A multimillion-dollar housing development is bringing more affordability and stabilization to neighborhoods in north St. Louis that haven’t seen new, quality housing stock in years.
A little more than a year after Tabernacle Community Development Corp. officially broke ground on the project in the Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood, several new homes are in the process of being built or rehabbed, and a few have even sold.
“You’re seeing this transformation physically that really represents neighborhood transformation at its core, meaning bringing back physical value,” said Pastor Andre Alexander, president of the development corporation. “It is new housing that hasn’t been in this immediate area for decades.”
Since April 2023, the project concentrated along the 3600 and 3700 blocks of Hebert Street has rehabilitated 10 homes and newly constructed eight, he said. And beyond the scope of Hebert, Tabernacle CDC has restored around five more rental homes as well, Alexander added.
The rehabbed and newly constructed houses on Hebert are for purchase, and the majority are earmarked for people making below 80% of the area median income, which is $82,550 for a family of four, Alexander said. But that doesn’t mean there’s a visible difference in quality among the available homes, he added.
“We’ve seen that happen where developments get labeled by people in the surrounding community: That’s the ‘low to moderate [income] area,’” Alexander said. “No, this is an area where people live who want to be here, and it just so happens that we’re hitting people from all different spectrums.”
It’s an important distinction for the pastor who champions creating a “true blended community” with people from different backgrounds, including economic levels, he said. And people in the broader community are paying close attention, Alexander said.
“We have people who’ve been following this work waiting for homes to open up so that they could move in and be part of the community and its fabric,” he said, adding interest is coming from people who grew up in the neighborhood or the surrounding area and now want to move back to it.
One of those new owners is Odelphia King, a special education teacher with St. Louis Public Schools, who purchased a three-bedroom, two-bathroom rehab last November. King described herself as a “product of St. Louis” having grown up in north city housing projects like Pruitt-Igoe and Vaughn.
“I feel very blessed being able to come from humble beginnings to become a homeowner, and I still can’t believe it,” she said. “It’s been a year, and I still can’t believe it when I pull up into my carport and look at it.”
Homeownership wasn’t something King said she had seriously considered, especially since moving back to St. Louis a few years ago.
“I was very concerned that I was not going to be able to do it and that’s what I had told [my Realtor]: ‘I can’t afford a house, I don’t have a credit score, I [have] just been back here two years, and I’m trying to build up my rental history and everything,’” King said.
King’s Realtor encouraged her to at least try, and as it turned out her credit score was better than she thought, and she now pays $800 a month on her mortgage, she said.
The new construction is especially attractive since those types of homes are not easy to find within the city limits, said Nicole Van Hook, a real estate agent with New Growth Realty, which is tapped to sell the properties.
“There’s not a lot of new builds in the city that are affordable,” she said. “They're excited about that, because now, ‘I'm the first person that lives here. I'm the first person who's moved here.’”
Van Hook said she’s also energized by the project’s broader goals of revitalizing the broader neighborhood along North Grand Boulevard that until recently was vacant lots.
“This is not just putting people in homes, it’s about community,” she said. “The more homes you have, like Hebert Street, at some point that's a community, that’s a neighborhood.”
The work by Tabernacle on Hebert is part of a broader strategy from the community development corporation to bring back more housing and commercial developments to the Jeff-Vander-Lou, Fairgrounds and O’Fallon neighborhoods. And it coincides with the Brickline Greenway, a dedicated pedestrian and bike path, a portion of which will run up to North Grand to Fairground Park.
It’s a plan that project developers hope will help economically revitalize neighborhoods in north city that need it. Alexander argues this kind of work must happen concurrently.
“In the development world, they always say, ‘Rooftops before flattops,’” he said. “It’s that whole idea that we need people first before we bring goods and services. When you’re in an area that has not been invested in in decades, you really need both happening at the same time.”
And it’s why the pastor has found multiple funding sources for the work, including $5 million from American Rescue Plan Act dedicated for citywide housing, dollars from the city’s Community Development Administration and millions in new markets tax credits allocation, which U.S. Bank is an investor in and helped to facilitate.
“If you don’t have multiple funding streams, it can’t happen concurrently. Then you’re doing one at a time,” Alexander said. “That’s not a bad thing, but it just takes longer for things to come about when you have to do one at a time or two at a time.”
Bill Carson, senior vice president of New Markets and Historic Tax Credit business development for U.S. Bancorp Impact Finance, said the investment his organization provided for the homes on Hebert Street helps with developing a form of affordable housing that isn’t just for rent.
“It’s a very important subsidy in affordable housing development and production, especially for affordable for-sale housing because there are very few if not any structured subsidies for affordable for-sale housing,” he said.
In this sense, a moderate-income buyer can purchase something that has a higher value than they’d otherwise be able to afford, Carson said. And it can help more broadly stabilize the real estate market that hasn’t had many transactions or new homes in years, he added.
“There often are not comparable values,” Carson said. “Or there often are not other sorts of examples of having housing sold in some cases for many years or decades or more.”
Considering the progress on Hebert, Carson added he would hope the bank can support similar projects in the future with the same financial tool from the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund of the U.S. Treasury, New Markets Tax Credits.
“Assuming availability, I would hope that we are able to do more of this around St. Louis,” he said.
