In the fall of 2025, St. Louis welcomed the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to North City, settling at Jefferson and Cass avenues, sprawling across a 97-acre footprint. Officials promised this facility would bring opportunity for academic partnerships, industrial growth and meaningful integration with surrounding neighborhoods. They said it would be an investment in North City.
But a harder and more uncomfortable question demands to be asked: Who will actually benefit once the doors fully open?
I live in downtown St. Louis, and like many working people, I drive through North City regularly. I pass the NGA site while traveling down Jefferson through the Carr Square area, heading toward the highway for work.
On these drives, I don’t just see a shiny new facility rising from the ground. I see block after block of vacant homes, empty storefronts and neighborhoods that have endured decades of disinvestment, neglect and broken promises.
North City has always been more than a map coordinate for development plans. It has been a place of opportunity for working families, especially Black families, who found affordable homes and built lives there.
These were neighborhoods where our grandparents and great-grandparents worked hard to buy property, raise children, attend church and take pride in their ownership.
My grandfather grew up in inner North City and attended Vashon High School. He witnessed the rise and fall of these neighborhoods firsthand. He saw families plant roots, businesses open their doors and communities thrive long before disinvestment hollowed them out. Now, after decades of abandonment, a multibillion-dollar federal agency has arrived, suddenly declaring North City “valuable” again.
And that is exactly what worries me.
History tells us what happens next. When massive institutions move into long-neglected communities without firm protections for residents, displacement follows. Property values rise, taxes increase and the very people who held these neighborhoods together through the hardest years are pushed out.
Churches that have stood for generations, family-owned businesses and residents who were “grandfathered in” don’t get uplifted, they get priced out.
That is not revitalization. That is removal.
It is deeply unfair to ask long-standing residents to make room for progress that may never include them. It is unjust to celebrate economic development while ignoring the cultural, social and historical fabric of a community. And it is disingenuous to promise partnership without guaranteeing protection.
If the presence of NGA will truly improve North City, the investment must begin with the people who already live there — not developers, not outsiders, not future tenants with higher incomes.
Without enforceable commitments to affordable housing, local hiring, community ownership and anti-displacement protections, this project risks becoming yet another chapter in a long story of broken trust.
North City does not need to be “saved” by bringing in an institution that may ultimately erase it. It needs to be respected, protected and uplifted.
Until that happens, we must be honest enough to say it out loud: NGA, as it currently stands, is not benefiting North City.
Demitria Davis is a community organizer, activist and St. Louis resident.