South Carolina Hit Pause on Affordable Housing–Here’s How
South Carolina is in the middle of an affordable housing crisis. Rents are maxed. Working families are being stretched thin. And the state just quietly passed a bill that makes it harder to build the housing those families need.
It’s called S.853. It passed on May 14, 2026. Most people haven’t heard of it because it was sold as a bill about abandoned buildings. And most of it is exactly that. But Section 5 is different.
Section 5 freezes a property tax exemption that affordable housing developers depend on. For the next two years, if you file an application for that exemption after June 30, 2026, the state won’t even look at it. They’ll hold it in a drawer until 2027.
Why does a property tax exemption matter? Because property taxes are a real expense. When that exemption disappears, the cost of operating an affordable housing project goes up. When costs go up, rents go up or the project doesn’t get built at all.
Here’s an analogy. Remember when Spirit Airlines shut down? One of the only carriers keeping ticket prices genuinely low was gone, and without that competition, the bigger airlines had less reason to stay affordable. Housing works the same way. When the incentives that make below-market housing pencil out financially are stripped away, fewer developers can afford to build it and everyone else pays the price in higher rents.
The law has one exception: nonprofits that own their properties 100% on their own, no private investment involved. That sounds reasonable until you realize almost no affordable housing gets built that way. The model that works, and that has been working, is a partnership between nonprofits and private developers. The nonprofit provides the mission and the structure. The developer provides the money, the construction team, and the risk. The tax exemption makes the whole thing viable.
That partnership model is exactly what this freeze leaves out in the cold.
As of March 18, 2026, Governor McMaster hasn’t signed it yet. If you want to do something, call your South Carolina state representative. Ask them to amend Section 5. The window is narrow, but it’s still open.
This week’s blog was brought to us by Ivan Jenkins!