Conversation w/ Doug in Columbia about Charleston

00:00 I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. 00:27 For spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties. 00:59 share his grace on thee. 01:21 America is back. Yes, sir. Let's go to the WRD talk line. We'll talk to Doug in Columbus about Charleston. disagrees with me. Doug, what's on your mind? Hey, good afternoon. Yes, sir. I lived in the Mount Pleasant area north of the city of Charleston for 33 years. Recently moved 01:41 Columbus retired, by the way. um And I disagree with your comment about there must be something that's gone wrong in people's lives for them to want to move to Charleston. Now, I know that you lived there for a while and you like six, eight years ago, whatever it is, but people don't flood into an area unless there's opportunity and jobs. And so I'm going to name a couple that I'm sure you're familiar with. 02:10 Yep. Boeing, Volvo, NewCorp Steel, Mercedes-Benz, the medical university. Every hospital chain down there is expanding and it's all based on population coming in. Now that's not to say that there aren't problems, but my biggest problem and the biggest reason I left Mount Pleasant is that my lifestyle changed, the traffic was heavy and I retired. 02:37 Yeah, and they weren't able to keep up with that. when you look at it now, I understand all of those industries you're talking about, and that's a lot of people. A lot of those are over in Somerville, North Charleston area, the nicer places, places like that. But if you get downtown, and that is just that is from my 10 years of experience of living in Charleston, that those people, by and large, that went to Charleston not for a job, 03:07 not because they had a job but the people that that i met that were there they were running away from something it's a great place to run away to but unfortunately they took their problems with them well i i didn't meet a lot of people downtown i built houses for thirty seven almost thirty three years more like twenty seven construction so i met people that moved there from all over the united states right 03:34 um Now, I will say that the volume of high-rise buildings in the downtown area has gotten absolutely ridiculous. Yeah. And I disagree with it. I'm not inclined to stand in the way of progress, but it's just like any other um popular place, whether it's a restaurant, a college uh that is 04:03 popular for a lot of reasons and people are drawn to it. Now, I'd like to add that it's been my experience just through watching the local news that the crime rate in the Greenville-Spartanburg area is, in my opinion, potentially twice what it was in the Charleston area. I don't know how many people live in the Greenville-Spartanburg area. I can guess that in the Metro Charleston area, there's at least a half a million now. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe over. 04:32 I'm pretty shocked at the amount of shootings and carjackings that hit the news here every single day. Well, see, that's ... I'll tell you why, Doug, because those things make news here. How many shootings do they have down in North Charleston? That's just a daily occurrence down there. That doesn't even make the news. Well, yeah, it does. No, it doesn't. 04:59 if you listen to talk radio down there or or if you're what's all we would want to radio down there it's been a while since i've uh... paid attention to it but there is none up night well used to be when i left three years ago there was three years ago what station did you listen to down there i think it was uh... i mean i can't remember that letters but it was there was ninety four point something or not three points they don't have a local talk show anymore 05:28 Well, okay. Neither does the other one. They've got nothing down there. But let's get back to what you talked about, about the skyline, about the high-rise buildings down there. If you've got a city who is famous for its skyline, why would you want to ruin the skyline by putting all of these high-rises up? There used to be a law that no building could be taller than the highest church steeple. Well, they've abandoned that. Yeah. mean, as progress moved north, 05:58 Tours more Charleston the eyelines went up now. I would have to say at the same time uh And you can argue both sides of the fence the rundown houses in off meeting Street and certainly north of Calhoun that were a bit of a blight for years and years and years a lot of those are gone now and So you can say well what would we do we replace it with something new and taller and 06:28 everything's gotten more expensive. do you know, mean, Doug, do you know why those old houses were so run down? Of course I do. Okay, why? Well, part of it was because people couldn't afford to rebuild them uh in the ways that architectural review requires in some cases. 06:50 You could have rebuilt those houses if the ARB, the architectural review board in the historical section of Charleston, wasn't so stringent on what materials you had. You had to use original materials. Well, I know that. How do you find that? You could have a termite infested building that's being propped up and braced up. Yeah. And uh you would be in big trouble if you tore it down or modified it in six months. However, 07:19 If it fell down, that was okay, but you couldn't have it demolished. You're right about that, Doug. I appreciate your call. Thank you very much. So I just got back from Rhode Island and Connecticut, went over to Stonington Borough in Connecticut. again, I got to tell you, the whole time I was there, literally the entire, what, three days, three and a half days I was there, I didn't see one black person. 07:49 Now saw a lot of signs that said Black Lives Matter, but I didn't see any black people. right. So I had to tell some relatives there, they're big liberals up there and they were talking about African Americans. said, have seen, I said there are more black people in my neighborhood than there are in this town. So please tell me how black lives matter here. Well, they don't. Okay. So anyway, but I was listening to some of the stories from Connecticut. They are going to 08:17 start that they tax everything, everything. Now they're going to start taxing soda, sweetened, unsweetened, and powdered soft drinks. They're to start taxing them at two pennies per ounce, two pennies an ounce. And then another crazy story that I heard was, you know, a lot of people into recycling, they'll take their aluminum cans, they'll take them to the recycling center. 08:48 And if you take more than a thousand pounds, which is a lot, but if you take more than a thousand pounds of aluminum to a recycling center, you know what you have to show? No, you just got to show. You got to show your ID. You got to show an ID if you take more than a thousand pounds. Now to vote, no, they don't want you to do that, but you want to recycle a thousand pounds of aluminum cans, you got to show that ID for whatever reason. 09:15 was a couple of bills here in South Carolina. want you to be aware of, did you know that we tax bingo here in South Carolina? We do. There is a bingo tax per bingo card here in South Carolina. I'm not kidding, JJ. I'm not getting, JJ is in there just shaking his head. I'm not kidding. We tax bingo. We tax everything here in South Carolina. um So 09:42 Remember that when you go to the polls about everything is taxed. We've got a couple of bills I want you to know about. S-922. S-922 has passed its third reading and this will include removing Dr. Simmer as the interim director of the health department. I think that would take place May 1st. It's either sometime in April or May 1st. I think that would be a good idea. That guy's got to get going. 10:10 And there's another bill that would ban drag shows for kids here in South Carolina. Isn't it weird that we live in a state and we live in a time to where we actually have a bill, have to have a bill to ban drag shows with children in attendance? That to me blows my mind. I hope both of those bills pass. 10:39 And meanwhile, we're out there taxing bingo cards. We'll be right back. It's the Charlie James show. News Talk 98.9, WOD, the voice of the Carolinas.