, and it's worth seeing (in this HNer's opinion), and worth preserving.