Entitlement pathway election — South Carolina

One statute, both governments: the Local Government Comprehensive Planning Enabling Act of 1994

South Carolina's zoning enabling law is a single chapter that applies identically to municipalities and counties: the South Carolina Local Government Comprehensive Planning Enabling Act of 1994, codified at South Carolina Code of Laws Title 6, Chapter 29 (1994 Act No. 355). A "local planning commission" under the Act can be a municipal commission, a county commission, a joint city-county commission, or a consolidated-government commission, and a municipality may designate the county planning commission to act as its own by ordinance. Once a local planning commission has prepared, and the governing body has adopted, at least the land-use element of a comprehensive plan, that governing body -- city or county, the statute draws no distinction -- may adopt a zoning ordinance to implement it (Section 6-29-720(A)).

The Act gives local governments an explicit menu of zoning techniques to choose from without treating the choice as beyond their power if unused: floating zones, performance zoning, planned development districts, overlay zones, and conditional uses are all named directly in Section 6-29-720(C). Nonconformities may be continued, restored, or phased out on a schedule the local ordinance sets (Section 6-29-730), and planned development districts can vary from standard zoning requirements to accommodate flexible, mixed-use site plans once adopted by ordinance (Section 6-29-740).

State agencies, and any local government using property inside another jurisdiction, are themselves generally subject to local zoning under Section 6-29-770 -- with one carve-out worth knowing if a project includes a licensed group-home component: a home serving nine or fewer mentally or physically handicapped persons, licensed or approved by a state agency, is exempt from local zoning entirely, and no variance or special exception may be required for it. If a local government objects to a proposed site for such a home, the statute runs its own fast, binding process -- objection within 15 days, a jointly selected third arbitrator, and a final site decision by majority vote within 45 days, with the siting entity free to pick its own site if no selection is reached in time.

SC Housing's zoning threshold: in place by full application, no cure period, and no home-rule wrinkle to check first

Threshold Section IV.C of the 2026 QAP requires "proof of proper zoning being in place at the time of application submission, including approval of all necessary special/conditional uses," typically evidenced by a letter from the relevant City or County official confirming current compliance. Because the QAP defines "application" to mean the full application unless otherwise specified, the operative deadline is the full application date -- May 11-15, 2026 for the 2026 cycle -- not the earlier preliminary application date. This research found no scored or threshold-level alternative in the 2026 QAP for describing a planned future rezoning as a substitute for zoning already being in place, for any credit type; the posture is binary, the same way it is in states like Georgia that lack a cure period for this specific threshold, even though South Carolina reaches that result through an ordinary state enabling statute rather than a constitutional home-rule reservation.

That structural simplicity is itself worth naming: South Carolina does not have the constitutional question Georgia's guide raises about whether the state could legislate a statewide zoning override at all. The Local Government Comprehensive Planning Enabling Act is an ordinary General Assembly statute, not a constitutionally reserved local power, which means the Assembly could in principle amend it -- but this research found no pending or enacted South Carolina zoning-preemption legislation analogous to a Live Local Act, and none should be assumed without checking the current legislative session directly.

The procedural clock, and two different limitations periods that are easy to conflate

A board of zoning appeals is optional but standard practice under Section 6-29-780 -- three to nine members serving staggered three-to-five-year terms, with joint boards available where local governments share a planning commission and a common ordinance. Section 6-29-800 gives the board the power to hear appeals of administrative decisions, grant variances and special exceptions, and remand or stay proceedings; Section 6-29-825's pre-litigation mediation option, added in 2003, gives a property owner an alternative to going straight to circuit court, conducted under the state's Circuit Court Alternative Dispute Resolution Rules.

South Carolina's own Housing Tax Credit: gap financing, not a percentage match, capped at $20 million

South Carolina Code Section 12-6-3795 -- titled the "Workforce and Senior Affordable Housing Act" when originally enacted by 2020 Act No. 137 (H.3998), effective May 14, 2020 -- created the South Carolina housing tax credit (the QAP's own "STC"). As first enacted, credits allocated under the statute ran far ahead of their original fiscal estimate: preliminary eligibility determinations through the end of 2021 totaled roughly $100 million a year and an estimated $1 billion over the credit's ten-year term, against an original ten-year estimate of about $20.6 million. 2022 Act No. 202 (H.5075), Section 1.A, effective May 16, 2022, rewrote the statute in response, and the version this research read directly from the South Carolina Code -- the current, in-force text -- reflects that rewrite.

