Center Street Reopens on Folly Beach the Same Month Its Rental Cap Falls Apart
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
Lesley Lewis has spent most of this year working longer hours to make what she used to make in a couple of hours. She owns Hot Pursuit Donuts, and for most of the summer, getting to her shop meant picking a path through construction fencing, excavators, and the kind of dust that settles on everything within a block of Center Street. A few doors down, an employee at Native Boutique named Rebecca Blake has been closing out the register every night and comparing the numbers to the year before. They have been, in her words, significantly less.
That was the mood on the island's only road in and out for most of 2026. It is worth understanding exactly what caused it, because the project that caused it is now finishing, and something else that has shaped the rental market on Folly Beach for three years just came apart at almost the same time. One of those changes is visible from the sidewalk. The other one is not, and it matters more.
The Center Street Stormwater Infrastructure Improvements Project has been the real headline of 2026 for anyone who lives, works, or parks near downtown Folly. City Administrator Aaron Pope has called it the largest and costliest stormwater improvement since the original pipes went in, some sections dating to the 1940s. The new pipes being installed are roughly triple the size of what they're replacing, which is the point: Center Street floods during ordinary summer rainstorms paired with high tide, and the old system couldn't move the water fast enough.
The city's contractor, Gulf Stream Construction, offered what Public Works Director Eric Lutz called an "optimistic" twelve-month timeline earlier this year, after the city had originally planned for eighteen. Weather delays and utility conflicts stretched that further. As of early September, the city's own construction updates describe the remaining work as transitioning from underground infrastructure to paving, streetscape improvements, and final finishes: Powerblock pavers and bioretention rain gardens on the east end, new sidewalks and streetscaping heading toward West Arctic on the west end, Dominion Energy swapping out streetlights, asphalt paving that went down in early August. What's left is the kind of work you finish, not the kind you build.
That is genuinely good news for anyone who has navigated the intersection at Center Street and Arctic Avenue this year. It is also, on its own, not the most interesting thing happening to the block right now.
Here is the part that surprised me when I dug into it. Mayor Chris Bizzell has pointed out that the traffic counter on the bridge onto the island logged more cars coming and going this year than at the same point last year. Occupancy rates on Folly home rentals, according to AirDNA data the mayor cited, were also slightly up despite the construction. Pope has said much the same thing about vehicle counts: consistent with previous seasons.
None of that describes what Lewis or Blake experienced. And that's not a contradiction so much as a scale problem. The island-wide numbers measure whether people crossed the bridge and whether a house rented for the week. They don't measure whether a visitor who crossed that bridge could find parking near Center Street, or whether they gave up and turned toward the beach access a few blocks over instead of walking past the barrels to a specific shop. Richard Brendel, who owns Flipper Finders, a boat tour and kayak rental business right where visitors first arrive on the island, put it plainly: when you add construction on top of an already unfamiliar layout, tourists don't know where to go. He said his own bookings held up mostly because they came in ahead of time online or by phone, not from anyone walking up, and that he used the slower walk-up traffic this year to remodel the shop.
So the island did fine. The two blocks that make up its commercial core, for a good stretch of the year's busiest season, did not. That distinction is easy to miss if you only read the traffic counter, and it's the whole story if you own a storefront on Center Street.
While Center Street was being rebuilt, the legal foundation underneath Folly Beach's short-term rental cap was being taken apart in a different way, and the timing is worth laying out because it hasn't settled the way most residents probably assume.
In February 2026, the South Carolina Court of Appeals rejected a challenge from Folly East Indian Co., a rental property company owned by island residents Richard D. Brendel and Michael J. Riffert. Their argument was that the cap functioned as an illegal zoning change. The court disagreed, ruling that the cap regulates business licenses, not zoning, and the 800-license limit on investor-owned short-term rentals stood.
Then, on August 14, a different legal theory succeeded where that one had failed. Circuit Judge Thomas J. Rode, ruling in two separate cases brought by Park Lane Partners LLC and Elizabeth Stuart Cooper, and by Thomas Jermyn, found that the cap had been improperly enacted through a citizen referendum rather than through city council, and that the rental registration fee funding it amounted to an unlawful tax rather than a service fee. The cap that survived a zoning challenge in February was struck down on a procedural one in August, on the same ordinance, within the same year.
The city is appealing. In the meantime, council voted 4 to 1 to approve a temporary moratorium on new short-term rental license applications, a pause that runs until the city's own regulatory study wraps or until 2027, whichever comes first, with narrow exemptions for renewals, waitlist offers, and a handful of applications filed in the days right after the ruling. An automatic stay tied to the appeal has kept the old cap functionally in place for now, but the legal ground under it has shifted twice in six months.
For a rental market that had 1,125 short-term rental properties on the books at the time voters approved the cap in 2023, accounting for 43 percent of the island's housing stock, and roughly 200 households still sitting on a waitlist that hasn't moved in years, this is not a settled question. It's a moving one, and it's moving at the same time the barrels are finally coming off Center Street.
Once the paving wraps, the city has said it wants to mark the occasion with an islandwide celebration, though a date hadn't been set as of early September. In the meantime, the fall calendar that's already locked in gives residents plenty of reason to be downtown regardless of how the barrels situation resolves:
Both will be the first major events to play out on a fully repaved Center Street since the project began, assuming the timeline holds through the fall.
The thing worth sitting with is that Center Street's construction had a start date, a budget, and now, close enough, an end date. The rental cap doesn't have any of those. It has an appeal in progress, a moratorium with an expiration written into it, and a regulatory study that could reshape the rules again before 2027 arrives. One of these stories is finishing. The other one is just entering its next round.
If you're trying to figure out what any of this actually means for a specific block, a specific listing, or a specific plan you've got for the island, that's the kind of question worth a real conversation rather than a guess based on a headline. You can also keep an eye on what's changing through our Folly Beach neighborhood page. Daniel Tsveer has spent his career following exactly this kind of local detail across the Lowcountry, and Daniel Tsveer Properties is always glad to talk through what it means for you. Let's Connect.
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