Missouri capital redux.

Over the weekend, a blog article of mine prompted an interview from the city's local newspaper.  The original article, published here about a month ago, focused on the obvious revitalization efforts that have taken place in downtown Jefferson City, capital of Missouri.  Although I had never visited there prior to the trip that prompted the article, I was taken by the high level of maintenance of the city streets, the relative absence of demolished old buildings, and the considerable investment in the streetscape.  But most of all, I was taken by a Jimmy John's.

The presence of a national chain, particularly one as aggressively franchised as Jimmy John's subs, demonstrates a greater level of confidence in the viability of this main street as an attractive locus for commerce than all the plantings, park benches, and brick sidewalks in the world.  A predictable chain restaurant may not be what the Jefferson City's downtown boosters were craving, and it hardly indicates that the small city's main street is a major shopping destination, but at least it shows that it's strong enough that a business leader with some capital was willing to give a chance to some real estate as close to the center of it all as you can get.

This blog article recently prompted the Jefferson City News-Tribune to follow up on my article, interviewing me further about my impressions and including more of the history of revitalization than I ever knew coming into it.  I encourage my readers to take a look, and feel free as always to post comments here or wherever you like.  Thanks again.

Main Street geniuses and the chain of fools.

By now I’ve explored the visible evidence of main street reinvestment numerous times, through streetscape enhancements, creative infill development, improved access for wheelchairs, vintage iconography, or the preservation of the historic building façade at the expense of everything behind it (pejoratively called façadectomy).  Across the country, in towns both small and microscopic, palpable evidence reveals communities that are vigorously trying to address the decades-long economic malaise of their historic centers.  Predictably, the success of these initiatives has been spotty.  A particularly simplistic but not entirely inaccurate speculation for this inconsistency is that supply exceeds demand; we simply have too many municipalities with marginally surviving main streets to meet the demand for vibrant centers of commerce.  This supply-demand dichotomy extends temporally to contemporary popular retail typologies: more succinctly, we have too many strip malls and shopping centers to house retail just as comfortably, if not more so, and they offer enough amenities (mostly catering to cars) to the consumer that it remains hard for old main streets to compete.  The truly flourishing small downtowns have capitalized on “authenticity”, a word a deliberately framed in quotes because of its inherent artificiality.  Modern strip malls are no more or less authentic than historic main streets, but they tap into nostalgia that, through an inversion of taste cultures (coupled with the paucity of genuinely successful old main streets) makes them appear aesthetically superior to generic, ubiquitous, automobile-oriented strip malls in the eyes of many.  Maybe someday a new retail typology will replace strip malls—my suspicions is that it will be of the point-and-click variety—and the inevitable demolition of the most obsolete shopping centers will render the few flourishing survivors into a sort of vintage curiosity.  But we ain’t there yet.

In the meantime, main streets that achieve the rare combination of an attractive veneer and low vacancy rates still avert the eyes.  Maybe my standards aren’t so lofty, but Jefferson City’s East High Street appears to be one of them.

 

An unusually small municipality for a fairly populous state (barely 43,000 people), the capital of Missouri seems to have checked off most of the requisite boxes one might associate with main street revitalization. 

It’s got abundant benches, vintage streetlights (complete with floral arrangements suspended from them), landscaping that undoubtedly doubles as stormwater management, and wheelchair-friendly pedestrian crossings.  It all looks impeccable; the design team conceived it with a great deal of diligence and care.  My research suggests that the key player is Downtown Jefferson City, a volunteer association with modest annual membership dues for all the businesses that line East High Street, assisting them in promotion of the downtown and the planning of key events.  Although not necessarily the wallet to implement the costliest of these initiatives, this agency certainly seems to be the thinking cap.

Since these photos comprised my one and only visit to Jefferson City, I have no basis of comparing the main street in the fall of 2012 with its condition at a prior point.  It’s hard for me to judge if the investment on aesthetic upgrades has yielded a return.  At any rate, it doesn’t seem to be making the conditions worse.  As far as I can tell, the 2.5 block commercial corridor was over 90% occupied. 

Not only are virtually all the retail spaces leased, but, in contrast to so many other American main streets, Jefferson City lacks many significant “gaps in the teeth”—spaces where one of the contiguous old commercial buildings faced a demolition team.  The pic below shows about the only one that I could find.

My conversations with one of the storefront entrepreneurs, a frozen yogurt business owner, revealed that nearly all the improvements have taken place within the past two or three years, which is exactly as it appeared.  East High Street’s revival is nascent and still very fragile.

One tenant in particular, however, gives the corridor a better-than-average prospect at long-term survival:

That’s right: it’s the rapidly-growing sandwich chain from Champaign, Illinois—one of the most franchise-dependent major brands in the business.  Such an establishment may seem unremarkable for a small-town main street, especially one so close to a state capital that houses hundreds of daytime workers who demand lunchtime options nearby.  But Jimmy John’s is not a common occupant of 19^th century downtown commercial buildings in small cities.  Long a staple of the college scene (where it might occupy a traditional pedestrian oriented storefront), the meteoric growth of this chain in recent years depends heavily these days on suburban locations in strip malls or freestanding drive-thrus.  It tends to populate areas that are middle class or higher, in contrast with McDonald’s or Burger King, two chains that will select a location regardless of its income density—or, Church’s Chicken, which almost exclusively seeks locations with below-average median incomes.  I have my strong suspicion that this Jimmy John’s leased this storefront for two primary reasons: Downtown Jefferson City recruited the franchise owner heavily (perhaps even through incentives), and this same franchisee determined that foot traffic along the main street was good enough allow for profitability, even good enough to sacrifice any possibility of integrating a drive-thru window into the operation.

