A conversation with Richard Baron on urban development
By Chris King Of the St. Louis American
In addition to its rediscovered missing youths and its baseball team, St. Louis has been in the national news recently for the redevelopment of its Downtown and the implosion of its public school system. So, last week the American sat down with a local developer – or, as it has been said, visionary – who is steeped in issues of urban development, particularly as it ties to rebuilding urban education: Richard D. Baron, co-founder, chairman and CEO of McCormack Baron Salazar.
Baron was the 2004 laureate of the Urban Land Institute for its J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development, which recognized the work of his St. Louis-based company in revitalizing urban neighborhoods all over the U.S., including 27 HOPE VI communities. Locally, Baron also is founder and developer of COCA, co-founder of the Vashon Education Compact and an executive board member of the Regional Chamber and Growth Association, among many other civic commitments.
Baron spoke to the American about the Downtown development boom and its current limitations, the city schools and their challenges, and McCormack Baron Salazar’s local flagship community, the George L. Vaughn Residence at Murphy Park, which replaced the 656-unit George L. Vaughn Family Apartment highrises that stood virtually vacant by the early 1990s.
The following remarks by Baron are edited from a long, digressive conversation held last Friday.
We are creating a whole new residential community Downtown, which is fine. We are seeing these wonderful historic buildings recycled, the creation of a larger tax base, with more people involved in the affairs of the city. But the market right now is mostly professional singles and couples with no children. To really see a residential presence Downtown on a significant scale, we will need the development of 5-10,000 new units. This hasn’t happened, but I hope it will. A very critical part of the market is built-for-sale new construction. Right now we are seeing mostly historic tax credit-driven reconstruction. The difference that will make the numbers work is for-sale new construction.
At McCormack Baron Salazar, we do large-scale, mixed-income communities. We are very focussed on human capital work as well as the built environment. We try to use schools as the center of our communities. They are important in the way they bring together family and kids. Improving the quality of what is being done in the schools is part of our redevelopment strategy in creating new, viable housing markets.
We are interested in economically integrated communities that can also be racially integrated. From my work with public housing, I could see clearly that the formula of segregating all the low-income families in one area did not make sense. It really depresses the market in and around these huge sites and cuts the people in these sites off from services. These sites also don’t provide alternative role models for poor kids – opportunities to interact with middle-income kids. That became more and more the focus of our company, how to work these environments here in St. Louis. Now our work is national in scope, with offices also in Los Angeles, Memphis, Phoenix and Pittsburgh. We are involved with 13-14,000 housing units across the country.
Some of our sites locally include Murphy Park on 20th Street, which replaced the old Vaughn highrise, and Renaissance Place at Grand, just east of Powell Symphony Hall on Delmar. These are mixes of mixed-income and elderly housing communities.
Jefferson Elementary School is the center of Murphy Park, our little flagship for our school-centered redevelopment strategy. The community has been operating since the mid-‘90s and is very stable. A lot of the kids go to the neighborhood school now who were bussed before. That’s our goal, for it to become a neighborhood school, and that is being accomplished.
We also are seeing now a new seniors’ community emerge out of what was a decrepit Housing Authority highrise.
The school system is critical. Clearly, schools are the most important factor in seeing the rebirth of neighborhoods. To get people to live in the city, we are going to have to see better neighborhoods, and that’s tied directly to schools. I have been actively involved with the St. Louis Public Schools for 35 years, most recently in helping to organize the Vashon Educational Compact, which is basically out of business, now – with all the dysfunction in the city schools, we saw no reason to keep going until the situation is stabilized. But we hope to get it revitalized.
The outflow of students from the St. Louis Public Schools is very scary. How in the world are we going to hold the schools together if thousands of students leave the system? Families will vote with their feet and leave the city altogether to find better schools and reasonably priced housing. The problem is the system isn’t working and it isn’t perceived to be working by families.
