The Future of Myrtle Beach

Hurricane season was upon the locals, too, but nobody seemed especially concerned, even with a massive storm, Hurricane Hazel, lurking off-coast. There had been storms before, of course, but there was a belief (still present today to an extent) that the curved nature of its coastline would keep Myrtle relatively safe.
Not this time.

By noon on Oct. 15, by which time the still-violent storm was heading toward North Carolina, one resident had died and 80% of Myrtle Beach’s waterfront dwellings had been decimated. The devastating storm surge produced 11-foot tides, flooded the low-lying barrier islands and flattened dunes into so many sandy pancakes that ran the length of the Strand, 40 homes were wrecked on Pawleys Island; in East Cherry Grove every dwelling was ripped from its foundation; a three-story hotel was carried out to sea in North Myrtle Beach.

But as with other major catastrophes, the storm energized the citizenry, which over the next several decades rebuilt Myrtle Beach into the formidable tourist destination it had already started to become. Miracle Miles never caught on as a designation. But Myrtle Beach caught on as a place to go.

Today, six decades after Hazel, a series of figurative storms (though one can never discount the vicissitudes of real storms these days) confronts the stretch known to most outsiders as Myrtle Beach (population about 29,000) but to locals as the Grand Strand (population about 330,000), the 60 miles of coastal communities from Winyah Bay in Georgetown to Calabash, N.C. Its very size and diversity stamp it as a place of exceptional promise but also exceptional perplexity.

So we decided to consider how the Strand will weather the myriad challenges, and ask this question: What will we look like in two decades? Granted, this will be imperfect Nostradamus-izing. Interstate 73, which would connect Myrtle Beach to I-95, crucial to so many aspects of the future of the Grand Strand, has been a nettlesome subject for so long that it seems in some way like a fable. Then there’s casino gambling. If it comes to South Carolina, it will come to Myrtle Beach, and if it comes to Myrtle Beach, things will change exponentially. But while South Carolina house minority leader Todd Rutherford has filed a bill to pave the way for casinos—the monies targeted for much-needed road repairs throughout the Palmetto State—most believe that the bill is unlikely to go far this year. So those are two giant what-ifs in any kind of prognosis.

Still, we plunge ahead. And with a tip of the golf cap to the difficulty of making predictions about an area where a golfer teeing off at Pawleys Plantation in the south feels as if he’s in a different state from when he tees off at Rivers Edge in the north—because he is—we hazard a few guesses about the future of our hard-to-define, all-over-the-place, wonderfully eccentric and diverse Strand.

CERTAINTY: Decades from now two distinct yet sometimes intermingled groups of pleasure-seekers will still be coming to Myrtle Beach for the water and the sand . . . though one group would prefer to mix in some fairway once in a while. And they will continue to define the ethos, not to mention the commercial and financial muscle power, of Myrtle Beach.

Beachgoers and golfers. Golfers and beachgoers. Sun-worshippers have been trekking to Myrtle Beach since the dawn of the 20th century, and, since 1927, with the opening of Pine Lakes Country Club (which sits appropriately on Granddaddy Drive), the beaches and the courses have been the twin engines driving Myrtle tourism.

COROLLARY: Down the road, however, the number of Grand Strand golf courses will be reduced for a simple reason: The number of golfers has been reduced. This is not a Myrtle Beach problem; this is a golf problem, perhaps the golf problem.

The halcyon days of the late ’90s, when Tigermania was at its zenith and every entrepreneur with a regripped four-iron was opening a resort course, are long gone. Since 2000, there have been a dozen course closings in Myrtle Beach.

This is not necessarily bad news, say golf officials. Like many other golf destinations, Myrtle Beach is undergoing what Bob Seganti, the PGA director of golf operations for Caledonia Golf and Fish Club and True Blue Golf in Pawleys Island, calls a “healthy contraction.” The belief that the Strand was “overcoursed” seems unanimous up and down the 60 miles of fairways and greens.

“Companies and individuals were finding out that their properties were worth more for their real estate than for their golf course revenue,” says Dave Genevro, general manager at Barefoot Resort and Golf, in North Myrtle Beach. “Looking at the Strand as a whole, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

The Strand might take some care about closing too many courses, though, because there has been a 67% increase in the number of beginners (2.5 million) who played their first rounds of golf in 2016, compared with those who first played golf just five years earlier. The deflation that started when Tiger Woods slipped from the scene may have ended, and there are millions of Jordan Spieth–Dustin Johnson–Rickie Fowler fans who never cared or knew much about Tiger in the first place.

