“font-family: Verdana; line-height: 13px;”>Journalists learn to prepare for the holidays as if nothing will happen, and in the absence of news they will need stories of interest. Surely it was in this spirit that business reporter Tim Logan prepared a 3,000-word story on developer Paul McKee Jr. for the Sunday, December 18 edition of the “font-family: Verdana; line-height: 13px;”>Post-Dispatch
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>Coming one week before Christmas, one of the slowest news Sundays of the year, the piece had no news. The most recent development is a judge’s ruling against McKee in a suit over a property in Hazelwood, which the Post had reported a month before.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>Logan
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>did report a new comment on this $32.1 million judgment against McKee, which McKee and his attorney Steve Stone have appealed.
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xml:lang=”EN”>“I don’t see how anything he’s doing is going to go forward while he’s got that judgment,” attorney W. Bevis Schock told the Post.
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xml:lang=”EN”>Schock is one of the attorneys representing plaintiffs that have successfully blocked, for now, McKee’s $390 million tax increment financing agreement with the City of St. Louis for the controversial Northside Regeneration project.
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xml:lang=”EN”>Judge Robert H. Dierker Jr. ruled that the anonymous person paying Schock’s legal fees need not be disclosed. Schock is secretary of the Board of Directors for the Show-Me Institute, which conservative billionaire financier Rex Sinquefield serves as president. It is commonly speculated that Sinquefield is paying Schock’s legal fees. A call to Pelopidas, which handles media for Sinquefield, was not returned.
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xml:lang=”EN”>“Bevis Schock says we’re dead,” McKee’s attorney, Steve Stone, told The American during a lengthy interview on Monday, the day after the Post piece was published. “We sure look funny, if we’re dead.”
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xml:lang=”EN”>Indeed, McKee’s team – which has grown to include a real-estate broker and an environmental consultant helping with the clean up of the contested Hazelwood site – looked anything but dead. They were advancing on all fronts with deals on every project: Northside, NorthPark near the St. Louis airport, Shiloh near Scott Airforce Base, Winghaven in O’Fallon and even the suddenly expensive former town dump in Hazelwood, where they are rooting for microbes to finish consuming the leftover organic waste from the dump and expelling potentially dangerous methane gas so the developer can get back to business.
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xml:lang=”EN”>“You can’t solve an environmental problem with a lawyer,” McKee – a Washington University-trained engineer – said of the Hazelwood site.
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xml:lang=”EN”>However, McKee said, his lawyer has factored the long-standing dispute over the Hazelwood site “into all of the commitments we have made at NorthPark and in North City.” Contrary to Bevis Schock’s doom and gloom, he said, the judge’s November ruling will have no impact on their developments.
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xml:lang=”EN”>The American “font-size: 9pt; font-family: Verdana;” lang=”EN” xml:lang=”EN”>was enticed with reports of nearly-closed deals for tenants, large and small, all over the map of McKee’s developments. No businessman ever wanted to disclose a potential deal until it is closed, since there is always competition on both ends of the deal. But clearly, McKee, Stone and their broker, Christopher Zoellner of Foundation Commercial, were on the same page on a wide range of deals.
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xml:lang=”EN”>If it was an act – Alderman Antonio D. French has accused McKee of being a salesman; in his ruling, Judge Dierker compared him to a circus showman – it was a smooth one.
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xml:lang=”EN”>One fact is indisputable: McKee has shown a penchant for taking on risk in a lagging metropolitan area that may be unprecedented. He undertook Winghaven when St. Charles County was expected to grow, and he and Bob Clark of Clayco competed successfully as a joint venture for NorthPark when it was highly prized airport-buyout real estate. But his most recent ventures – a former dump in Hazelwood, a flood plain in Shiloh and a jigsaw puzzle of small parcels in some of the most crime-ridden neighborhoods in the U.S., North St. Louis – show real courage for doing the dirtiest development work.
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xml:lang=”EN”>That is exactly why, as he has said all along about the Northside project, he seeks public subsidy and shared public risk. “We’re dealing with rotting public infrastructure,” McKee said.
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xml:lang=”EN”>He now knows this to be true first-hand. When local preservationist Michael R. Allen began the painstaking deed searches that outted McKee’s land-banking in North City, his Northside plans were a closely kept secret in St. Charles. Now McKee has set up an office, which he calls a “war room,” on the near North Side, where bankers, clients and journalists have to navigate a maze of poorly planned and crumbling streets to find McKee.
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xml:lang=”EN”>Step out of the office, and the visitor is confronted with huge piles of dirt. McKee is proud of that dirt, because it means work is being done. Bevis Schock might be focused on the $32.1 million judgment against McKee in Hazelwood, but McKee is animated by the $315 million in development he has managed to execute in a massively recessed economy – not to mention the 5,500 direct and 3,000 indirect jobs which he says these projects have created.
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xml:lang=”EN”>One also is confronted with the vision of downtown St. Louis, which is stunning seen from the near North Side – and the phantom of a bridge that will soon be rising to drop thousands of motorists on McKee’s doorstep, once the new Mississippi River Bridge is completed. McKee did the hard work early in swapping land with transportation authorities to both ease highway interchanges and increase the value of his investments. That is McKee’s distinct genius – to match huge opportunities, like a once-in-a-lifetime construction of transformative infrastructure, with blight. For blight is also opportunity, if you have an appetite for risk.
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xml:lang=”EN”>As McKee’s broker, Chris Zoellner, says, absence can be opportunity when courting tenants who offer services. As the broker runs a red pinpoint up and down a map of wasted North City streets and vacant lots, he says, “For our clients, absence of services is desirable.”