With Sergeant Jasper slated for demolition, downtown workforce housing is getting scarce

The urban geography of the Sergeant Jasper apartment building has always been peculiar. The low-rent, high-rise apartment building is situated just north of Broad Street in the midst of millionaire homes, a small real estate miracle that has allowed students, tour guides, and F&B workers to live near the southern end of the peninsula, rubbing elbows with the lawyers, tycoons, and socialites South of Broad.

Now that the Sergeant Jasper's owners at the Beach Company have announced the building's impending demolition, some of the residents are wondering whether they'll be able to afford to rent again downtown. "Oh no, definitely not," says Ryan Camelon, a researcher at the Medical University of South Carolina who moved into the Sergeant Jasper from Boston just a month ago. "I think this is the nicest for the cheapest amount of money. Everything downtown's pretty expensive."

He's right. Most housing downtown is expensive (see p.14). And with the loss of the Sergeant Jasper's 221 reasonably priced units, the available stock of workforce housing just got that much smaller.

The Sergeant Jasper was named after a Revolutionary War hero, but it was never a place for old money. Up until the demolition was announced in mid-February, it was still possible to rent a studio there for $835 a month or split a two-bedroom apartment with a roommate for $585 apiece. Savannah Mooneyhan, another member of the final generation of renters, says most of the residents are students and downtown workers, plus a few older longtime residents and young families. She's determined to find another rental downtown, but she knows her options are limited. Residents are being evicted one floor at a time, starting at the top in mid-May and ending at the bottom in August.

"Even when you're looking on Craigslist, you're competing with 200 people at the same time, so I'm looking now," Mooneyhan says.

For Mooneyhan, who works at the downtown Irish bar Tommy Condon's and attends the College of Charleston, leaving the peninsula is a nonstarter. "Parking at CofC is terrible and expensive," Mooneyhan says. "I'm going to stay downtown. If I have to move to the other side of the Crosstown, I'll do that before I move off the peninsula."

Karen Bacot, director of marketing for the Beach Company, says the company has not yet decided what sort of residential development will go in the Sergeant Jasper's place, but the plan is to include some affordable housing. She says the company is still meeting with the Preservation Society and the Historic Charleston Foundation to discuss the next steps, and any plans will have to be vetted by the Board of Architectural Review and other city agencies.

Whatever gets built, it won't be as tall as the 16-story Sergeant Jasper. "No one wants to build that tall again us included," Bacot says. "Everybody has agreed on that one thing."

In the meantime, the Beach Company is organizing a mid-March housing fair for its current Sergeant Jasper tenants, inviting the company's competitors to come and offer reasonable downtown rental rates. Alternatively, the company is offering to let renters lock in their current rental rates if they move across the river to another Beach Company property, Mt. Pleasant's Riviera at Seaside.

"I think there's a lot of speculation and fear that things are going to change wildly, but that's an assumption that's been misguided," Bacot says. "We understand the workforce is important, and we're going to incorporate that in any plans."

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With Sergeant Jasper slated for demolition, downtown workforce housing is getting scarce