Lisa Potts has lived in St. Louis’ West End neighborhood for 20 years. She loves her neighbors and neighborhood, but decaying infrastructure and safety have been a worry for her family. A former neighborhood stabilization officer for the City of St. Louis, Potts knew she couldn’t simply wait for things to improve on their own.
Around this same time, Invest STL was reimagining how it could assist neighborhoods like the West End. The nonprofit organization aims to support communities by providing monetary resources to community leaders to turn their vision of their home into reality.
On Friday, Potts told St. Louis on the Air that she made a point to attend the first Invest STL meeting held in the West End. When Potts got to the meeting, she found herself in a room full of neighbors she hadn’t met yet.
“People asked, ‘Where do you live?’ and people started raising their hand saying ‘I live in the West End.’ I started looking around and [saw] these beautiful, Black women. Immediately after the meeting we got together … and we met at one person’s kitchen table, and the rest was history.”
What followed was the formation of WeCollab — a team made up of community members, the Cornerstone Corporation, which addresses housing issues, and Invest STL — to engage neighbors and devise a means to ensure that future development will have community buy-in.
A community-driven effort at development represents a significant shift: At a time when St. Louis is experiencing population decline, its many neglected land parcels are desirable to private developers, who often make the case that their projects will transform blighted areas into valuable ones.
However, for residents who have remained in these areas, the influx of urban developers is cause for concern — especially if plans for their community do not take their needs into consideration.
This sentiment is shared by residents of the West End and Visitation Park neighborhoods. Situated just north of the infamous “Delmar divide” and between two prosperous neighborhoods and business districts — the Central West End and Delmar Loop — community members of West End and Visitation Park took matters into their own hands to address crime and gentrification.
Dara Eskridge, executive director of Invest STL, said that her organization’s purpose is to create a neighborhood-level investment strategy that is both monetary and programmatic. She said, “We do a lot around storytelling and narrative reframing, so that we’re able to equip the region with a more complex and nuanced understanding of our neighborhoods and the power, beauty and wisdom that’s within them.”
April Walker, who moved to West End, is another longtime resident who has joined the initiative. She was introduced to WeCollab while working for the U.S. Census Bureau. She is now part of WeCollab as the lead community ambassador, which means she focuses on community engagement to bring as many residents into the fold as possible, especially younger generations.
“We want them involved,” she said, “so that they can look and say ‘Yeah, I helped renovate that building; I said I wanted that park there.'”
Walker also said she wants to resist the notion that residents do not have the means to make a difference. “People think community has no voice. ‘How can you stop developers?’ We have put together an organization called the development review committee so that if developers need tax abatement or anything from the City of St. Louis, they have to go through us.”
On Thursdsay, WeCollab delivered a presentation to the city’s Planning Commission to make its plan to work with developers official. Three years after the community’s efforts began, the city has approved it.
The next step is implementation and further collaboration including West End’s and Visitation Park’s 10th Ward Alderwoman Saheem Clark Hubbard. WeCollab has identified five areas within the neighborhood to focus improvement efforts on, including safety, infrastructure and investment — for and by the community.
“We want [everyone] to talk to your neighbors,” Walker said. “Someone said to me they wanted a laundromat. Someone else said we need a grocery store. Those things go into their focus area by saying this is what I want to see and this is what we need. And we start from there.”
For more about WeCollab, what community engagement means and how more neighborhoods can work together to determine the future of their community, listen to St. Louis on the Air on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast or Stitcher or by clicking the play button below.
“St. Louis on the Air” brings you the stories of St. Louis and the people who live, work and create in our region. The show is produced by Miya Norfleet, Emily Woodbury, Danny Wicentowski, Elaine Cha and Alex Heuer. Ulaa Kuziez is our production intern. The audio engineer is Aaron Doerr. Send questions and comments about this story to talk@stlpr.org.
