Property owners along Washington Avenue and those north of the business corridor are proposing a new community improvement district to bring additional services to the northernmost part of the city’s downtown.
The Downtown North Community Improvement District Inc. is laid out in legislation sponsored by Ward 14 Alderman Rasheen Aldridge. It is back before the full board after passing out of the Housing, Urban Development and Zoning Committee with a favorable recommendation on Tuesday.
During the committee hearing, Aldridge said he appreciated this CID’s focus on the northern parts of downtown.
“A lot of time in the downtown area we say ‘downtown west’ or ‘downtown,’ but we forget about our community members that [are] north of downtown,” he said.
The new district is primarily spearheaded by the owners of the old St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Globe-Democrat buildings, two prominent downtown spaces that have been redeveloped in recent years to host more tech and geospatial-focused companies.
“We started this CID so that more of the stakeholders along Washington Avenue would both have a say so, but also pay into this because it benefits everyone,” said John Berglund, managing partner at the StarWood Group, which owns the Post building.
A CID would create a formal structure with a board and executive director that could continue some of the work Berglund and Steve Stone, who owns the Globe building, have already started informally to establish a district focused on geospatial, financial technology and entrepreneurship, Berglund said.
“This formalizes a loose structure that was started by the Post, the Globe and T-Rex,” he said. “We are focused on economic development and improving underlying policies so that density will improve.”
Those policies could include studying how to better light the architecture on Washington Avenue, addressing nuisance properties, adding traffic calming and other ways to improve safety in the area, said Nick Hartzler, a senior project manager at Steadfast City Economic & Community Partners. He said the firm is helping shepherd the legislation through the board.
Community Improvement Districts function by levying a special assessment on the real property within the district, in this case about 4 cents per square foot for a surface lot and 2 cents per square foot per floor above the ground level floor, Hartzler explained. For the proposed Downtown North CID, it could generate about $270,000 annually, he added.
“Currently the group of property owners have been privately funding a lot of these efforts that they’ve been putting up,” Hartzler said. “For example, there was no website for promoting businesses along Washington Avenue. They have privately funded [one], so ideally the ownership of [it] would be transferred to the CID.”
Notably, this proposal would layer a second CID on top of one that already exists downtown and was renewed in 2021.
Hartzler added that renewal faced pushback and finally passed when the existing CID cut how much money they would collect from properties and the assessment proposed in the new CID wouldn’t exceed what property owners had been paying before renewal.
“The services that this group believes it needs are currently not in the purview and scope of what the existing downtown CID is providing,” Hartzler said. “That’s why we are wanting to create this dedicated fund through this new CID to help really bring this corridor back rather than take away revenue from other parts of the city.”
It’s a viewpoint shared by Kelli McCrary, executive director of the existing Downtown Community Improvement District. She added she’s not concerned about a potential second district within the footprint of hers, which focuses its funds on beautification, cleaning, and security to supplement the city’s police department.
“They want to take advantage of areas north that could potentially connect them with the NGA facility that’s coming online [soon],” McCrary said. “I think that helps not only this downtown community but also the region in terms of looking at how we can work collaboratively to improve areas that make downtown more attractive.”
