Commission looks for ways to help waterfront businesses.

A legislative committee looks for ways to preserve the public's access to the coast.

Bluffton has managed to keep its unique character but hasn't avoided growing pains.

The first houses of a small coastal village are rising on a finger of land near where the broad Neuse River flows into Pamlico Sound.

Lowcountry leaders have already faced many issues that are coming to North Carolina's mainland coast. Here are five things they say they learned while trying to handle growth:

Generations of Estelle Revell's clan launched shrimp boats, built homes, bore children and buried their dead on a hilll beside New River. Now, landowners around her, many of them relatives, are selling, but Revell refuses to leave.

The development boom transforming North Carolina's inland coast is dismantling the state's seafood industry, which already was collapsing under falling prices, rising fuel costs and shrinking catches.

The state legislature is considering a tool to slow the disappearance of traditional waterfront businesses such as fish houses, the same kind of property-tax break that farmers can get.

Half a century ago, seven families donated rights to a few acres so the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could dig a harbor in this fishing village. The harbor was to be used by "the boat owners of the people of Marshallberg, and any and all other boat

Along Bogue Banks, a 26-mile barrier island in Carteret County, buildings are going up and up -- in elevation and in price. They are crowding out humbler pleasure domes that served North Carolinians of lesser means.

By many measures, access to the state's coastal waters is declining for working-class visitors -- but not to the actual sand. Thanks in part to state regulations that make the construction of access points automatic when beaches are renourished, offi

Coastal counties are just starting to act, and many developers exploit lax state rules.