Seven crumbling multifamily homes along Kingshighway near Interstate 64 in St. Louis managed to stay standing through years of neglect, but they were no match for the excavator that quickly turned them to rubble in late February.
The emergency demolition ordered by the city makes way for a new apartment development and removed some of St. Louis' most prominent vacant homes, situated near one of its busy intersections.
“The neighborhood behind these buildings made extraordinary gains over the last couple of decades,” said Alderman Michael Browning, whose Ninth Ward includes the parcels. “And yet you wouldn’t know it by looking at these properties.”
There had been plans to revitalize some of the homes in the early 2000s that never materialized, he explained. They were vacant by 2014 and then bounced between a few owners who Browning said avoided investing in stabilizing them.
“Just a really cynical strategy of demo by neglect in order to get around preservation ordinances,” he said.
Multiple development ideas for the parcels came and went.
Drury Development Corp. had planned to build a hotel before it sold the land to apartment developer Lux Living in 2021, which had ambitions to build an apartment building on the site. Those plans were marred by the city’s historic preservation board, though, which denied a demolition request, saying the properties had architectural merit and could still stand for a few more months.
All the while the row of homes along Kingshighway continued to decay until the city threatened to stabilize the buildings at Lux Living’s expense, Browning said. While that case worked through the courts, Lux Living sold the properties to two nearby residents, who then sold them to the current owners, Kansas City-based NorthPoint Development.
“As soon as they bought them, it was communicated that the properties were in terrible condition, unable to be saved,” Browning said. “There were a couple of partial collapses that happened right before the sale occurred.”
Developers scooping up properties only to let the buildings on them sit vacant and decay is a familiar story to Torrey Park, director of the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative.
“Ultimately, it’s about private owners who purchase land or purchase a building with the idea that they can turn it into a profit,” she said. “It’s speculative.”
Similar situations have plagued north St. Louis neighborhoods, which have the overwhelming majority of the city’s roughly 20,000 vacant properties, she said.
The newly cleared lots along Kingshighway aren’t set to stay that way. Their new owner, NorthPoint Development, has plans for an apartment building with roughly 150 units.
The developer also intends to construct a second apartment building to the north, on land owned by Washington University between Chouteau and Gibson avenues, totaling 328 new units between the two projects and costing nearly $120 million.
NorthPoint Vice President of Development Jennifer George explained the developer is attracted to “the continued demand for housing” in the area close to the Barnes-Jewish Hospital campus, Wash U’s medical campus and Cortex.
“We’re super excited about the connectivity opportunity there,” she said. “There’s a lot of bike (and) pedestrian connections in the area. It’s got good Metro access.”
These kinds of assets can make development enticing but aren’t evenly spread across St. Louis, which underscores why there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach that will solve the city’s vacancy challenges, Park said.
“The north side has less of an infrastructure,” she said, “doesn’t have the same kinds of amenities. You’ve got food deserts, lack of banking institutions.”
Park argues this is by design.
St. Louis’ central corridor historically received more economic development incentives and investment attention than north St. Louis and some southside neighborhoods such as Dutchtown and Gravois Park, she said.
“To really redevelop, (those areas) need an influx of cash,” Park said.
Striving for equity
The city does have cash from the American Rescue Plan Act and Rams settlement, some of which is allocated to spur development.
“Capital funds, incentives, tax credits, all of those are tools that can be used,” Park said. “We need to think about where the need is and not necessarily divide those funds equally across the city.”
Mayor Tishaura Jones agrees.
“That is equity,” she said. “Taking a look at where resources are needed and pouring [them] into neighborhoods and places that haven’t seen investment in decades.”
It’s the underpinning of the city’s economic justice action plan, which seeks to reverse the historic harm done to the city’s majority Black and brown neighborhoods from decades of disinvestment.
Jones clarified that it doesn’t take away from neighborhoods that have seen revitalization, but rather focuses attention on the parts of the city that still need it.
“Half of our city has been left to fail for decades and these are the steps we’re taking so that all boats in the tide rise,” she said.
The visibility of vacancy
While the properties along Kingshighway may have been highly visible to thousands of vehicles passing by them each day, they aren’t perfect surrogates for the majority of vacancy in St. Louis.
Just 5.5% of the parcels are vacant in the Forest Park Southeast neighborhood, which includes The Grove entertainment district. More than two dozen north city neighborhoods have parcel vacancy rates above 20%, according to data from the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative. Two-thirds of the city’s vacant parcels have no building on them, and some empty swaths span entire blocks.