At any rate, Jimmy John’s is virtually alone among national brands on East High Street, and it’s the only chain restaurant that I could find.  But it’s a major boost for Jefferson City—an indication of the franchisee’s confidence that downtown denizens could sustain his or her business, which, as a national brand with particular operating costs and licensing fees, undoubtedly must contend with far greater expenses than the locally owned operations nearby.  To an extent, the celebrating of a Jimmy John’s means we must throw conventional main street revitalization out the window: while the ambition of many main street boosters is to attract an eclectic downtown mix of varied local entrepreneurs, such tenants rarely flourish exclusively without the presence of a familiar logo to serve as a relative anchor.  Mom-and-pops simply lack the equity to weather very many periods of slow business, and thus they come and go routinely.

I’m thrilled for Jefferson City that it seems to support an independent bookstore, even in an era of escalating e-reader encroachment.  But will the bookstore last through the implementation of a five-year business development plan?  It might not matter.  From what I could tell, downtown Jefferson City boasts the aforementioned sandwich chain and a Hallmark Gold Crown, which amounts to two more national brands than the average struggling small-town main street can claim.

So has East High Street reached its commercial apex?  Probably not.  As the pictures indicate, the on-street parking spaces appear mostly full—no doubt boosted by Downtown Jefferson City’s removal of the meters to allow 90 minutes free.  But the street wasn’t exactly teeming with shoppers.  I saw practically none on this weekday late afternoon.  The business association’s aspirations for the main street appear formidable, judging from the website’s use of phrases like “prominent destination”, “thriving”, and “the place to be”, which even the most optimistic person would confess comes across as hyperbole.  But virtually all evidence suggests this member-supported agency has nursed its vision incrementally, potentially meeting even some of the second-tier goals.  For example, numerous American main street associations concern themselves primarily with impeding demolition and activating the first-floor storefronts, while the upper levels continue to languish.  During my visit, Jefferson City’s main street not only boasted a near-perfect occupancy rate at the street level, the second and third floors seemed occupied as well.

If these upper floors are still vacant, Downtown Jefferson City has taken enough care to keep them looking occupied through well-maintained curtains and blinds.  The one obvious deficiency that stood out to me was the occasional surviving mid-century sheath, no doubt installed back in the day to conceal the fact that downtown’s buildings appeared old, obsolete, and increasingly in disrepair.  Sometimes these 1950s-era false façades are fantastic looking on their own terms, as I pointed out with some winsome examples in south Louisiana.  But it would be hard to fall in love with the ugly, uninspired cosmetic work performed on a few of Jefferson City’s buildings, like the ones below:

My suspicion is that at least a few of Jefferson City’s biggest downtown boosters envision a main street filled with al fresco cafés, specialty boutiques, lively upmarket bars, and enough crowds to attract street performers.  Maybe even mimes.  Certainly the incomes in this small city are high enough to support more than the two or three low-key bars/restaurants that I could spot along East High Street.  And maybe someday the activity downtown will escalate to the point that wine bars, art galleries and brasseries really do dominate the landscape.  But obviously this ambition seems a bit fanciful, and it’s not because Jefferson City is failing—by most metrics, it’s doing quite well.  However, the current conditions perfectly capture the timeworn phrase “never let perfect be the enemy of the good”.  I don’t want to tell the leadership of this handsome state capital to lower its aspirations, but it must recognize that the fact that virtually all of the historic buildings are in good condition, occupied, and adjacent to a perfectly manicured streetscape places Jefferson City among the top quintile of downtowns for American cities of its size.

My sad suspicion is that, even as the occasional well-preserved main street does live up to flowery phrases the website embraces, most are not and never will again be “thriving” or a real “destination”.  Those thriving main streets aren’t exactly places for run-of-the-mill, mundane shopping; they are destinations that eloquently trigger nostalgia by evoking a time when our city centers really were the center of commerce, recalling the blatantly artificial references to “authenticity” that I noted earlier.  It’s all veneer.  Nostalgia denotes ambiance, and ambiances fuels the leisure consumption patterns of an emergent class that uses its disposable income for artisan pottery, craft beers, and expensive pommes frites.  It is unrealistic to expect that many, or even most, of our main streets will ever propel themselves into upper-tier commodification.  The supply outpaces the demand.

