The Coast Guard plans to bring more ships, buildings and people to the former Charleston Naval Shipyard in North Charleston.

Adm. Karl Schultz, the Coast Guard’s commandant, said Thursday in his annual State of the Coast Guard address in Charleston that the service plans to homeport five national security cutters and a group of offshore patrol cutters that have yet to be built, The Post and Courier reported.

“This gives Charleston the potential to grow into the largest concentration of assets and people in the Coast Guard,” Schultz said, according to the newspaper.

Charleston now hosts three cutters, the national security cutters Hamilton and James and the Willow, and roughly 1,000 Coast Guard members, the newspaper reported. Schultz said the new cutters could double that population to 2,000.

“Over the next five years, the Coast Guard will homeport multiple new cutters and consolidate its operations along one waterfront,” the service said in a statement ahead of the speech.

That consolidation would gather Coast Guard offices and properties now spread from downtown Charleston to North Charleston at the old shipyard, according to Schultz and Capt. John Reed, commanding officer of Coast Guard Sector Charleston. The plan calls for closing the historic Coast Guard station on Tradd Street, they said. That station was first commissioned in 1914, the newspaper reported. Reed said early estimates put the cost of the consolidation as high as $500 million.

The shipyard was ordered closed under the federal base closure process in the 1990s. U.S. Rep. Joe Cunningham, who attended the announcement, said the plan was a major reversal.

“We’re gaining the ground we lost,” Cunningham said.

Schultz also pointed to budget strains at his service, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security rather than the Defense Department. He said the Defense Department’s readiness funding “has grown nearly three times as much as the Coast Guard’s over the past five years despite our services having the same types of readiness challenges.”

Bill Bethea, chairman of the S.C. Military Base Task Force, welcomed the news before the speech.

“We’re very pleased they chose South Carolina to grow the size of the Coast Guard presence in Charleston,” he told The Post and Courier. “It’s a big plus.”