Georgetown County, SC

Built environment | 2026

Examining inequities in wastewater infrastructure to inform investments and strengthen community resilience.

As descendants of the enslaved Africans who established coastal communities from North Carolina to Florida, Gullah Geechee people have experienced historical underinvestment in basic infrastructure. Many houses in Plantersville, Sandy Island, and the West End of the City of Georgetown lack connection to centralized sewer systems and rely on septic tanks that fail when neighborhoods flood or sea levels rise. Connecting to area sewers is expensive, potentially creating financial burdens and displacing residents. The Gullah Geechee Chamber Foundation seeks to document water and sewage inequities, their impacts on health, and the barriers residents face in accessing sanitation systems. These data can inform land use plans for the City of Georgetown and Georgetown County’s Unified Development Ordinance, target efforts to underserved areas, and strengthen community resilience.

The Gullah Geechee Chamber Foundation will partner with The Village Group, researchers at Clemson University, the Georgetown Water and Sewer District, and the Georgetown City and County planning departments. The Gullah Geechee Chamber Foundation and the Village Group will convene a community advisory board to codefine research questions and protocols, help interpret the findings, and identify priorities for future infrastructure and investment. Along with resident surveys and interviews, the project team will conduct focus groups with community members and institutional stakeholders to understand access to sewer systems, reliance on septic tanks, septic system performance, flood risk, barriers to sewer connection, and perceived health and economic impact. To contextualize findings, the team will integrate administrative and secondary data on infrastructure access and demographics to develop summaries with policy recommendations that can guide planning and advocacy.

Through this project, the Gullah Geechee Chamber Foundation hopes to provide data to residents, community groups, and local agencies to support equitable infrastructure planning that will shape sewer expansion, climate adaptation, and economic development for decades. Using community-informed data and recommendations, decisionmakers can identify underserved areas, prioritize investments, and design policies that will address long-standing inequities in infrastructure development and prevent potential displacement.