Jefferson City’s challenges are multifaceted: it remains one of only five state capitals that receive no direct access from the Interstate Highway System.  Meanwhile, the toddlin’ town of Columbia, Missouri—home of the University of Missouri (“Mizzou”)—sits just 30 miles to the north of Jefferson City.  Not only can it boast a huge captive student population of 35,000—fostering lively downtown activity because such colleges typically concentrate a large population who generally do not own cars—but Columbia’s city limits stretch directly into the path of I-70.  It’s also nearly three times as populous as Jefferson City.  I suspect many government workers at the state capital commute from Columbia.  Can the mostly rural purlieus of central Missouri support two eclectic downtowns within a 25-minute drive?

Let the presence of the Jimmy John’s serve as the answer to this question.  Like tiny Frankfort, capital of Kentucky, Jefferson City’s primary reason for being is to foster the administration and operation of state government services.  Beyond this function, the city’s ability to assert its distinctiveness—or for its downtown to compete with Columbia’s—will prove a colossal challenge.  While this task isn’t insurmountable, it exposes the need for Downtown Jefferson City and other civic boosters to take pride in the minor victories.

If East High Street never attracts another chain restaurant, that’s okay—in fact, it might be good for building a profile of a place that really can support the “unique discovery of old shops intermixed with new finds” it proclaims on the website.  And if it gets a few more chains, that’s fine too—it reaffirms the ability for these historic buildings to attract tenants with greater capital.  And, even though I have never been to Columbia, I’d be willing to bet the farm it has more tawdry bars and chain restaurants in its downtown—perhaps even two Jimmy John’s.

Salvaging St. Louis, Part III: Biodiversity in repopulation.

In the previous section of this three-part article, I began exploring some of the affordable housing initiatives of St. Louis that have helped it, to some extent, stem its precipitous decline, particularly in comparison to Detroit, its peer city in terms of population loss.  If this survey (you could almost call it “home tour”) seemed a bit facile, well, it is.  To some extent, that’s the point: St. Louis—in contrast with Detroit—has transcended much of its dire population freefall over the years by repopulating its vacant land with sensitively designed affordable and mixed-income housing.  The city is still losing population, but its 8.3% loss from 2000 to 2010 is a pittance compared to the staggering 25% that rocked Detroit during the same time frame.

My home show takes on an even more subjective angle because it has exclusively focused on the portfolio of the St. Louis-based developer, McCormack Baron Salazar, Inc (MBS).  I confess that I received an information packet guiding through different developments within the city limits through MBS’s public relations coordinator.  But this analysis should rise above the level of a promotional campaign for one of the nation’s largest affordable housing developers.  Looking at a particularly successful developer serves as a bellwether for what might prevent other attempts to restore the city’s housing stock from yielding transformative results.

The previous section looked primarily at MBS’s portfolio in the northern half of St. Louis, which has long been the most impoverished part of the city, with some neighborhoods losing over 80% of their population over the years.  The near north side was home to the notorious Pruitt Igoe, 32 high-rise public housing structures whose near immediate failure to accommodate its population safely resulted in its ultimate demolition, a mere 16 years after its completion.  Most of the former site of Pruitt-Igoe remains a vacant, weed-strewn lot.  However, some of McCormack Baron Salazar’s most effective low-income housing efforts sit directly across the street from the old monstrosity, such as the Murphy Park development to the north featured in Part II.

For this section, the housing survey will travel southward, into some of the near- Westside neighborhoods of St. Louis—an area framed by downtown to the east, Forest Park to the west, Delmar Boulevard to the north, and I-44 to the south.  Most of the neighborhoods around here are transitional: some are still in decline, but many have stemmed the population loss and are recovering to form a reasonably racially and economically integrated district, with much of the original building stock still intact.  MBS has contributed several creative projects to this area, and, due to the broader array of incomes represented in the neighborhood, these new developments tend to cater to tenants in multiple economic strata.

The northernmost of the developments featured in Part III, Renaissance Place at Grand Apartments straddles what most would consider the line between the north side of St. Louis and the west side.  Although just barely north of the common divider Delmar Boulevard, the expansive project still sits directly west of the northern edge of downtown.  My apologies once again for some of the lower quality photos—dusk was setting in, and I often did not have the time to get out of the vehicle to take pictures.

After completion in 1968, the Arthur Blumeyer public housing development housed over 1,100 families across four high-rise and 42 low-rise apartment buildings, with an emphasis on support for the elderly.  Though the development lasted considerably longer than Pruitt-Igoe, it fell under the same scrutiny as most other public housing thanks to the Federal Omnibus Consolidated Reconciliation Act of 1996, which mandates that public housing of 300 or more units with a vacancy rate of 10% or higher must undergo routine viability assessments.  According to these housing audits, if the maintenance of the buildings exceeds the cost of vouchers and a revitalization plan will not confidently return them to long-term viability, local housing authorities must remove the structures from the housing supply within five years.

By 1999, most of the housing in Arthur Blumeyer did not pass the test, so St. Louis Housing Authority partnered with MBS to replace the development with Renaissance Place at Grand.  Using $35 million of HUD’s HOPE VI grant funds, the developer created a 512-unit community, which under HOPE VI stipulations must accommodate a mix of income levels while adhering to architectural standards that respect the surroundings.