“Folks living in the areas with high vacancy have to live next to it every day,” Park said. “It’s very visible to them.”
And it can be more than just a visual marker, said West End resident Tonnie Smith, who has advocated for ways to improve her north St. Louis neighborhood for more than a decade.
“It’s not just ‘oh, it’s terrible to look at,’ but it affects our mental health and also property values,” she said. “And just safety in general.”
When Smith and her family first moved into their home 17 years ago, nearly half of the 50 structures on her block were empty, she said. Today, only eight remain that way, and they’re all maintained, Smith said.
This change was far from automatic, but instead something Smith and her neighbors spent years working toward.
“We always wished these vacant properties would somehow be taken care of,” she said. “We would talk about it all the time.”
Smith said she began her journey into improving the neighborhood after leaving her role as a branch manager at U.S. Bank. Her neighbors and family encouraged her to learn how other parts of the city became thriving centers with active parks and clean alleys.
What started as work to beautify the neighborhood shifted to addressing vacancy, she said.
“We shouldn’t just plant flowers and make things look nice when we have all this abandonment,” she said. “Then learning about the things that were done on purpose to cause this was another reason that was important to me to help rectify [the vacancy].”
‘It does not happen overnight’
Revitalizing a neighborhood with higher vacancy can be quite challenging because of how empty buildings and lots can drag down property values, said Linda Nguyen, executive director of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis. She added that vacancy also hurts neighborhoods by giving a perception that they have minimal activity.
“It makes people not want to invest in neighborhoods,” Nguyen said. “Seeing things that are happening, it makes people want to be part of it. When people don’t see anything happening, there’s nothing to be a part of.”
Reversing this image can take many years of work where the fruits of that labor aren’t obvious, she explained.
“When it comes to neighborhood change, I think [it’s important] to remind folks it does not happen overnight,” Nguyen said. “There is a strategy and intentionality to it.”
This is something Smith is familiar with from her own experience in the West End neighborhood. It took time to both document the vacancy and explain to her neighbors which lots they were focused on, Smith said.
“We’re focusing on the properties that are in really bad shape and causing issues from trespassing, people breaking in, the ones that are really causing issues for the neighborhood,” she said.
One success about six years ago that stands out for Smith is when she helped persuade the owner of a vacant duplex to sell the property, which had had continual calls to the police for various reasons. She explained she got important help from organizations like Legal Services of Eastern Missouri and the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department to facilitate the sale.
“People were really amazed by that on my street that we were able to do that ourselves,” she said.
Neighborhood plans
More recently, Smith said neighborhood residents were able to develop a neighborhood plan, with some funding from Invest STL, which the city adopted last June. It lays out priorities for the area such as developing the center of the neighborhood at Maple Avenue and Goodfellow Boulevard, turning the Hodiamont tracks into a greenway and others, Smith said.
“Through many years and a lot of community engagement, I think residents saw we can have a say in what happens to our neighborhood,” she said. “So when people do want to come into the neighborhood, they can use this as a guideline to know what it is the residents have said they wanted.”
These kinds of plans are powerful tools to guide development that responds to local challenges and fits what residents desire, Nguyen said.
“A lot of our [community] organizations are in the know,” she said. “That’s the shortcut: they know the residents who live there, they know the businesses around there, they know where the open vacant buildings are and how long it’s been vacant.”
Nguyen adds Forest Park Southeast is now reaping the benefits of a form-based code, which lays out rules for how developments should look on particular parcels based on input and feedback from existing community stakeholders, like local residents and business owners.
“That’s something the neighborhood had a say in 10 years ago,” she said. “That’s the power they have.”
And beyond written plans and codes, Nguyen said continued neighborhood representation and engagement in development proposals is also critical.
The Forest Park Southeast Neighborhood Association has regular meetings and a development review committee where residents and those who work in the neighborhood consider opportunities that come up.
George, with NorthPoint Development, said she finds it refreshing to work with a neighborhood that is well organized and has formalized ways of engagement. It makes soliciting feedback from many residents a lot easier, she added.
“A lot of times where we might do neighborhood engagement or outreach, we’re trying to do cold letter mailings or cold door knocking to introduce ourselves,” George said. “We didn’t have to do this here.”
NorthPoint is still working out some of the details for the new apartments, and George said she expects direct feedback from the community will influence how those plans look once finalized.
