On Saturday, U.S. Rep. Wm. Lacy Clay (D-MO) joined congressional colleagues for a hearing at St. Louis City Hall entitled “The Use of Federal Housing and Economic Development Funds in St. Louis: From ‘Team 4’ Into the Future.”
The hearing was an official field hearing of the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity of the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services, convened by Chairwoman U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA).
Clay said his goal with the hearing was to identify ways to focus existing federal funding to St. Louis into North City, where development is desperately needed. Clay said wise use of federal money will lead to private investment currently lacking in North St. Louis.
The first witness panel at the hearing focused on the infamous Team Four Plan, the 1974 memorandum that called for a strategic disinvestment in North St. Louis.
Alderman Terry Kennedy (D-18th) provided testimony on the history of the Team Four Plan, concluding that “developments over the years have followed [the plan’s] patterns and tenets,” even though the plan was not formally adopted.
Areas of North St. Louis “give the greatest justification for the City’s application for federal housing dollars, but have seen the least of it,” said Kennedy.
“This may be the first time the Congress has looked into the Team Four Plan,” said U.S. Rep. Al Green (D-TX), the other subcommittee member present for the hearing. He received wild applause from the sizeable audience.
One surprising moment came when Deputy Mayor for Development Barbara Geisman stated that she had never read the Team Four Plan and that it was “not relevant” to the work she is doing in North St. Louis.
Geisman also voiced support for increasing use of federal funds for North Side development.
Moving beyond the Team Four Plan, the second panel of witnesses included experts on methods of increasing and targeting federal funds in distressed urban areas.
A key witness was John Talmage, director of The Social Compact, Inc. The Social Compact is undertaking a “Neighborhood Market DrillDown” project, in which the organization is using alternative data sources to challenge incomplete data on population and financial asset currently referenced by developers and investors. This project has looked at cities like Detroit, Miami, San Francisco and Cincinnati, leading to revised Census counts and increased awareness of the previously discounted assets of distressed areas.
“Let’s make the phrase ‘return to the city’ or ‘the comeback city’ mean more than just opportunity to build new for a new population,” said Talmage.
In many cases, existing populations already could support new retail and development, he said. The problem is that developers don’t have good information and thereby discount certain areas. The Social Compact aims to uncover and publicize information to reverse negative perceptions of urban areas. St. Louis is one of the cities the organization will be analyzing in the near future.
Matthew Fellowes of the Brookings Institution submitted a written report that discussed the high cost of being poor, and ways in which business practices take money away from low-income populations that could otherwise be invested in quality housing.
Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory testified that his city’s successful effort to challenge faulty Census information led to the counting of 47,000 more residents than the Census had reported, representing $2 billion in spending power.
North Side tour
Prior to the hearing, Clay led a two-hour bus tour of North City and County for his colleagues, subcommittee witnesses and a few local development leaders. Clay showcased two successful examples of development, as well as three sites that have been long-time North Side problems.
After visiting the Friendly Temple Apartments in Wells-Goodfellow, where a church congregation has developed a successful 110-unit elderly apartment complex on vacant land, the bus headed to the 15-acre vacant site that once was the former Army Ammunition Plant at Goodfellow Avenue and I-70.
A retail development project for the site centered around a Home Depot store recently fell apart, and there are no immediate plans for another project. Clay said the site’s condition was “part of the failure of the City to develop a prime location.” Clay said he prefers development on the site that would create jobs, suggesting light industrial or transfer center uses as desirable.
The next stop was the NorthPark project, where County officials worked with developers McEagle and Clayco to create a 60-acre industrial and commercial park on land vacated through the airport noise abatement project. For NorthPark, the tour’s narrator was Mike Jones, chief of staff to County Executive Charlie Dooley.
With its location in the center of the country, next to an airport and interstate, Jones said, the site is ideal for attracting growing local companies and companies currently located elsewhere.
The final stops were at the abandoned Carter Carburator plant on North Grand Boulevard, a heavily polluted site, and the 33-acre Pruitt-Igoe site at the intersection of Cass and Jefferson avenues. Notably, discussion of Pruitt-Igoe did not include any mention of McEagle developer Paul McKee, who owns significant land around the site and whose plans have been the subject of much speculation and controversy.
U.S. Rep. Waters, a St. Louis native, repeatedly pointed out that low development costs give St. Louis an advantage unknown to many urban areas. However, the advantages are balanced by challenges. Jones cautioned that St. Louis has not been a desirable place for national developers.
“We don’t have natural demand,” Jones said.
With low activity, areas in the city and county viewed as distressed lose out on development – especially when developers can’t get access to public incentives that cash-rich suburbs can offer.
Without smart use of public money and better population data, reinvestment in North City and County will continue, at best, through slow and scattered efforts – with the result being more lost opportunities for the entire region.
– Lindsey Derrington contributed information for this article.