I’ll confess that I’ve seen HOPE VI developments in other cities that come closer to imitating the existing vernacular; it would be hard for anyone with above-average vision to mistake this for historic St. Louis housing.  (And it doesn’t help that 80% of the trees are barely more than saplings.) Still, the individual buildings orient themselves to the street and recall the brick duplexes still commonplace in other St. Louis neighborhoods.

We’d be hard-pressed to find apartment buildings that look like these in the newer suburbs.  Also noteworthy is the high density of solar panels that line the roofs of many buildings at Renaissance.  The sustainable features and pedestrian scaled design helped the entire project earn a certification from US Green Building Council as a LEED Neighborhood Development (ND) community.

Though only about a mile away from the North St. Louis developments featured in Part II, Renaissance enjoys intrinsic advantages for stretching within walking distance of the Grand Boulevard theater district, a still impoverished but steadily gentrifying area.  Unlike Murphy Park and Brewery Apartments (but comparable to Westminster Place), Renaissance’s proximity to desirable land near Grand Boulevard results in broader appeal for a mixture of incomes and races.  Thus, this development most likely had to dilute some of the distinguishing architecture features to attract a bigger market.

Just a few blocks to the south stands the headquarters of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Missouri, in the heart of Grand Center, part of the art and theater district that boasts the Fox Theatre and Powell Hall (home of the St. Louis Symphony) as its hub.  Formerly a Woolworth Building, it sat vacant for many years after the store closed in 1993.

Today, it hosts the well-known nonprofits regional headquarters, with additional space for art studios, offices, and other foundations.  The restored 46,000 square foot Art Deco building (Big Brothers Big Sisters uses half the leasable space) was a milestone for McCormack Baron Salazar, Inc: the firm’s first non-residential development, completed in June 2008, taking advantage of a mixture of new market and historic tax credits.  The area itself, thanks to the abundance of surviving pre-World War II architecture, is re-emerging as an arts and restaurant district, thanks in part to its close proximity to St. Louis University (SLU) to the south.  The photo below shows a pocket park (Strauss Park) at the intersection of Washington Boulevard and North Grand Boulevard, just a block away from the Big Brothers Big Sisters building:

Viewing the park from another angle, the majestic Fox Theatre is patently visible.

Here it is, through a streetscape view standing in front of the old Woolworth.

The cluster of older skyscrapers at this prominent point two miles west of downtown St. Louis asserts its importance as a sub-node, a reviving office and entertainment district comparable to many cities’ Midtowns.

At the same time, the neighborhood of 11,000 poses formidable challenges.  The defining characteristic of the average household is an unmarried woman with children, and barely 20% of adults have at least a high school diploma.  With a population nearly three-quarters African-American, over one-third of these households make less than $10,000 annually.  The remaining 27% of the population consists of a diverse array of relative newcomers: young professionals, college students, some immigrants, artists—virtually all of which have higher incomes than the median and which inevitably have driven the neighborhood’s escalating reputation as a destination for fashionable (and not necessarily low-cost) urban entertainment.  Keeping in mind the polarizing demographic forces operating in Grand Center, the old Woolworth Building seems like a shrewd location for this type of redevelopment: the tenant mix can directly engage with the neighborhood’s neediest residents while fostering a blend of the (clichéd label) “eclectic” that helps sustain the often fragile balance in areas those host a widely mixed array of incomes.  Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Missouri, an office/administrative hub for the St. Louis metro and beyond, tries to emphasize inclusivity through partnerships with other neighborhood businesses.  The near-future prospects for Grand Center suggest further gentrification, but this also expedites the end of the segregation and concentration of poverty that characterized the area for decades prior.

Less than a mile from the Big Brothers Big Sisters, and just to the west of SLU’s main campus, sits 6North, a fashionable loft-style building featuring 80 units, with approximately 55% at market rates.

Although the surrounding neighborhood shows clear evidence of gentrification after decades of economic decline over the years, the majority of the building stock remains intact.  At this same intersection of Laclede Avenue and North Sarah Street, only one other corner is vacant.  Here are the structures at the other two corners:

Situated on the site of a former farmer’s market (whose original shell remains), the new construction (completed in 2006) demonstrates a conscious effort to blend with the surrounding vernacular as urban infill.   6 North’s proudest accomplishment (earning it multiple development and design awards) is its incorporation into every unit the fundamentals of universal design, which organizes the space so that virtually any individual can maximize his or her usage of the space, including those with any variety of physical challenges (wheelchairs, blindness, severe arthritis).  With the help of disability advocates at the Starkloff Institute http://starkloff.org/s/ , MBS’ development team devised wider hallways, more accessible light switches, changing floor textures to serve as tactile cues, full-length mirrors, and open space under sinks.  The building includes several work-live units on the ground floor, giving clients the option of a home office.  It also features a community room and fitness center (again applying universal design principles), and ground-floor retail. 

The demand for developments such as 6 North is only like to increase over the next two decades, as throngs of Baby Boomers become septa- and octogenarians.  No doubt many of them will prefer a home environment that allows “aging in place”—reducing the need to move into assisted living facilities later in life.

The final development sits yet further south than its predecessors—the first one south of Interstate 64.  McCormack House at Forest Park Southeast apartments place affordable assisted living all under one roof. 
 