CERTAINTY: As part and parcel of its from-sea-to-green message, Myrtle Beach will continue to market itself as a “value destination,” there being no game plan to become Hilton Head or Kiawah Island. As Dennis Nicholl, head professional at The Dunes Golf and Beach Club, a Five-Star course that is known throughout the country, puts it, “There is nothing wrong with being known as a good-buy golf destination.”

COROLLARY: Take care with the designation because “value” should not be mistaken for “unsophisticated,” “status quo,” and, perhaps most of all, “domestic.” In a world that has become increasingly global, Myrtle Beach has to double down on its push to get into that game, which will only happen via the air.

In the last five years, improvements to Myrtle Beach International Airport (the terminal is now twice its former size) and an almost 100% increase in nonstop service (from 23 markets to 45) has, for the first time, pushed the number of arrivals to over one million passengers. Since 2016 alone, arrivals have increased 18%. “That is a significant number in the airline industry,” says Kirk Lovell, director of air service and business development for Horry County.

But even more could be done. Golfers aside, Myrtle has attracted hundreds of thousands of regional beachgoers over the decades, yet is not as well-known for beachgoing as similar-sized cities in Florida or California. Why not? Myrtle’s Atlantic is swimmable from April to November—February to December if you’re a Canadian tourist—so Myrtle Beach should strive to compete for beachgoers the way it does for golfers.

CERTAINTY: The area’s population will continue to rise dramatically as it has for the past several decades, making the Grand Strand an integral part of what amounts to a great Southern migration; the lure of a warmer climate, less expensive real estate, lower taxes and a more reasonable cost of living are all magnets to pull folks from the northern climes. From 2014 through ’15, in fact, only The Villages, Fla., grew faster than the Grand Strand.

The most accurate Census Bureau projections have been for the counties of Horry and Brunswick, and their numbers are nothing less than staggering. In 1990 that population was about 195,000, which has grown to about 449,295 now, which is expected to leap to about 639,000 by 2027, a 130% rate of growth. That can only be good news for a tourist-based economy with a large seasonal workforce.

COROLLARY: That population will move, by and large, along the major transportation corridors, such as the Carolina Forest community adjacent to Highway 501 between Conway and Myrtle Beach, where affordable land is available to provide housing to accommodate growth. “The growth looks like a T,” says Rob Salvino, a Coastal Carolina University economics professor who studies area trends, “where Highway 17 parallels the coast, and 501 bisects and runs away from the coast.”

CERTAINTY: The majority—hard to say if it will be “vast” but it will probably be “sizable”—of the new populace will gather in planned communities (Carolina Forest is an example) that reflect a trend toward “suburbanization,” present not only in the South but all over the country. These communities will look for sustainability, green solutions and planned outdoor recreation in the form of bike paths, hiking trails and the like. In that respect, Myrtle Beach is not unlike other “active” communities around the U.S., such as Boise, Idaho and Boulder, Colo. A recent New York Times story tracked that trend, noting that in such communities, lot sizes are smaller, paving is reduced up to 50% and thought is even given to “plant-to-pavement ratio.”

COROLLARY: If the full positive impact of that trend is to be felt, however, the Wild West aspect of the Strand’s governance might have to change. The South—Myrtle Beach is no exception—grew up with few municipal designations, largely because population density was thin. There are only eight recognized municipalities along the 60 miles of the Strand; by contrast, the Boston area has 180. To point out just one example, Murrells Inlet, which straddles the line between Horry and Georgetown counties and is integral to life in the southern part of the Strand as well as a draw for folks even up in North Carolina, is an unincorporated community.

A certain we’re-our-own-boss spirit goes along with this, of course, and nobody is saying that 180 municipal designations does not sometimes result in noisy stasis. But over-unincorporation can have deleterious effects for governance, too. Counties along the Strand are disproportionately large (Horry is the largest county in South Carolina and the sixth-largest east of the Mississippi) and disproportionately important, charged as they are with governing large geographical areas and population bases.

With growing population, the most vexing problems that face municipal officials are not the sexy ones. They are things like water runoff, highway and road construction, bridge maintenance and other infrastructure issues, vexations that cross community lines and require bonded cooperation.

Plus, “suburbanization” also requires “connectivity,” municipalities working together on traffic plans, bike trails, hiking paths, joint entertainment ventures. The more the communities along the Strand can link together for branding opportunities, while retaining their distinct character, the more attractive life in these new communities will be.

