The big explosion in this area got stymied by the Great Recession. However, despite the current situation, or maybe because of it, our area is seeing a big surge in home building. We're a retirement location for many people from Ohio and the NY-NJ area. Since March, we've started to see a stream of more people from the NY-NJ area. Take that info how you want. In most cases, people's retirement savings goes a lot longer down here than up there. That's created a secondary boom in the Medical industry. We've had all kinds of hospital/surgical/general practice/therapy etc etc services grow with even more planned. Most of that growth began centered around Hwy 17 along the coast, but having some serious hurricanes, along with one that required a Herculean effort from our National Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the bridge over said closed electrical plant open (we're talking driving one lane each way with 10-15 foot high sandbag barriers to keep the flooded lake at bay) has cause a shift to construction further out, on the Conway side of the river.

As far as CCU's growth, well previously I had talked about us not getting the support from the state like other schools? We had to get with the folks of Horry County to grow. It started with the fact that our roads were horrible. They're better now even if not completely perfect, but that's down to an idea people had to do a local option sales tax of $0.01. A Penny tax (but not on groceries or things like that) which would be used for specific road projects. We're currently in phase 4 I think of that. Well some other folks had the idea that due to do something similar for the public schools. The rapid growth our area was seeing caused a lot of crowding in our schools and we just weren't getting the resources to handle it. So they did a public schools sales tax. But that didn't fly because of some legal technicalities. So they reworked it so that the public school system got the lion's share of proceeds and CCU and Horry-Georgetown Technical College would get a portion as well.

With that penny tax money going strictly for new building or renovation. So numerous academic buildings as well as housing sprung up enabling CCU to grow from almost 5000 students in 2001 to over 10,000 students now. I will note that none of that penny tax money was used for the renovation of our stadium to get it to the NCAA required 20,000+ seats. As CCU grew, so did the businesses around us.

I also would like to add that CCU has an amazing PGA certified Professional Golf Management program as well as our own golf course.