For those who have read Part II, this development might bear more than a passing resemblance to the McCormack House at Westminster Place.  It should.  To the best of my knowledge, it’s more or less identical, thus explaining the shared namesake.  I see no reason to fault standardization—quite naturally it reduces aggregate soft costs in terms of architect’s fees, and it probably cuts on some of the needed civil, mechanical and electrical engineering.  One notable difference between this McCormack House and the one at Westminster is the surrounding environment.  With Westminster Place, the assisted living sat on a primarily residential street, with other McCormack Baron Salazar developments abutting it.  Here, it sits in relative isolation:

The above photo offers a view across the street from Forest Park Southeast.  At the junction of Manchester Avenue and Kingshighway Boulevard, the purlieus are hardly peaceful, and the street widths make them undesirable for pedestrian crossings.  Fortunately a neighborhood of mostly intact housing and improving safety record stretches to the east of this facility.

While this concludes the housing tour, it barely scratches the surface of MBS projects in the St. Louis city limits.  Their website reveals dozens more, ranging from adaptive reuse of historic structures, residential neighborhood construction, schools, shopping plazas, and solar retrofitting.  And, of course, McCormack Baron Salazar, Inc. is just one of many developers aiming to repopulate some of the city’s most devastated neighborhoods through amenity-laden developments that cater to a wide variety of socioeconomic levels.  Some are clearly more successful than others, but compare most of the St. Louis projects with these affordable apartments I encountered in a recent trip to Detroit:

Taken through a raindrop-flecked windshield from a speeding bus, the pictures probably don’t do it justice.  At the same time, they get the point across adequately: the buildings are oriented toward an interior parking lot or surrounded by off-street parking, with a perimeter fence.  They intend to sequester the residents from their surroundings rather than integrate them.  And they look completely indistinguishable from what one would expect to see in the suburbs.

I’m on the verge of creating a strawman here.  It’s completely unfair for me to compare some of the most carefully thought-out housing in St. Louis with some obviously perfunctory developments in Detroit, when I’m sure Detroit has some superior replacement housing, and St. Louis certainly has other sub-par projects.  But the numbers cannot lie: despite six decades of over 60% losses in either city, the decline shows some indication of flatlining in St. Louis, whereas the last 10 years for Detroit were worse than ever.  No doubt a combination of exogenous and endogenous forces have come to shape why it appears Detroit has suffered so much more than St. Louis, and to delve into those would be worthy of yet another blog post that at this point I’m not well-informed enough to generate.

Simply put: empirical evidence supports the numbers.  St. Louis has more effectively fended off the long accumulating stigma of living in the city limits. Even though, as I indicated in my first post in this series, St. Louis had to contend with a housing stock that had fallen more greatly out of favor than Detroit (particularly at the peak of the decline, from 1960 to 1980), it has enjoyed both a greater degree of renovated old housing as well as a replenishment of the supply in nearly depopulated neighborhoods.  More than most major American cities, and certainly more than St. Louis, single-family owner-occupied detached housing dominates Detroit’s supply.  Much of Detroit housing, especially in the northern neighborhoods close to the border at Eight Mile Road, looks like conventional “white picket fence” housing, yet people still abandoned it in droves, more rapidly in the last decade than even the previous lows of the 1970s. Though it may not have reversed the stigma, St. Louis holds greater promise, manifested in part by revitalized neighborhoods on the near south side, as well as the broad array of new construction across much of the previously deserted near north side.

I’ve deliberately suppressed the fundamental claim of this lengthy essay up to this point, though I have clearly hinted at it.  This exploration of St. Louis’ evolving housing stock over the years (with tangential comparative references to Detroit) intends to call into question how much—if at all—shifting consumer tastes for housing have influenced the departure from American cities.  While most older, industrialized cities in the country did begin to lose population in the middle of the 20^th century, some obviously suffered more than others: I have explored two that have endured among the steepest declines.  But not every city has been able to align its housing construction with consumer tastes—tastes that time has proven to be quite persnickety, not just in regards to design/style of housing or the particular neighborhood/district, but the ultra-sensitive interplay between the two.

The truth is, the McCormack Baron Salazar developments featured in this article have, by and large, forged a shrewd compromise in capitalizing on a mostly urban housing typology in parts of the city where demand for housing diminished to virtually nothing.  In order to substantiate this, it’s necessary to briefly revisit a project like Murphy Park from Part II of this essay:

Obviously these buildings bear little relation to the turn-of-the-century brick architecture that survives resplendently throughout St. Louis neighborhoods south of Delmar Avenue.  But it also does not look like a conventional suburban apartment complex in terms of the urban form: buildings front the conventional gridded street with minimal setbacks.  Residents of these areas will still navigate their apartment complex in much the same way they would if this were a historic neighborhood: walking along sidewalks that parallel the streets while crossing at intersections, as opposed to walking through sidewalks in grassy yards to reach large parking lots.  It’s a pedestrian scaled typology in a city that flourished in an area before automobile.

