Last October, St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones took the stage at the city’s annual event celebrating the local business community projecting confidence about the region’s trajectory.
She also issued a warning to those who, in her eyes, have held St. Louis back, namely by holding onto swaths of land in the city but failing to invest time or resources in their upkeep or improvement.
“If you’re an absentee property owner, read my lips: Neglect is no longer welcome in the City of St. Louis,” Jones said.
In the months since, both residents and civic leaders have taken steps to strengthen the way St. Louis can and will respond to the roughly 25,000 vacant buildings and lots inside city limits.
City residents overwhelmingly passed a change to St. Louis’ charter that eliminated a $500 cap on fines and fees for violating ordinances related to vacant buildings and non-owner-occupied buildings that are deteriorating or actions like illegal dumping or unpermitted demolitions.
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Empowered by that change, the Board of Aldermen passed a trio of bills this month that increase the fines for code violations, create new categories of fines for vacant buildings left open to entry and unpermitted demolitions and make those fines easier to collect by tacking them onto a property owner’s tax bill.
These changes aim to help St. Louis recover the millions of dollars that vacant properties cost, said Jared Boyd, Jones’ chief of staff.
“These properties are not only [not] generating resources for our schools, our libraries, our basic city services, but are actually draining resources,” Boyd said. “If you fail to mow your lawn for a vacant property, the city goes in and uses tax dollars to do that.”
He added that the city performs code enforcement on all properties in St. Louis regardless of who owns them.
“We haven’t done a good job of quantifying and collecting the cost of vacancy,” Boyd said.
Board members cited a 2024 report from the city estimating 14,000 properties had $21 million in fees and finance related to vacancy and owed another $2.7 million in back taxes.
Even armed with the new tools passed by the board, it may take years before they’re felt. The earliest the new provisions can take effect is Sept. 1, and the city has tens of thousands of vacant parcels to deal with.
“We only have so much money to tackle those,” said Laura Ginn, a vacancy strategist with the St. Louis Development Corporation. “We do have more than we’ve ever had before, but it’s still not enough to really shift the tide.”
Underused authority
Another reason why it’ll take time to feel the changes the Board of Aldermen passed has to do with the mechanism of transferring outstanding debts to a property owner’s tax bill.
It’s an ability the city has long been able to exercise, Ginn said, “it just wasn’t utilizing that authority in the past.”
The only time the city used to transfer debts to a property owners tax account was in cases of demolition, she explained. But in recent years, she said it’s grown to include the costs that come with other city code violations, too.
“In a lot of these cases, the city is out real dollars,” she said. “We’re talking about a cost to apply board-ups to openings, a lot of times repeatedly. A cost to provide mowing, weed eating and sometimes demolition or stabilization work.”
If a property owner fails to pay these specially levied taxes, the city’s collector of revenue can sue to foreclose on the property, said Dale Sweet, an attorney who specializes in the forced sale of property by the government to collect a tax bill.
“These cases are collector of revenue versus earth, not collector of revenue versus any particular person,” he said “So nobody is garnishing any wages. Now, if the taxes don’t get paid, can that taxpayer lose her property? Why, of course.”
But the process is far from quick, and for good reason, Sweet said. These are involuntary sales, and anyone with an interest in that property, whether they’re the owner, a lienholder, or have any other financial interest in it, need to be notified of a tax foreclosure.
“There has to be some kind of structure that gives constitutional due process to those owners of property interest,” Sweet said.
He explained this usually meant St. Louis’ collector of revenue would wait the maximum of three years as laid out in the statute of limitations before filing a lawsuit to foreclose on a tax-delinquent property.
A judge hears the case and decides if the city can seize the property. And then it’s still at least another six months before the property in question could be auctioned off by the sheriff's department on the steps of the civil courthouse in a tax sale open to the public.
These happen a few times a year, including one in the fall, when most, if not all, of the properties up for auction are vacant. If no one buys a property at the auction, it goes into the city’s land bank, also known as the Land Reutilization Authority.
“The property owner of last resort,” Sweet said.
‘I’ll be excited when a new block is developed’
In 2022, the Missouri legislature passed updates to the 1971 Municipal Land Reutilization Law that enable the city to foreclose on tax-delinquent properties.
