NORTH CHARLESTON, South Carolina — All that is left of the lot where Sen. Tim Scott’s house stood on Meeting Street Road is a desolate field filled with dirt, gravel, and mounds of weed-choked grass. The poverty and crime rates in this neighborhood are consistently higher than the national averages. Some people, says Scott, call it a “nobody zone.”

But Scott, the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction, once called it home.