Compare the Murphy Park housing above to the photo below:

With prominent driveways leading to two-car garages, it’s hard to imagine these houses (not by McCormack Baron Salazar) might sit along century-old streets in a St. Louis neighborhood just a mile from downtown.  They look like 1980s suburbia.  But they do sit squarely in St. Louis, just a few blocks away from MBS’s Murphy Park development.  The juxtaposition of these radically different attempts to redevelop housing in depopulated north St. Louis neighborhoods begs the question: which one do people want more?  Obviously any attempt to gauge demand empirically as I have is based purely on speculation, but it’s relatively easy to substantiate it within a larger context.  Truthfully, most of the low income African American families who left north St. Louis pursued the same American Dream as their white counterparts had thirty years prior: they sought larger, detached, flexible suburban housing with garages and bigger yards.  But when a developer tries to replicate that model in the city of St. Louis, replete with its failing schools, strained public services, and lamentably high crime rates, why should families with any wherewithal choose the exact same housing product in the city that they can find easily in the ‘burbs but with much greater piece of mind?  Much of this newish suburban housing in St. Louis seems to be unraveling already:

Meanwhile, Murphy Park remains in impeccable shape.

Again, the comparison here isn’t entirely fair, since I deliberately pinpointed the worst examples of the suburban-style housing (some of it looks fine).  And it is possible that the suburban housing is owner-occupied and heavily subsidized, while Murphy Park is renter-occupied and thus falls under strict property management.  But demand will still drive everything, and it is highly possible that an extremely low-income family may still seek affordable housing with a “traditional” urban form that MBS offers, as long as it provides amenities.  Meanwhile, the market-rate buyers who voluntarily move to the city despite its crime and failing schools will almost definitely seek housing that promotes urbanism and walkability.  Though I don’t see yuppies moving to this side of St. Louis any time soon, they are far more likely to show interest in the market rate portion of an MBS development such as Murphy Park or the meticulously renovated Brewery Apartments—

--than they would for a conventional suburban house like the ones near Murphy Park, which they could easily afford in a suburb with much better schools.

Thus, a savvy developer must know not only when it’s the right time to rebuild in the always-risky depopulating central city, but which neighborhoods/districts are right to build, and which architecture or urban design principles are suitable for that particular neighborhood.  St. Louis’s most promising investments for the short-term may sit in a semicircle shape two miles around the downtown to the north, west, and south.  In the north, the best option is new construction using moderately urban standards but with the contemporary amenities (walk-in closets, ample kitchen/cabinet space, single-tap faucets) that virtually everyone expects these days.  To the west and the south, developers can focus more on strategic infill or restoration, since a considerably greater portion of the original housing stock survives, with a newly invigorated demand for both brick and attached duplexes.

Elsewhere in the St. Louis city limits—outside of that two-mile “fertile crescent”—it may be hard to stimulate much more demand for housing restoration or replenishment, particularly in the north and west.  Many of those neighborhoods are still losing population.  And the demand for the conventional St. Louis brick house does not extend so broadly that new arrivals are willing to try their luck in neighborhoods that hold no prospect for turning trendy in the next decade.

The conventional St. Louis brick house is still a niche product.  The fate of housing in these outlier districts is cloudy: while the city seeks buyers to claim vacant homes at very low costs, quite a few others will face demolition.  Optimally, the City will forge contracts with developers to purchase and rehab a broad swathe of them, based on the instinct that revitalizing an entire district, while evidently costlier and difficult to implement, is far more likely to result in sustained revitalization than merely renovating a single structure in an area otherwise surrounded by blight.

Whatever the Missouri city’s recent successes, neither St. Louis nor Detroit has any room for complacency.  The figureheads behind St. Louis’ revitalization face an uphill battle in the less trendy neighborhoods: what often appear to be solidly built brick homes will nonetheless continue to deteriorate when mothballed, not just due to climatic changes but also negative human intervention.  Many abandoned properties, particularly in the most deserted areas (and, thus, the least supervised), face imminent collapse due to persistent brick theft from scavengers.  Though I have not seen it, the film Brick by Chance and Fortune apparently explores St. Louis’ distinctive brick legacy in greater detail.  Meanwhile, recent Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers incidentally suggest that the metro Detroit economy is faring better than St. Louis for the time being—though a single year’s reports on job growth don’t necessarily indicate much, St. Louis ranked dead last among major metros, according to a recent chart compiled by The Urbanophile.  Metro Detroit fell somewhere more in the middle of the pack.  The essence of urban depopulation (a process decades in the making) is a many-headed hydra, and our learning process is scarcely over, nor, for that matter is the depopulation era over for many, many cities.  Tackling repopulation has proven just as difficult.  The most talented market-rate and affordable developers understand niche sensitivity enough to generate a strong IRR, leaving on the less successful in the housing industry to trot the stale shibboleth “built it and they will come”.  In the wounded American city, it just ain’t that simple.

Again, I would like to thank Heather Milton for her support and input on St. Louis housing.

Salvaging St. Louis, Part II: Planting the seeds for repopulation.