The changes primarily achieve three things, the biggest of them being enhanced notice to anyone with a financial interest in a tax-delinquent property, said Peter Hoffmann, managing attorney for neighborhood advocacy at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri.
“The law updated how the collector of revenue is identifying people who have liens on property, interest in property and how they’re giving them notice,” he said. “That way, more people know that the [tax] bill is delinquent and have an opportunity to pay.”
Sweet said that adding more burden on the city to do things like post a laminated notice on a property can encourage the payment of the taxes owed to the city and keep properties from going into the land bank.
“There are a lot of points at which a taxpayer or an interested party can pay the taxes and redeem the property,” he said. “The amount will change depending on the stage.”
The additional notice augments another one of the updates, which seeks to make it easier to clear the title for a delinquent property by ensuring that its purchase price at auction accurately accounts for what the city is owed.
“The city really should be working to recover all of its costs at the same time so that we are giving buyers at the tax auction or the LRA an opportunity for success,” Hoffmann said. “You wouldn’t want to have someone after [purchasing] a property getting a bill for the garage demo that happened last year.”
Ginn, the city’s vacancy strategist, said the city increased minimum bids on vacant properties at tax sales in 2024, which led to the building division and the forestry department recovering $120,000 for services they provided. It’s money that they had not collected in years past.
The changes also place an expectation on the city’s collector of revenue to foreclose faster on known vacant and tax-delinquent properties after one year rather than three.
“The 2022 changes in the legislature make the city do that,” Sweet said.
And this obligation is just beginning to bear fruit years later. Last October, the city’s collector of revenue filed 138 lawsuits to foreclose on properties with outstanding tax balances from 2023. In December, a judge ruled in favor of the city in the vast majority of cases, paving the way for foreclosure and those properties going up for auction as soon as later this year.
The cases seek to recover just under $4 million in taxes owed and an additional $1 million in penalties, interest, court costs, attorney fees and collector’s fees.
It’s the type of progress state Rep. Michael O’Donnell, R-St. Louis County, is encouraged to see as the sponsor of these changes in 2022.
“This, to me, shows that it’s working and that the city has been serious in engaging and sending this process down the road,” he said. “When I’ll be excited is when somebody has bought those properties and we’ve got a new block developed. Or we’ve got a new commercial area developed.”
‘The most impact with our resources’
Employing code liens of this nature and then foreclosing on delinquent tax bills can be pivotal for communities across the country, not just in St. Louis, said Tarik Abdelazim, vice president of technical assistance at the nonprofit Center for Community Progress.
“The costs of doing nothing are astronomical, and to make strategic investments with improved policy and then improved practices really is the best approach to turn the tide,” he said. “Start to get from decline back to ascension and revitalization.”
However, there is a chance the costs represented in the lawsuits filed by St. Louis’ collector of revenue may not be recuperated. Some bills stretch into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, likely representing an improvement cost like building stabilization.
“If you can’t get paid back, then at least take ownership and temporary stewardship of that property,” Abdelazim said. “Now let's get it out for affordable housing, first-time homebuyers, put that property to use that’s consistent with the community's goals.”
However, to Sweet, the attorney specializing in these kinds of forced sale of property, the foreclosure process isn’t a perfect solution.
“This has always been a tax collection strategy,” he said. “It’s difficult to use a tax collection strategy to also address problems with vacay, abandonment and dilapidated property.”
And Ginn agrees.
“We can get real excited about tools and jump into implementation,” she said. “But what I’ve liked about the vacancy strategy work is that we’re spending a lot of time making sure that software departments are connected and talking to each other.”
It’s less flashy, but Ginn explained it helps the city better prioritize where to deploy finite resources to tackle this huge problem. She added that St. Louis’ Building Interventions Suitability Analysis helps determine which properties need more attention.
“It doesn’t tell us what to do; it just says, ‘Of all these [vacant] buildings across the city, where do we begin? Where can we have the most impact with our resources?’” Ginn said.
A lawsuit foreclosing on delinquent taxes may not be the best solution for a building that needs to be demolished now, she explained. St. Louis’ challenge with vacancy has built up over decades, and Ginn argues it’s unrealistic to expect a speedy solution.
“But we can’t just look at this as some big daunting task and go, ‘Oh well.’ We do have to start somewhere,” she said.
And that means using every tool at the city’s disposal, Ginn explained, and “growing the muscle to use these tools more effectively and efficiently.”