In this area, the movers, shakers and decision-makers can look to golf for guidance. While there is certainly competition for the golfing dollar, Strand courses have traditionally shown unusual cooperation, recognizing Myrtle Beach Golf as, in one respect, a single brand. “We’re almost Yankees way up here,” says Barefoot’s Genevro with a smile, “but we want everybody to succeed. The better Caledonia does, the better we do. That’s how we look at it.”

CERTAINTY: The look and feel—call it the ambience—of Strand golf will be different. There has long been, to be sure, a casualness to Myrtle Beach golf, which grew up with a bro-and-brew sensibility. But even the Five-Star courses might relax a little in terms of dress code, golfing options (nine holes, perhaps even six) and especially music on the course. (Golf’s early war against cellphones has been all but lost since many golfers use them for shot measurement.) Golf officials have been surprised to find that it’s not just young golfers who want to blast Drake to ease their frustration; increasingly, senior citizens are likely to crush their nine-woods with Buffett in the background.

Along with this, the non-golfing amenities (swimming, tennis, child-care resources) at the large resort clubs will continue to improve because, more and more, families are moving to golf resorts for reasons other than golf. That speaks to golf’s overall numbers problem, of course, but also provides opportunities for the residential clubs.

COROLLARY: The push to lure the young is a major part of golf’s relaxation game. The message throughout the Strand, nay, throughout the golf world, is this: We want you and your buddies to keep coming down just like you always have, Old-Timer. But what we really want are your sons, your daughters and your grandkids.

But efforts to recruit the young golfer have not been all that successful. Of the nearly 24 million golfers in the U.S., only about 12% are “Junior Golfers,” defined as players six to 17. Myrtle Beach finds itself squarely in the middle of the dilemma. By marketing itself as a sports-tourism destination, it is highlighting the very activities that are taking away the young golfer—travel baseball, year-round soccer, AAU hoops and the like. With a 12-month-a-year immersion in sports, many kids don’t have time to pursue an activity that requires four hours, avid concentration and a collared shirt. More and more kids never get introduced to the game, far less play it on a regular basis. Says the Dunes Club’s Nicholl, who spends many of his weekends trekking around the state and points beyond with two soccer-playing teenagers, “I’m a PGA professional, and I am part of the reason why golf is not moving. My kids have access to golf facilities and the best equipment, and they don’t have a minute to play.”

But there is another way to look at that problem. About one-quarter of all golfers in the U.S. are women, and one-third of juniors taking up the game are female. Then, too, while Tigermania seemingly failed to make much of a difference on the pro tour, the number of non-Caucasians in the junior golf population has tripled from just 6% in 1995 to 27% today. Golf officials up and down the Strand confirm that they are seeing more and more trips for female golfers, and Myrtle’s appeal to minorities has always been strong.

It would be nice to put the following premise under CERTAINTY: Over the next two decades Myrtle Beach’s rapid population growth will attract millennials at the same rate that it attracts those born before 1978, generally considered the cutoff.

But we can’t. The positive news about Myrtle Beach’s population growth was accompanied by the reality that millennials, who represent spending power and a more secure economic future, are by and large not part of the Southern migration. And the reasons they are not coming speaks to the core issues of Myrtle Beach’s future. Namely:

• That major connector to the Interstate, which has been an ongoing battle for more than 30 years.

• A revived downtown that must include something on the empty lots downtown, near the boardwalk and near the Myrtle Beach Convention Center.

So let’s put it as BIG MAYBE: An influx of millennials, reacting to a combination of market forces and lifestyle, will reenergize the Grand Strand.

COROLLARY: The climate/lifestyle advantages that are drawing active seniors are also appealing to millennials. While your average 25-year-old doesn’t go gaga at, say, the pastoral hiking path of a planned community, there is nevertheless ample reason to believe that he or she will move there. According to the latest Census Bureau statistics, 25- to 29-year-olds are about a quarter more likely to move from the city to the suburbs as vice versa.

So the problem isn’t getting millennials to find a place to live and love when they get down here; the problem is getting them down here. To get them down here, they need jobs. To get them jobs, Myrtle Beach needs major companies to open hubs, taking advantage of the proximity to Savannah, Charleston and Atlanta. And to lure major companies, Myrtle Beach needs a major connector road instead of a 90-minute drive just to get to I-95.