In the previous part to this study, I explored the similar population trends of two major Midwestern cities, St. Louis and Detroit.  Both cities have endured significant losses since their peak in the 1950 census.  Interestingly, Detroit seems to absorb the lion’s share of critical attention for its persistent economic malaise, yet St. Louis has actually suffered a slightly greater loss: 62% within its historic city limits, compared to Detroit’s 61%.  How has St. Louis evaded much of the stigma of decline that persistently dogs Detroit?  I offered a few big-picture speculations in the previous post, not the least of which is that, by and large, the St. Louis Metropolitan Statistical Area (consisting of 15 counties and St. Louis as an excluded city, or 16 counties if one considers the even larger Consolidated Metropolitan Area) has remained stable or grown slightly over the last few decades, while in Detroit, even many of the suburbs are shrinking as well.  In addition, St. Louis does not owe its population explosion to the emergence of a single industry: it began growing into a prominent city decades before Detroit, and for a short time in the mid 19^th century, it was the largest city in the Midwest—bigger even than Chicago.  Detroit, meanwhile, was still a humble town in the 1800s; then, after a surge of over 1,000,000 persons from 1910 to 1930 (the fastest growing city in modern history at the time), it enjoyed about 20 more years of unquestioned prosperity.

Most compelling for a person guided by empiricism as I am, St. Louis fundamentally looks better than Detroit.  While it clearly manifests its population loss, particularly in the impoverished northern half of the municipal boundaries, the Missouri city doesn’t harbor nearly as many broad swathes of vacancy as its Michigan counterpart—and the southern half of St. Louis boasts a number of perfectly stable or even fashionable, recently gentrified old neighborhoods. I identified one other major influence that gives St. Louis an edge: its housing stock was older and suffered obsolescence to a greater degree than Detroit.  While this may seem counterintuitive, it indicates that St. Louis owes its population loss much more to a housing typology that fell out of favor—people abandoned housing in St. Louis less because it depended on a collapsing industry and more because of how easy it was to construct a comfortable modern home outside the city limits.  The housing stock in St. Louis is on average much older; when St. Louis began to decline, people were abandoning 80 to 100-year-old brick rowhomes and duplexes because it was easier to start over than upgrade.  Conversely, much of the housing stock in Detroit was only 50 years old when the desertion process began.  While both cities suffered, postwar deindustrialization contributed far more to Detroit’s exodus than it did in St. Louis.

I have no doubt I am going out on a limb on this assertion, especially since St. Louis in particular can currently boast some aged brick attached housing that commands a fairly high price, since a few of these older neighborhoods have enjoyed a recent renaissance.  And, of course, all the industrial cities of the north suffered the same outmigration concomitant with the decline in industry.  But clearly some suffered more than others: in the Northeast, no one would question that Baltimore and Philadelphia’s attached housing stock have proven more prone to complete abandonment than, for example, Boston’s triple-deckers.  The remainder of this article will scrutinize the character of St. Louis’ housing, particularly in light of what I would consider one of the leaders in repopulating disinvested neighborhoods: the firm McCormack Baron Salazar, Inc., a pre-eminent owner and developer of affordable housing.  While every major city claims at least a few prominent affordable housing developers, MBS has almost singlehandedly restored some neighborhoods in St. Louis that otherwise would undoubtedly bear the same devastating scars we can witness in Detroit.  And it consistently ranks as one of the largest affordable housing developers in the country.

Lest this article come across as a promotional campaign for this specific firm, I attest now that I intend merely to use McCormack Baron Salazar as a method of winnowing a reasonable travelogue through the city’s vast and diverse array of housing stock, by directing attention on a handful of the firm’s developments in the city limits.  I intend to evaluate their success at balancing current demands for housing amenities with a respect for St. Louis’ distinctive vernacular architecture—the style that fell so heavily out of favor but now enjoys a palpable if uneven resurgence.  Not surprisingly, a preponderance of the major developments rest in the more devastated northern half of St. Louis.

This first, known as Murphy Park, stretches across several blocks centered at the intersection of Cass Avenue and North 19^th Street, just a few blocks west of the former site of Pruitt-Igoe, one of America’s most infamous public housing projects—and among the first to face demolition after persistent failure to offer its low-income residents an adequate quality of life.  To this day, the neighborhood (formerly known as DeSoto-Carr) is overwhelmingly African-American and low-income, though it holds a fraction of the population from its 1950 peak.

Murphy Park replaces Vaughn Towers, another public housing development that had fallen into serious disrepair by the mid 1980s.  Across three phases, MBS built over 400 units of new, low-rise housing, providing individualized entryways and private yard space, along with park facilities, a swimming pool, and a community center.

While it bears the trademarks of relatively new construction through the lack of the patina of “traditional” St. Louis housing expected from this district in the city, it also eschews the suburban multifamily typology, particularly the type one would expect to see in the 1980s.  Notice that the front doors all address the street, rather than turning toward the interior of the block with a centralized parking lot, as one might expect in the suburbs.  MBS did not alter the original grid, as the high-rise public housing developers did in prior decades.  And because different sections of Murphy Park adopt different styles, the community does not look like a development conceived from a uniform source or a single site plan.

