The long-awaited housing development in the NorthSide Regeneration project that covers 1,500 acres in North St. Louis city is finally seeing some positive movement.
On June 7, NorthSide developer Paul McKee Jr. said they will begin construction on 3,000 market-rate residential units – starting with 500 units over the next five years. To accomplish this, McKee announced a partnership with Washington-based national developer Telesis and local CRG Real Estate Solutions.
McKee’s move to start on the housing development comes seven years after the city first approved a $391-million Tax Increment Financing (TIF) proposal for NorthSide’s $8-billion redevelopment plan. The NorthSide TIF and plan was basically frozen for three years, following lawsuits filed in 2010 against the city and state. In April 8, 2013, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled in favor of the NorthSide TIF.
On June 2, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency officially announced that North St. Louis will be the new home for its $1.75-billion west headquarters. NorthSide’s first housing will go up immediately adjacent to the NGA facility site, in a 50-block area bounded by St. Louis Place Park, Cass Avenue on the south and North Florissant on the east.
The first phase will include houses, starting at $115,000 for a 1,000 square-feet home. It will also include apartments and lofts, starting at rents of $750 on up to $1,400 for 800-square-feet. At present, Catherine Lynch, director of planning for Telesis, said they do not plan to include affordable housing among the first 500 units.
“There’s a difference between affordable housing and income-restricted housing,” said Lynch. “Right now the market rate for rents and sales in that neighborhood are affordable to households below 80 percent and in comes cases 60 percent, which is the usual income restriction for affordable housing. So how many are affordable? Right now, everything.”
McKee said there are already seven low-income projects in surrounding neighborhoods.
“There is so much subsidized housing on the North Side,” McKee said. “Our goal is to get prices that people can afford to pay but not put income restrictions on people so they can grow to anyone who wants to live there so that we can increase the value of the neighborhood and make it a market neighborhood.”
Molly Metzger, a board member of the Equal Housing Opportunity Council and associate professor at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University, has been part of many recent conversations on preventing gentrification and diversifying city neighborhoods.
“I suppose you could say that even the most expensive housing is affordable to someone,” she said. “But the big question is: Who can afford it? And if there are some reasonably priced units, will they be dedicated to the low-income households who really need them?”
While the low-income tax credit program is not perfect, Metzger said it helps to guarantee that there will be a mixed-income population. Metzger hopes that the housing developers will take into account the Ferguson Commission’s call to apply a racial equity lens to every major policy and practice decision made in the region.
“It is not enough to say that there is affordable housing elsewhere on the North Side,” Metzger said. “If we want integrated housing, as opposed to merely a shifting of the color line, we need to be proactive and plan for it. There is a long history in St. Louis and around the country of the displacement of low-income communities and communities of color. Will the NGA site be the next iteration of that same story?”
