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Charleston Issues Itself a $35 million Permit for West Ashley Offices on a Former Orphanage Site

Charleston has issued the building permit for its own three-story office building at 1662 Ingram Road in West Ashley, on land it bought from the Catholic Diocese to keep an apartment complex off the site, with a July 2028 deadline set by an expiring downtown lease.

By Morningline Research · October 14, 2026

On October 5, the City of Charleston issued a building permit for its own new home: a three-story office building at 1662 Ingram Road in West Ashley. The permit describes "construction of new 3-story office building w/ public meeting component." Its reported value is $35 million.

It is the building Mayor William Cogswell has promised will bring city services, including a permit center, out of downtown and closer to where most residents and city workers live. And it is on a deadline: the city's downtown lease runs out in July 2028.

A price set a month earlier

Timeline of Charleston's West Ashley city offices at 1662 Ingram Road
Graphic: Morningline Research, from city building permit records and the reporting linked in this story.

The permit follows a City Council vote on September 8, when council passed the final reading of a guaranteed maximum price of $33.4 million to build it, The Post and Courier reported. That first building will be about 49,000 square feet and hold up to 140 employees, according to the paper.

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The two figures don't match, and they measure different things. The $35 million on the permit is the valuation the applicant reported to the city, not a contract amount. The $33.4 million is the council's ceiling on the construction contract.

"Really exciting to have city offices located where most of our employees and the majority of our residents live," Cogswell said, according to the Post and Courier.

From children's home to city offices

West Ashley, Charleston
West Ashley, Charleston. Photo: James Castle, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).

The site has a long Catholic history. The building at 1662 Ingram Road opened in 1966 as the Charleston Home for Children, an orphanage that housed 32 children and closed in 1990, Live 5 News reported. Over the decades the property also served as a convent, a women's shelter, diocesan offices and South Carolina's only Catholic assisted living facility.

The city bought 1660 and 1662 Ingram Road from the Catholic Diocese of Charleston for $6.5 million in May 2025, according to the Post and Courier. The alternative was housing. The land had been marketed for an apartment complex, which ABC News 4 put at 100 units and Live 5 at 125. Cogswell argued that city offices would bring "significantly lower" traffic to an already congested area. "It made a lot of financial sense for us to do this," he said, according to Live 5.

The old buildings came with asbestos and mold, plus a circa-1966 modernist chapel that preservationist Caroline Wilson called "a rare example of modernism in Charleston," according to an August 2025 Post and Courier editorial. The paper backed the offices.

Demolition of the old buildings began in July, after Charleston firefighters used the empty buildings for rescue and fire training, ABC News 4 reported.

Opening in 2028

City officials now expect the offices to open in summer 2028, and Live 5 reported that construction would take about two years. That lines up with the end of the city's lease at 200 Meeting Street in July 2028.

The reports also differ on headcount. The Post and Courier says up to 140 employees; Live 5 and ABC News 4, quoting city staff in July, said 150 to 175. And the 2025 editorial described two 45,000-square-foot buildings, smaller than the 49,000 square feet the paper reported in September.

"We're still kind of working out the details of how that permit center works," Edmund Most, an interim section chief with the city, told Live 5.

Another West Ashley purchase

Ingram Road is one of two West Ashley sites the city has bought for its own use. It also bought land along West Ashley Circle for a fire operations facility, ABC News 4 reported. In October 2024, Live 5 reported a price of nearly $14 million, paid from a $100 million city operations bond.

Across the country, construction money is concentrated far above this scale. Projects over $1 billion now account for one in four nonresidential construction dollars, the Associated Builders and Contractors told Construction Dive this week.

What comes next

The second building on Ingram Road is not expected until around 2035, according to the Post and Courier, and part of the site will be a temporary park until then. For now, the permit clears the way for the first building, with the downtown lease setting the clock.

How we count

The permit comes from City of Charleston building permit records and was issued October 5, 2026. Its value is the valuation reported on the permit, not a contract amount. The purchase, schedule, price and history come from the news coverage linked here.

See all of Charleston's latest permit numbers, updated weekly.

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