"This was funded. We were ready to roll with this project." That's what Mount Pleasant's Assistant Town Administrator, Christiane Farrell, told Town Council in January about the Edwards Park Basin drainage upgrade, a project that had been fully designed and permitted before a federal grant vanished out from under it. If a project the town describes as ready to go can still be sitting in limbo more than a year later, a listing description calling a house "move-in ready" deserves a second look too.
Old Village sells itself well. Oak canopies, a walkable stretch along Pitt Street, harbor views, a history that goes back to 1803. What the listing photos and the median price on a portal search won't show you is that the neighborhood is cut by two lines that have nothing to do with curb appeal and everything to do with what you'll actually pay once you own the place. One line runs through the ground. The other runs through the county assessor's office. Knowing which side of each you're on matters more than the number on the sign.
A Project That Was Ready to Go
Old Village's stormwater system was mostly built in the mid-20th century, before modern drainage standards existed, and it shows every time a hard rain sits on Pitt Street. An ABC News 4 report quoted Old Village resident Ashley Graham describing a December 2023 storm that left "navigable water in Edwards Park and on Pitt Street," with flooding a couple of feet up at the intersection of Pitt and Ferry.
The town's response was the Edwards Park Basin project, covering roughly 136 to 138 acres and 434 parcels south and east of Moultrie Middle School. In 2021, Mount Pleasant won a $5.67 million federal grant through FEMA's Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program to cover most of the project's $8.8 million cost. The design was finished. The permits were issued. Then, in April 2025, the Trump administration ended the BRIC program entirely, canceling grants that had been in the pipeline since 2020, and Mount Pleasant's Edwards Park funding disappeared with it.
As of February 2026, the project was still on hold, and town engineering staff were pursuing a separate FEMA hazard mitigation grant while weighing whether to use town funds to move forward without waiting. In March 2026, FEMA signaled it planned to reinstate the frozen BRIC awards, but the timeline for when that money would actually reach Mount Pleasant remained undefined. That's not a rumor about future risk. It's a currently unresolved funding gap on a project the town already designed to fix a problem residents are already living with.
The Boundary the Listing Won't Draw
Here's the part that matters for a buyer specifically: Edwards Park isn't the whole neighborhood. It's one of 27 drainage basins the town studied, and the one right next to it, the Royall Avenue Basin, already got its fix. Mount Pleasant started a roughly $9.7 million drainage project there in 2022, and by 2026 that basin had been substantially improved, funded separately from the BRIC grant that later fell through.
That means two houses, both marketed as Old Village, both a short walk from Pitt Street, can sit on opposite sides of a funding line that has nothing to do with their age, condition, or price. One buyer inherits a drainage system the town already rebuilt. The other inherits a system the town designed, lost the money for, and is still trying to refund. A listing sheet will tell you the square footage and the lot size. It won't tell you which basin you're buying into, and that's a question worth asking the town's engineering department directly before you write an offer.
The Other Line Nobody Draws
South Carolina protects existing homeowners from sudden tax shocks through what's called the reassessment cap, which limits increases in a property's taxable value between countywide reassessments. Charleston County's 2025 reassessment reset values to reflect the market as of December 31, 2023, and it reset more than 190,000 properties across the county.
The cap is a genuine benefit if you already own the home. It is not a benefit if you're about to buy one. According to the Charleston County Assessor, properties that sell or transfer ownership don't qualify for the capped value. Your first tax bill as a new owner has no relationship to what the seller had been paying for years under the cap. As the Post and Courier put it in its own reassessment explainer, "the result is that long-time owners pay lower taxes than more recent buyers of similar homes."
Stack that on top of the assessment ratio itself. Owner-occupied primary residences are taxed on 4% of assessed value. Second homes, rentals, and investment purchases are taxed at 6%. That's true everywhere in the county, but it lands harder in a neighborhood where thin inventory and high demand mean buyers are often stepping in after a seller who's owned the home for a decade or more under a capped value that hasn't caught up to the current market. The gap between what the seller was paying and what you'll pay isn't a rounding error. It's the whole point of the mechanism.
What the Median Actually Measures Here
There's a reason Old Village's quoted median price bounces around so much depending on which quarter or which source you check. Redfin recorded just four home sales in Old Village Historic District in May 2026, down from five the year before, with a median sale price of $4.1 million, up 165.9% from the same period a year earlier. Compare that to I'On, the newer master-planned neighborhood a short drive away, which saw 15 sales in that same month at a median of $2.2 million, up a more modest 7.5% year over year.
A number built on four transactions isn't measuring the neighborhood's value. It's measuring which four houses happened to close. If your budget or your pre-approval is anchored to a headline median you saw quoted for Old Village, you're anchored to a number that can swing by triple digits depending on whether a handful of harbor-front estates or a couple of smaller cottages happened to sell that month.
What This Means If You're Comparing Old Village to Newer Mount Pleasant Neighborhoods
None of this means Old Village is a bad place to buy. It means the sticker price comparison to somewhere like I'On or Carolina Park is incomplete without two additional questions: what will my actual tax bill look like the year after closing, and which drainage basin does this specific parcel sit in. Newer, planned communities built in the last two decades were designed to current stormwater standards from day one, so this particular friction is largely specific to Old Village's older infrastructure and its unusually active resale market. That's not a strike against the neighborhood. It's just a cost that shows up after closing instead of on the listing sheet, and it's worth pricing in before you're the one paying it.
A Few Questions Worth Asking Directly
Before you write an offer on an Old Village home, it's worth getting direct answers rather than assuming they'll sort themselves out at closing.
- How long has the current owner held title? A longer hold usually means a bigger gap between their capped tax bill and what yours will look like after transfer.
- Which drainage basin is this parcel in, Edwards Park or Royall Avenue? The town's engineering department can confirm this, and it's a different answer depending on which side of Moultrie Middle School you're on.
- Has FEMA's planned BRIC reinstatement produced an actual funded timeline for Edwards Park, or is it still open-ended? That status changes month to month right now.
- How would the 4% owner-occupied assessment ratio compare with the 6% non-primary rate if this is a second home?
These aren't questions a listing photo answers. A town engineer can answer the basin question, a county assessor can answer the tax question, and we are glad to help you sort out which answers matter most for the home you're considering.
If you're weighing an Old Village purchase against another Mount Pleasant neighborhood and want the real numbers, not just the median, Rose Gold Properties can walk through what a specific parcel's tax reset and basin status actually look like before you make an offer.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
