Florence County, SC Accessory Structures: ADU Owner Occupancy (2026)

Florence County Code Section 30-97 opens by stating that accessory apartments are not permitted at all as conditional uses in any residential zoning district inside the City of Florence; the rule only reaches property in unincorporated Florence County and any other municipality that allows the use elsewhere. Where an accessory apartment is otherwise permitted, the first and most basic condition the county lists is that the principal structure, meaning the main dwelling on the lot, must be owner occupied. That single requirement rules out adding an accessory apartment to a property held purely as a rental with no owner living on site, since the ordinance ties eligibility to the owner's own residency rather than to the tenant's.

The owner-occupancy condition sits ahead of every other standard in the section, including the 50-percent size cap, the shared-utility-meter requirement, the single-family-only limitation, the 20-foot detached setback, and the extra parking space, all of which only come into play once the owner-occupancy threshold is met. Losing owner-occupied status after an accessory apartment has already been built puts the property out of compliance with this section and exposes it to zoning enforcement, since the conditional use approval was granted on the basis of the owner living in the principal dwelling, not merely on the physical characteristics of the buildings.