The rewritten statute is explicit that the STC is gap financing, not a percentage match: it must "supplement but not supplant the federal housing tax credit and must be limited to an amount necessary only to achieve financial feasibility of the project" (Section 12-6-3795(B)(5)(a)). On top of that feasibility ceiling, the statute imposes a hard statewide dollar cap: "the total amount of all South Carolina housing tax credits that may be allocated in any calendar year must not exceed twenty million dollars," plus any unallocated credits carried forward from prior years and any recaptured, revoked, or canceled amounts not yet reallocated (Section 12-6-3795(B)(5)(b)). SC Housing's own Appendix C3 (State LIHTC) confirms the practical effect of the next layer of that cap for 2026: no more than 40 percent of the $20 million base -- $8 million -- may go to 9%-credit-track projects, with at least half of that specifically reserved for USDA-rural-eligible developments and the remainder split among senior/special-needs housing, SC Department of Commerce-certified workforce-development projects, and other projects; the remaining $12 million effectively supports tax-exempt bond (4%) track projects. Because unallocated and recaptured amounts carry forward, the actual dollars available in a given year can exceed $20 million -- SC Housing's own materials list $26,702,193 in State LIHTCs available for 2026.

That statutory public hearing is a distinct, third process -- not the same thing as a local rezoning hearing under Title 6, Chapter 29, and not the same thing as a federal TEFRA hearing for the bonds behind a 4% deal. Section 12-6-3795(C)(3) itself requires SC Housing to give written notice to the county and city where a project sits, then hold a public hearing no less than ten business days after notice, then give the county and city a further ten business days to comment -- all subject to review and comment by the General Assembly's Joint Bond Review Committee, and built into the QAP itself as Appendix C3 implements. A developer pursuing the state credit should expect three separate notice-and-comment processes to potentially run in parallel on the same project -- local zoning, the STC's own statutory hearing, and (for a bond deal) TEFRA -- not one.

Who actually issues the bonds -- and who allocates the ceiling that lets them

For a 4% credit deal, the federal Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) hearing requirement under 26 U.S.C. Section 147(f) applies regardless of who the conduit issuer is -- but South Carolina does not concentrate that role in a single entity the way some states do. SC Housing itself is the most direct and most common issuer for LIHTC-linked multifamily housing revenue bonds processed through the QAP's own Tax-Exempt Bond program (Appendix C2), and it conducts its own TEFRA public hearings directly, publishing notices such as those found on schousing.sc.gov for specific projects. But this research also confirmed at least two other active issuer paths in South Carolina: the South Carolina Jobs-Economic Development Authority (JEDA), a statewide conduit issuer created in 1983 that has issued exempt facility bonds for qualified residential rental projects under 26 U.S.C. Section 142(a)(7) -- including a $98,355,000 issuance for the Foothill Affordable Housing Foundation's acquisition of two Richland County communities -- and individual local public housing authorities, such as the Housing Authority of the City of Columbia, which can serve as the named "Issuer" on its own multifamily housing revenue bonds and conduct its own TEFRA hearing. Which entity is issuing determines who publishes the TEFRA notice and, in principle, which elected official's approval satisfies Section 147(f) -- a fact worth confirming for the specific issuer chosen on a given deal rather than assuming SC Housing is always the counterparty.

Bond issuance capacity and the state's private-activity-bond volume cap are two different things administered by two different bodies. The volume cap itself -- the "state ceiling" on private activity bonds under 26 U.S.C. Section 146 -- is calculated and certified annually, and allocated among competing issuing authorities, by the State Fiscal Accountability Authority (SFAA) under South Carolina Code Section 1-11-500 et seq. (Title 1, Chapter 11, Article 3), not by SC Housing. SC Housing, JEDA, or a local housing authority must each separately request an allocation from SFAA's own annual State Ceiling Allocation Plan before it can actually issue tax-exempt bonds for a specific deal; the state statute is explicit that nothing in that allocation process creates any right to a particular outcome, and SFAA's decisions on it are final and not subject to judicial or administrative review. Section 12-6-3795(B)(5)(e) ties this directly back to the state housing tax credit: even a project that otherwise qualifies for STC on the 4% track is conditioned on "availability and allocation to the extent necessary" of state ceiling under that same Title 1 process.

Put together, a South Carolina 4% deal's entitlement pathway runs through at least four distinct approvals that a developer could otherwise assume are one and the same: local zoning approval under Title 6, Chapter 29; SC Housing's own QAP threshold and (if applicable) STC statutory hearing under Section 12-6-3795; a state-ceiling allocation from SFAA under Title 1, Chapter 11; and a TEFRA hearing conducted by whichever entity -- SC Housing, JEDA, or a local housing authority -- ultimately issues the bonds. None of these four processes is a substitute for another, and this research did not find a single South Carolina agency that coordinates all four into one filing.