Time is tight. Chandra Dillard’s racing between obligations in the Upstate and a General Assembly session that’s starting in Columbia. Thoughts of providing a quality home for everyone are top of mind, whether the District 23 South Carolina representative is at the Statehouse, or her family house. “I’ve been in public service for over 20 years,” the Nicholtown native shares. “Even when I was on [Greenville] City Council, I was still in the affordable housing lane. That’s my passion. Long before it became sexy and a dire need, I’ve been working on this journey.”
Recently, that journey includes personal and professional projects. One year ago, the Greenville Journal featured Dillard’s treasured opportunity to fix up the house her grandfather built, on land her great-grandfather earned in Nicholtown. The Halls were some of the earliest Black families to settle on the former plantation property, who created a community that thrived for more than a century. She admits, “I am fortunate and I do feel incredibly blessed to be able to maintain and preserve this homestead in my family’s legacy. Not all are able to do that.”
Yet right when the project should have hit a final punch list, a December deep freeze froze crews in the kitchen. “Oh my goodness, I hate to even talk about it!” she says. “I came here December 27 and heard a waterfall. Pipes had busted everywhere and the whole house has to be redone.” She thought about challenges her grandfather Sumler Hall might have experienced. “I like to think he had a better time just putting up the house with his friends,” she shares with a chuckle. “There’s going to be a process, a revelation at the end of this.”
In government work, she’s learned revelations take patience, especially when it comes to putting quality roofs over peoples’ heads. With the 125th General Assembly now underway, she clutches a hammer in one hand, pen in the other. “Every session, I’ve been able to get bills passed that give housing authorities and their partners tax credits or tax exemptions, if they team together on affordable housing,” she explains. “When we see what other communities do, we work at the state level to make it happen. It takes for-profit, non-profit, state government, all of us deliberately collaborating on this issue.”
She’s pleased with old and new collaborations, including the HOPE VI Project, that have renovated senior housing and birthed new life to Arcadia Hills and Jessie Jackson Townhomes, and created Heritage Hills, among other sites. “We’ve put 350 people back into the community,” she says. “Habitat just put up its 400th home. I’ve supported bills that have been part of inclusionary zoning. That’s an important tool in the tool box.”
While builders reach for tools to repair her family place, she reaches for tools to preserve the life she lived growing in Nicholtown, sandwiched between the Greenville Zoo and McAllister Square. “The market and the changes that are happening with people moving here, we need to move at a faster pace,” she pleads. “This needs to be a priority issue and it’s going to take all of us working together.” Her hope is as solid as a two-by-four pine frame. “Nicholtown is like every other community that used to be African American,” she reveals. “There’s an influx of different demographics and people and diversity. It’s changed a lot, but the spirit of Nicholtown has not. Everybody is a neighbor. Everybody is welcome and we are about each other.”
