Some Uses Just Don't Belong: Land Use Law and "Caddyshack"
Introduction The South Carolina Supreme Court recently issued Dunes West Golf Club v. Town of Mt. Pleasant . Justice Kittredge , writing for a unanimous court, (and in an opinion footnoted as heavily as a David Foster Wallace essay) affirmed the trial court's grant of summary judgment to the Town of Mt. Pleasant (Town). Dunes West Golf Club (Dunes West) had challenged both a zoning change that prevented residential development on all golf courses in Mount Pleasant, as well as the Town's subsequent denial of Dunes West's request to rezone its golf course property in order to allow residential development. Of course I, like other arrested adolescents of my vintage, can't even see or hear the word "golf", much less read an opinion about zoning and land use in and around golf courses, without conjuring up characters, images and quotes from the 1980 movie Caddyshack , and the friendly environs of the Bushwood Country Club. (This affectation has threatened to...