A word of caution to those dancing on the grave of Paul McKee Jr.

St. Louis broke into something of an impromptu citywide celebration on Tuesday, June 12 when the Krewson administration tipped select media that it had notified NorthSide Regeneration that it had nullified their development agreement because of a number of alleged violations of that agreement on the part of NorthSide. NorthSide, of course, is the project name that developer Paul McKee Jr. gave to his ambitious – and long-deferred – project to assemble enough land in North St. Louis to build one of those “transformative developments of scale” that developers tout in proposals to legislators and investors.

The widespread frustration with McKee and NorthSide (in many cases, it’s more like hostility, even hate) is understandable. Though his early personal roots are on the North Side, he came to this project from the exurbs, having moved MasterCard to a former empty field in O’Fallon and developed Winghaven, one of those planned communities that make urbanists cringe. He assembled land in North St. Louis the same way everyone does – by buying small plots with an eye toward forming a big plot surreptitiously, using an array of front companies. When architectural historian Michael R. Allen figured out McKee’s assemblage scheme, long before McKee was ready to go public, the Post-Dispatch reported on McKee’s plans as if he were the first developer to sneakily assemble hundreds of small plots into one large footprint in an effort to drive down costs, and much of the public has had a sinister view of McKee and the project ever since.

McKee did a number of other things that deepened public suspicion. He had his legal team rather brilliantly craft a lucrative urban land-assemblage tax credit defined in a way that applied only to NorthSide, and with the help of then state-Rep. Rodney Hubbard he got it passed (and, indeed, NorthSide was the only project that benefitted from the tax credit before it was discontinued). From the cold-eyed view of politics and development, McKee had done nothing but succeed at the game everyone tries to play – to leverage political power to access public subsidies – but to the public it looked like a gigantic boondoggle. McKee’s association with Hubbard, and eventually the entire Hubbard family, even further deepened public suspicion of him. The Hubbards got a piece of NorthSide for their political efforts, and the North City power brokers became a well that McKee kept dipping into when he needed a state representative (Peggy) or alderman (Tammika) to advance his project. When a new generation of black politicians, including Bruce Franks Jr. and Rasheen Aldridge, unmasked the Hubbards’ dubious absentee ballot program, with the help of savvy libertarian lawyers, the public could be forgiven for concluding that McKee has been doing business with some straight-up gangsters.

McKee’s political allies came to include U.S. Rep. Wm. Lacy Clay, whose longtime chief of staff, attorney Darryl Piggee, would even go to work for McKee’s longtime legal team, lending further appearance (if not actual evidence) of political collusion. And then McKee finally got his development deal done with the Slay administration when Jeff Rainford was running it, sending his dubious political associations far past the tipping point. If he had been moving dirt and developing projects of public benefit while doing all of this political wrangling – and securing city tax incentives on top of state tax credits – maybe the project would have stood a fighting chance for public approval. But he is trying to develop a transformative project of scale in a truly distressed urban area, which should take time in the best of times, and he weathered a major economic downturn along the way.

McKee did achieve one major thing. With another local developer, he submitted the city’s proposal to relocate the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) West job center to his footprint in North St. Louis, which kept thousands of jobs and millions of annual tax dollars in St. Louis and Missouri, rather than moving to O’Fallon, Illinois. That was an enormous benefit to the city and state, but it endangered an already politically weakened McKee for the simple reason that any fool can now see what McKee foresaw more than a decade ago, when nobody was thinking this way: that you can make money developing North St. Louis. And that is really what is going on with the Krewson administration’s turning the long knives on him now.

To be clear, this is not a case of the valiant Mayor Lyda Krewson righting a wrong that Mayor Francis Slay made and stood by. In fact, Rainford and Slay first turned on McKee and NorthSide in 2015. A reasonably compliant administration turned obstructionist, and seasoned watchers of this game saw a ghost walking on the NorthSide. It’s the ghost of the dreamer with the big idea who becomes financially overextended and politically unprotected, and gets deliberately flattened – much to the benefit of rival, well-connected developers and speculators. Such players – schemers looking to take down a dreamer – are still very much in the game in St. Louis development; ironically, this same cabal fought to see the NGA project moved to Illinois, partly to foil McKee, despite the enormous cost to the city. As Rainford and Slay turned on McKee, this paradigm arose among insiders. McKee began to look like the visionary deliberately being imploded and bankrupted when on the brink of success by rivals with less imagination and appetite for risk, but greater savvy at a critical moment of an opponent’s weakness. The Krewson administration’s attempt to void the city’s development agreement with NorthSide is the first overt move toward bringing down McKee, but the game has been on for at least three years.

On Wednesday, June 13, a latecomer came to the game, in this case, more likely looking for public approval during his campaign for U.S. Senate than to enrich a cabal of rival developers at the expense of McKee’s dream. Attorney General Josh Hawley filed a lawsuit against NorthSide Regeneration, bringing three civil counts against the company – tax credit fraud, breach of a tax credit application, and unjust enrichment, all allegedly committed in the handling of the land-assemblage tax credits. Hawley’s suit, for which the city must have provided evidence, explains the timing of Krewson’s move against McKee.

Two notes of caution to those dancing on the grave of Paul McKee Jr. He can out-lawyer the city, which (as McKee critics are themselves saying) has made a series of bad deals with him that the city’s legal staff will have to defend against some of the better legal minds in the state. In fact, it would be unprecedented for the city to void a development agreement. The state attorney general could be tougher going, but NorthSide’s alleged misuse of tax credits has only been litigated in an eminent domain trial in the city where NorthSide was not named, so its defense against those charges has not been presented and innocence must be presumed until guilt is proven. And if you are expecting better, more credible, more ethical developers to replace McKee and finally deliver on transformative projects of scale in North St. Louis once McKee is out of the picture – providing he can be brought down or, at the very least, crowded to a small piece of the footprint – on what basis do you expect Krewson to find them? If such developers capable of developing the North Side were on the scene, who are they, where are they, and what have they been doing while McKee has been assembling a land mass on the North Side, crafting tax credits and incentives, and drawing up ambitious plans? Anybody still waiting on Superman in North St. Louis won’t find Paul McKee their final disappointment in this mess.