Advocates for North St. Louis routinely condemn the “Team Four Plan,” which was not a complete plan but rather one memorandum submitted by Team Four Architects to a comprehensive plan for the city being drafted in 1975. This memo defined something called a “depletion area” as any part of the city “where population and building stock were experiencing severe problems requiring redevelopment but where reinvestment had not yet begun,” as William Albinson of Team Four wrote in this paper in 2008. The memo urged, as Albinson wrote, “that spreading scarce redevelopment funds thinly across all depletion areas would not work; that the city should make commitments to specific locations.”
An oversimplification of the advice might be that the city leaders should focus development efforts on parts of the struggling city that were already bounding back, and consign areas “experiencing severe problems requiring redevelopment” to at least temporary oblivion. Albinson argued in this paper that his team’s memo was never an organized plan formally adopted by the city. Yet, consciously or not, the city has pursued a development strategy consistent with this advice, and anyone with eyes can see that the “depletion areas” left undeveloped were heavily concentrated in North St. Louis, which also has the city’s highest density of African-American residents. In a cultural moment today where “racial equity” is a priority (at least on everyone’s lips), the idea of consciously leaving majority-black areas of the city depleted and undeveloped looks both unjust and unwise (and arguably racist). It has had the effect of concentrating poverty in majority-black neighborhoods and, in the absence of legitimate economic means of earning an income, it has helped to foster crime and spawn a criminal underclass that endangers us all.
Those of us who decry this historical pattern should be celebrating the relocation of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Western Headquarters to North St. Louis, to what would certainly qualify (40 years after Team Four’s memo) as a depletion area. The NGA’s decision transformed the prospects for this depletion area overnight into one of the region’s most promising new hubs for redevelopment. The $1.75-billion construction project will create 15,000 construction jobs, with commitments to hiring minority workers and city residents. NGA West brings the agency’s 3,100 jobs to North St. Louis, and the amenities required for a workforce of that scale will create many more jobs. The first definite sign of new economic development is Paul McKee Jr.’s announcement that his NorthSide Regeneration project will finally break ground in the 1,500 acres in North St. Louis it controls. McKee said NorthSide will begin construction on 3,000 market-rate residential units – starting with 500 units over the next five years – in a partnership with Washington-based national developer Telesis and local CRG Real Estate Solutions.
These are high-tech jobs moving to North St. Louis that will create cross-town synergies with the downtown start-up community and Cortex in the city’s central corridor. The NGA’s decision to stay in the city and move north coincides with a number of other promising, current public and private developments. The Arch grounds are being refurbished in a $380 million project, which will boost tourism and help integrate the riverfront into downtown. The BJC Campus Renewal Project is well underway (BJC said it does not provide the cost of its construction projects). Forest Part Forever continues its partnership with the City of St. Louis to make $30 million in improvements to the city’s great park that anchors development around its periphery. More than $300 million in enhancements to the east end of Washington University’s Danforth Campus, which borders the city, have just gotten started. When you connect all of these projects, it’s possible to have hope that St. Louis has started to turn itself around and transform itself into a place where more people will want to live, work and play.
Thanks to the NGA – and, yes, Paul McKee Jr., who assembled the land that made the city’s NGA West bid possible – North St. Louis is, for the first time in the 40 years since a “depletion area” was defined (and going back decades before that), poised for new development of scale. We still have to be vigilant and firm to make certain that this development proceeds in a way that fosters the racial equity and inclusion that has been promised – and that this region needs as badly as it needs economic investment. And we regret the displacement of a number of families who made North St. Louis their home during the many years their neighborhoods were dismissed as “depletion areas” by developers. But let’s be clear: a huge jump start to badly needed economic investment has begun in North St. Louis, and that is something to celebrate.
