What locals are saying
Charleston is a city perpetually at war with its own appeal — the same cobblestone streets, pastel facades, and Lowcountry table that earned it twelve consecutive years as the country's top small city have also turned downtown into a tourist bottleneck that's pricing out the locals who made it worth visiting in the first place. King Street has shed generation-old independent shops in favor of chains and bachelorette traffic, and the peninsula's infrastructure — roads, transit, trash — strains visibly under the weight of 35 new residents arriving every single day. The real Charleston lives in the margins: Hampton Park's azalea-canopied silence, the Pitt Street Bridge causeway flanked by marsh and open harbor, the Gateway Walk threading through churchyards, or Cypress Gardens' cypress swamp you row through yourself — places that still feel like the city chose you, not the other way around.