“The fact that we’ve grown so much without an interstate suggests something powerful if we do get one,” says Salvino. But the key word in that sentence remains if.

The permits to build the connector road are in place, but one thing—one predictable thing—is holding it up: funding. Horry County officials have all but given up on the prospect of receiving federal help, but by the end of 2018 the monies may be in place from local sources to build the road. That would come as a great relief to both locals and tourists, who since 1996 have been paying a 1.5% “hospitality fee” (tax on lodging, entertainment, restaurants, etc.). Gary Loftus, the director of the Grant Center for Real Estate and Economic Development at Coastal Carolina, estimates that the county would have between $400 million and $500 million bonded for a project that would cost between $1 billion and $1.5 billion. “That’s a good beginning,” says Loftus. “We realized if we don’t do it, nobody else will.”

Representative Tom Rice, who says that the I-73 construction project “has been my top priority since I got to Congress,” believes that as many as 22,000 permanent jobs and 7,700 temporary jobs would be generated when the road is built. Beyond what I-73 would do for ease of travel, it would also provide what many consider a crucial hurricane evacuation route.

Connecting millennials to a reenergized downtown seems, on the one hand, to be a bit of a stretch. By and large, they would live in the suburbs, find their own places to hang, create their own music spots at Murrells Inlet. But there is something about that section of Myrtle Beach—the SkyWheel, the Gay Dolphin Gift Shop, the tongue-in-cheek signs at The Bowery (HOT BEER, LOUSY FOOD, BAD SERVICE), and the graceful serpentine sweep of the boardwalk with the sea oats waving beside it—that represents the beating heart of the entire Strand.

Sure, there is the perception in some circles that downtown is overcrowded in the summer months and sleepy from December to April. But city fathers insist that statistics showing Myrtle Beach among the most “dangerous” cities of its size in the country do not take into account that 15 million more people are added during the peak season, and that as many as 500,000 souls might be downtown on any given summer night. Something is going to happen in that percolated atmosphere, and, for violent crimes, Myrtle Beach’s numbers are actually quite low. Destinations that carry the stamp of TOURIST invariably figure high in crime statistics, places like Daytona Beach, Atlantic City and even the soggy lovers’ paradise of Niagara Falls.

So let’s say the perception of Myrtle Beach’s downtown gets better—remember that millennials are less inclined to worry about crime metrics anyway. The year-round populace still needs a reason to come downtown, visitors still need a reason to stay downtown when beach time is over, millennials still need a reason to say All right, there’s something happening down there, and downtown still needs a lure during the winter months when beachgoers and golfers are not around. The key to that is putting a unifying structure on the downtown lots, where all that stands right now are zip lines, the symbolism too rich to ignore: They take you on a short journey to nowhere.

City and tourist officials, of course, thirst for the opportunity to do something with the lots. But both are privately owned by Burroughs & Chapin, a real estate giant that has been an economic force along the Strand for more than a century. Jim Apple, the CEO of B&C, declined to be interviewed or respond to a list of questions, so what the lots’ owners are thinking is a mystery.

Over the years there has been talk about an International Trade Center, talk about expanding the nearby convention center via an overhead walkway and talk about an arena that was eventually built at ever-growing Coastal Carolina University, which has doubled in size in the last 15 years and shows no signs of stopping.

But there the lots sit, ripe for an amphitheater or musical venue that lures visitors, instills pride in locals and plugs into Myrtle Beach’s proud musical tradition. There’s a parking garage already in place, for heaven’s sake, so that’s one problem eliminated.

When you add a modern-day venue to the old-timey look of downtown Myrtle, Broadway at the Beach, TicketReturn.com Field (my kingdom for a better name on that beautiful little stadium, home of the minor league Myrtle Beach Pelicans), the music on Murrells, the weather, the golf and a vibrant economy fueled by a balanced population base, you have a heavy-hitting package that appeals to permanents and visitors.

And it does something else: It further realizes the promise of a half-century ago, when Grand Stranders, bowed but not broken by Hazel, envisioned a thoroughly modern Myrtle.

“Sure, there are many short-term issues that have to be resolved all up and down the Strand,” says Coastal Carolina’s Salvino. “But I am a long-range economist, and it is from that perspective that I consider the Grand Strand. And when I weigh everything together, I feel strongly positive about where we’re headed and what we can become.”

This article is part of the @MyrtleBeach Lifestyle series. If you’d like to get a FREE copy of our magazine mailed to you click here!