More than $32 million in new state funding is headed to Horry and Georgetown counties, earmarked for infrastructure, public safety, and community projects up and down the coast. The Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce broke down the specifics recently — $23,038,918 for Horry County and $7,150,000 for Georgetown County — and while headlines about state budget line items don’t usually get real estate attention, this particular round of funding is worth a closer look for Grand Strand home buyers, because a lot of it lands directly on things that affect property values, insurance costs, and day-to-day quality of life.
Where the Money’s Going in Horry County
Horry County’s $23,038,918 share covers a wide mix of projects. The largest single item is $6.1 million to resurface the Highway 544 Socastee Bridge, followed by $5,032,500 for downtown Myrtle Beach public infrastructure and $2 million for a new fire station. Conway picks up $1.5 million for its historic railroad trestle and ADA-accessible Riverwalk, plus $1.2 million toward restoring the Century Theatre and $1 million for Chestnut Bay flood resilience. Myrtle Beach also gets $1,491,418 toward cable landing site preparation, and North Myrtle Beach receives $1.22 million for boardwalk improvements. Recreation gets real investment too — $1.22 million for a Carolina Forest Recreation Center, $1 million for a Loris Recreation Center, and $500,000 for the Michael Morris Graham Rec Center — alongside $560,000 for downtown Loris redevelopment, $200,000 for the Loris Youth Club, and $15,000 for Soil & Water District fire resilience work.
Where the Money’s Going in Georgetown County
Georgetown County’s $7,150,000 leans heavily toward coastal infrastructure and public safety. Murrells Inlet gets $2 million for dredging and $1.5 million to replace its landing ramp — both meaningful for a community built around water access. Brookgreen Gardens receives $1.22 million for its Purdy Center, and $1,135,000 is going toward MLK Drive drainage improvements in Georgetown. The City of Georgetown adds $915,000 for its housing redevelopment authority and $250,000 for fire safety equipment, while $130,000 goes toward parking and ADA access at the Wacca Wache landing. Two multi-county projects round things out: $1.25 million for a Murrells Inlet–Garden City Fire District operations center shared between Horry and Georgetown, and $1 million for a public safety complex in the Town of Andrews, shared between Georgetown and Williamsburg counties.
Four Categories, One Common Thread
The Chamber grouped this funding into four buckets — infrastructure, public safety, economic development, and community projects — and the mix is worth noting on its own. This isn’t one mega-project concentrated in a single neighborhood; it’s dozens of smaller investments spread across Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Conway, Loris, Murrells Inlet, Georgetown, and the unincorporated parts of both counties. That kind of spread matters for buyers because it means the value these projects add doesn’t sit in one hot pocket of the market — it’s distributed across most of the communities a typical Grand Strand home search would already cover.
The economic development piece is worth a second look, too. Myrtle Beach’s $1,491,418 for cable landing site preparation ties into the city’s role as one of the few U.S. East Coast landing points for transatlantic fiber infrastructure — a quiet but real piece of the region’s digital economy. Georgetown’s $915,000 for its housing redevelopment authority is aimed at expanding housing stock and revitalizing existing neighborhoods, which speaks directly to supply in a county where inventory has historically been tighter than Horry’s.
What This Funding Means for Grand Strand Home Buyers
Individually, these look like line items in a state budget. Together, they add up to something more relevant to anyone shopping for a home here. A handful of these projects — the Chestnut Bay flood resilience work and MLK Drive drainage improvements especially — target the exact kind of stormwater and flood-mitigation infrastructure that affects flood risk, and flood risk is a direct input into what a homeowner pays for insurance. New fire stations and new fire safety equipment can factor into a community’s ISO fire rating over time, and that rating is one of the quieter variables insurers use to set premiums.
The rest is more straightforward: a resurfaced Socastee Bridge means less wear and fewer bottlenecks on one of the county’s more heavily used connectors, dredging and a rebuilt landing ramp protect the boating and fishing access that a lot of Murrells Inlet buyers are specifically paying for, and downtown investment in Myrtle Beach, Conway, and Loris tends to support the kind of walkable, well-maintained commercial corridors that make nearby residential areas more desirable. None of this shows up as a line item on a listing sheet, but all of it factors into why a neighborhood holds or grows its value over the years a buyer actually owns the home.
It’s also worth pointing out what this funding isn’t. This is state money, allocated through the South Carolina legislature’s budget process — not a new local bond or a property tax increase to pay for it. For buyers who’ve read about how tourism dollars, rather than rising property assessments, tend to fund public infrastructure along the Grand Strand, this is another example of that same pattern: meaningful investment in roads, safety, and community infrastructure that isn’t landing on homeowners’ own tax bills to cover.
The Bigger Picture: Part of a $350 Million Statewide Push
This round of local funding isn’t happening in isolation. It’s a small slice of a roughly $350 million statewide earmark package that South Carolina lawmakers approved for the 2026-27 budget, covering around 450 individual projects after House and Senate negotiators worked through a summer impasse over the total size of the package. The Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce specifically credited the Horry and Georgetown County legislative delegations for advocating on the region’s behalf during that process, which is worth noting — this funding didn’t happen automatically, it happened because local representatives pushed for it against projects from every other county in the state competing for the same pool of money.
That context matters for Grand Strand home buyers thinking beyond a single purchase. A region that consistently wins meaningful shares of state infrastructure funding is a region investing in its own growth capacity, which tends to track with the kind of population and housing demand that supports long-term property values.
What Buyers Should Watch For Next
A few of these projects are worth keeping an eye on if you’re actively house hunting. Construction on the Socastee Bridge resurfacing and downtown Myrtle Beach infrastructure work will likely mean short-term traffic disruption near those areas, which is a fair question to ask an agent about if you’re considering a home nearby. On the other end, buyers looking in Conway, Loris, or Murrells Inlet specifically may want to factor these investments into how they think about a neighborhood’s next five to ten years, not just its condition today.
It’s also worth asking, on any home you’re seriously considering, whether it sits near one of these funded projects and what the realistic timeline looks like — state earmarks like these typically move from budget approval to shovels in the ground over a year or two, not overnight. A good agent working this market day to day should be able to tell you not just what’s been funded, but which projects are further along and which are still early in planning.
If you’re weighing communities across the Grand Strand and want a sense of how projects like these line up with specific neighborhoods, our community guides break down what’s happening in each part of Horry and Georgetown counties, from Carolina Forest and Conway to Murrells Inlet and Pawleys Island. You can also browse current listings to see what’s available near any of these project areas, or take a look at our latest market report if you’re trying to understand how growth and investment like this is showing up in pricing trends. When you’re ready to talk through what a specific piece of infrastructure spending might mean for a property you’re already considering, our team is happy to walk through it with you. Funding announcements like this one rarely make it into a typical home search, but they’re exactly the kind of detail that separates a good buying decision from a great one.