Judge blocks larger home permits for tiny Coastal Georgia community of Gullah-Geechee residents pending appeal

A judge has blocked a Georgia county from approving larger homes in a tiny island community of Black slave descendants until the state’s highest court decides whether residents can challenge by referendum zoning changes they fear will lead to unaffordable tax increases.

Hogg Hummock on Sapelo Island was founded after the Civil War by enslaved people who worked the cotton plantation of Thomas Spalding. It’s one of the South’s few remaining communities of people known as Gullah-Geechee, whose isolation from the mainland resulted in a unique culture with deep ties to Africa.

The few dozen Black residents remaining on the Georgia island have spent the past year fighting local officials in McIntosh County over a new zoning ordinance. Commissioners voted in September 2023 to double the size of homes allowed in Hogg Hummock, weakening development restrictions enacted nearly three decades earlier to protect the shrinking community of modest houses along dirt roads.