USC’s Growth Fuels Tensions with Columbia Neighborhoods

COLUMBIA — It’s an oft-heard sentiment around Columbia that there are two versions of the capital city: one with students in town and one without. That half-joking gap is only widening as the University of South Carolina enrollment continues to grow — along with its campus and student housing through the recent opening of the new Campus Village dorm complex and the planned purchase of two downtown office buildings.

The Campus Village project was intended to help fill the ever-increasing need for on-campus student housing, bringing 1,800 beds to the south side of USC’s campus when it opened in August 2023. But the four dorm buildings have also served as a flashpoint for Columbia residents who see the growth as harmful to neighborhood tranquility, suing USC and the city of Columbia in March over claims that the university reneged on promises to a trio of neighborhood associations just south of campus.

USC’s undergraduate student body has grown by more than 4,200 students in the past decade, up to 28,429 in the 2023-24 school year. Enrollment was 24,179 a decade prior. That’s a 17.6 percent increase, and it doesn’t appear to be stopping. The 2024-25 freshman class is expected to be similar in size to this year’s, according to spokesman Jeff Stensland, which was its largest ever.

Such growth has spurred an increase in student housing, according to data provided by USC, with the university increasing its offering of on-campus beds from 6,171 in 2013 to 9,445 in 2023. But even that 53 percent increase isn’t nearly enough to house the undergraduate body on campus, with most upperclassmen turning to the blocks of private apartments that are ubiquitous around much of Columbia.

Residents of the Wales Garden, Hollywood-Rose Hill, and Wheeler Hill neighborhoods have been concerned about the Campus Village project since before it housed a single resident, warning before its opening of “the herd” of students it would bring to their doorsteps. The three neighborhoods sit to the south of USC, effectively bridging the gap between campus to the north and Rosewood Avenue to the south.

Their anxieties hit the court system on March 26 in the form of a lawsuit alleging that residents’ fears of “students cruising the area looking for the nearest most convenient parking space” had been realized. That lawsuit — filed in Richland County court by resident Kit Smith and the three neighborhood associations against the university, its university architect, the city of Columbia, and its Planning Commission — asserts that the Planning Commission allowed USC to go back on documented promises to the neighborhood associations, bringing more residents and fewer parking spaces to the dorm complex.

Tensions between an expanding USC and Columbia neighborhoods aren’t new. As far back as the 1960s, as USC was coming to terms with its post-war, baby boom growth, residents of the tree-lined University Hill neighborhood to the campus’s immediate east pushed back against the university’s expansion their way, which became the now-iconic Capstone tower dorm.

But as tensions continue, Columbia city leaders are looking to potentially head off future friction. Council voted unanimously April 2 to approve the establishment of a Town and Gown Advisory Committee. That new committee will include representatives from city government divisions, the hospitality administration, some neighborhoods within a mile of a campus, and the administrations of the area’s colleges and universities.

After a “strategic planning session” to determine its exact focus, the committee will share regular reports with City Council.