Compare the photos above to the neighborhood that surrounds it.  Here’s a photo with some older surviving housing nearby:

And some other new construction in the area, which looks every bit like something one might see in suburbia.

There’s nothing wrong with the housing in the above photo, unless you are vigorously anti-suburb.  (I'm not, if that weren't obvious already.) To be frank, such housing may very well align with what these moderate-income families are seeking, more than the conventionally urban townhome style promoted before.  However, the more authentically urban Murphy Park development shows evidence of greater staying power: it is in consistently good condition.  Meanwhile, some of the suburban stuff has fizzled.

Judging from the grayness of the wood, this conventional house has sat in semi-built limbo for at least a couple years.  Since I don’t know the history behind this development, I will withhold further judgment.

Needless to say, however, the adjacent Murphy Park project shows no evidence of aborted construction; the entire initiative bespeaks of a unified vision that loosely conforms to the archetypes of an urban neighborhood will still providing sophisticated modern housing.  The fact that it displays some stylistic variance helps mitigate the effect of looking “over-planned” or factitious.  The success of Murphy Park ostensibly prompted HUD to conceive of the HOPE VI model for integrating affordable housing into an existing urban neighborhood context, based largely on the design principles applied here.

Approximately the same age as Murphy Park, the Brewery Apartments sit just a few blocks away and apply an entirely different development approach: meticulous historic preservation and adaptive reuse, in order to deliver particularly high-density multifamily housing in a neighborhood that otherwise would be bereft of residents.

The development consisted of the rehabilitation of three buildings that had belonged to the Falstaff Brewing Company, ten rowhomes directly across from 20^th Street, and two new infill buildings.  The total complex offers 140 units, with 75% of the units open to households earning less than 60% AMI (Area Median Income).  Here’s a more comprehensive picture of the brewery complex:

And here are the adjacent rowhomes:

And a more distant view, peering through the trees from an intersecting streetscape:

It would take far more scrutiny than I allowed myself in order to identify the two infill buildings, which the development effectively integrates with the much older building stock.  At the time of this publication, leasing rates for the market-rate apartments at the Brewery range from $700 to $940, from one to as many as three bedrooms, though no market-rate three-bedroom units were available.  And it is easy to see why the brewery can lease to a market-rate clientele: redeveloped old breweries have flourished as fashionable residential real estate, especially for the urban young professional population that is less concerned with crime or struggling public schools.  Based on my phone inquiry, the Brewery Apartments rarely struggle to find market rate tenants, indicating their desirability despite the general impoverishment of the neighborhood.  

Most of McCormack Baron Salazar’s other St. Louis developments rest in more economically mixed areas than the aforementioned two.  The Westminster Place Apartments sit squarely in Midtown St. Louis, an area that remained fashionable up through the mid-1960s.  Just a stone’s through away sat Gaslight Square, a hub of taverns, cabarets, and, eventually, St. Louis’ counterculture movement.  But the area declined steadily in the 1970s, and, although never upscale, it fell victim to particularly acute desuetude, to the point that by 1990, the City had demolished virtually all the structures in Gaslight Square.  Westminster Place belongs to a series of public and private initiatives aimed at repopulating the 90-acre area.  Like Murphy Park, it offers a diverse array of housing to accommodate a variety of demographic groups. 
The end result stretches across several blocks in Midtown, with three developmental phases completed from 2007 to 2012, amounting to 392 new apartments and 80 homes.

Note the decorative brick street signs, which distinguish the neighborhood from the more conventional signage in the purlieus.  Westminster Place itself—the actual road—features a mix of townhomes and single-family detached housing flanking a landscaped traffic circle.

Some of the apartment buildings adhere to the same archetype used in Murphy Park.  Though their appearance may deviate from the structures of the Gaslight Square era, they still provide an above-average population density and a pedestrian orientation directly to the street—two characteristics that would be unheard of if MBS had abided by a more suburban vernacular.  Tucked into the heart of the Westminster Place development is McCormack House, an assisted living apartment for low-income seniors, visible in the photo below:

Interestingly, the same block of Olive Street that hosts McCormack House also completely intermingles features more Westminster Place apartments with old commercial/industrial structures that remain largely vacant and decaying.  Here’s one of the standard new buildings:

And here’s a relic from days past just a bit further down:

One of these dinosaurs sits directly across from McCormack House.

I would speculate that the above building is a sheath for concealing a menacing electrical sub-station, if it weren’t for the masonry scar to the building’s right, suggesting that a similarly sized building used to sit immediately adjacent to it.  Who knows what’s going on here?  These aging behemoths could belong to a stubborn landowner refusing to sell until the market it too hot, or it could be part of an eventual adaptive re-use that will attempt to salvage the façades.  Regardless, the juxtaposition of old and new provides a needed anomaly.  Otherwise, far all the artistry involved in integrating a variety of housing styles and types, Westminster Place still looks like exactly what it is: a new development to replace a completely devastated old neighborhood.

In order to avoid this article extending to uncomfortable length, I’m going to push the pause button.  Part III will conclude the essay with an exploration of a few more McCormack Baron Salazar projects, along with a final analysis on the implications for intensive housing provision as a means of inducing repopulation.