Attractive but unaffordable, Mt. Pleasant is pushing out its working class
For LuAnn Rosenzweig, watching her Mt. Pleasant home triple in value has been nothing short of jaw-dropping.
Not because she’s looking to cash in on her property any time soon, but because the skyrocketing listing price was not something the retired speech pathologist expected when she bought her Molasses Creek home in 1991 for $236,000.
“We would never be able to afford this home if we were moving in today,” Rosenzweig said. “We fortunately moved in before the big housing boom.”
When it comes to Mt. Pleasant, serious discussions about livability and gentrification often take a backseat to the town’s white picket fence milieu. The town’s 87,000 residents aren’t just Whole Foods regulars who can afford million-dollar homes. They’re also multi-generational African-American homeowners attempting to preserve their family legacies, or young professionals in the region’s booming tech and hospitality industries paying inflated rents for bedrooms near their jobs.
