David Slade is a senior Post and Courier reporter and personal finance columnist. Over more than three decades he's worked for multiple newspapers and magazines, and his reporting has been honored with more than 50 state, regional and national journalism awards. David reports on the impacts of South Carolina's rapid population growth and development. Reach him at 843-937-5552 or dslade@postandcourier.com
Slowly, but surely, South Carolina is approaching the point where more than half the state's residents will have been born elsewhere.
That's already happened in most coastal counties, but the ongoing relocation of people to South Carolina is more broadly changing the state's demographics.
Until the 1940s, more than 90 percent of South Carolina residents were born in the state, and most of the rest were born in Georgia or North Carolina.
Even in 1970, about 80 percent of Palmetto State residents were natives, but the decades that followed saw the state's population more than double, and people moving from the Northeast and Midwest played a large role.
Last year, South Carolina had the nation's fastest-growing population, entirely due to people moving from other states. In 2023, an estimated 51.8 percent of S.C. residents had been born in the state, down substantially from just a decade earlier, when it was 57.8 percent, according to Census estimates.
The changing demographics can be seen in subtle ways.
In fast-growing areas, there could be more bagel shops, different varieties of pizza and a place to get a good Philadelphia cheese steak. Lacrosse, long a popular high school sport in the Northeast, has outpaced baseball as a spring sport in parts of South Carolina.
And there can be a lack of shared history.
Older people who grew up in Mount Pleasant, now the state's fourth-largest town or city, can recall when it was a town of 15,000 people rather than a sprawling suburb. Newer residents, who've pushed the town's population close to 100,000, did not share that experience.
Harlan Greene is a Charleston historian and author who was born in the city in 1953, when it was less a place people moved to and more a place people moved from. From 1950 to 1970, the peninsula's population plunged, from about 70,000 to less than 47,000.
Greene still lives downtown and has seen the influx of residents and tourists bring many changes, some for the better and some for the worse.
"If we're all from South Carolina, we pretty much had the same education and were brought up to believe pretty much the same things," he said. "You basically learned from the same textbooks, and you may have had a more narrow view of the world, but a more comfortable view."
"For good and for bad, that's not the case any more," Greene said.
Boom & Balance Retired baby boomers are pouring into South Carolina. 'Gray tsunami' is washing over the land. By David Slade dslade@postandcourier.com
In South Carolina, the people migrating from other states have, as a group, been predominantly White, elderly and politically conservative. That's why Jasper County had the most rapidly growing White population in the nation, Horry and Beaufort counties are Republican strongholds (even more than they had been), and the state will soon have more residents 65 and older than residents 18 and younger.
Destination states such as Nevada, Florida and Arizona have the nation's lowest percentages of native-born residents. And South Carolina has become a destination state, too.
The top five states people have recently been coming from when they relocated to S.C. were New York, California, North Carolina, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
News Why do tens of thousands of newcomers pour into South Carolina every year? By David Slade dslade@postandcourier.com
Of South Carolina's nearly 5.4 million residents, about 2.6 million were born somewhere else as of 2023, the Census Bureau estimated.
Nationally, the percentage of people who were born in the state they live in ranges from a high of 77 percent in Louisiana to a low of 27 percent in Nevada.
In 2023, there were 14 states, plus the District of Columbia, where less than half the residents were born there. South Carolina is approaching that threshold and currently has the 18th-lowest percentage of state natives.
News SC expects another million residents by 2042. Most will be coming to these few counties. By David Slade dslade@postandcourier.com
The trend is driven by both the high rate of people moving to the state and by South Carolina's low to negative birth rate. A negative birth rate is when more people die than are born in a given year.
At current rates of in-migration from other states, South Carolina could cross the 50 percent line in 2026.