In January 2023, former Mayor Tishaura Jones, using American Rescue Plan (ARPA) funds, announced she was launching a pilot program called “Stable Communities STL.”
The program, Jones said, would address vacant and neglected properties and stabilize buildings in St. Louis. Further, it would stabilize privately owned properties “so they can then be renovated and become, instead of neighborhood sores, neighborhood gems,” Jones added.
Jones told a group of business owners last year: “Under this program, if owners fail to make needed repairs, the city will exercise our right to hire contractors to complete this work and send the absentee owner a bill. If you are an absentee property owner, read my lips: neglect is no longer welcome in the city of Saint Louis.”
Newly elected Mayor Cara Spencer has just pulled the plug on that program.
“This building stabilization program was well-intentioned but, unfortunately, pretty poorly executed,” Spencer said during a Tuesday afternoon press conference.
“As we have seen in previous media coverage, the City has been billing property owners for work that wasn’t done and causing undue stress to communities already suffering from blight. Given the widespread and well-documented problems, we had no choice but to end this program and re-evaluate more effective ways of making much-needed investments in North St. Louis.”
The program has indeed proven problematic. Some property owners were shocked when they learned they owed hundreds of thousands to the city for repairs they didn’t ask for or authorize. Others claimed the work was poorly done or nonexistent.
Late last year Jones asked the FBI and the state auditor’s office to investigate reports of corruption in the St. Louis city Building Division after one inspector, who later resigned, allegedly had ties with two construction companies that had been paid more than $2.3 million in ARPA funds to do work mandated by the city.
Stable Communities STL was allocated some $13 million in ARPA funds to make repairs to privately held properties and then bill the owners for the work. The St. Louis Development Corporation (SLDC) and other city departments provided administrative support to the program. Two programs operate under Stable Communities STL’s umbrella: “Building Stabilization” and the privately-owned “Property Stabilization” programs.
Jones said she had no comment, when contacted by The American.
There are thousands of abandoned or dilapidated properties on the city’s land bank, better known as the Land Reutilization Authority’s (LRA) database. The city has always had the authority to conduct emergency repairs on buildings that pose a threat or nuisance, but its building division lacked the funds to cover the costs of repairs upfront.
That all changed in 2022 when the city was awarded millions in federal pandemic aid. After that windfall, elected officials began drafting guidelines to prioritize targeting the roughly 5,000 vacant and deteriorating structures in the city.
With the passage of tougher legislation, the city increased its efforts to stabilize its LRA properties and pursue problematic property owners like Paul McKee’s NorthSide Regeneration. It also threatened to seize high-profile but problematic vacant properties such as the Railway Exchange building downtown, according to the St. Louis Post Dispatch.
“The program has sent “a message to bad property owners that the city is not going to tolerate their behavior,” said former Mayor Jones’ chief of staff, Jared Boyd last year.
The Post Dispatch reported that more than 100 properties had been identified by which the city had hired contractors to do repairs and then bill the owners afterwards. Another “20 or so,” it reported, were “in the process of having the repair work bid out.”
To ensure “no cloud is left” on any liens resulting from enforcement by the stabilization program, Spencer said her office is working with the Assessor and City Counselor’s offices to “lift all remaining liens” against penalized property owners.
There’s still $5.4 million in ARPA funds remaining with the Stable Communities STL program. Spencer’s answer to what will become of that money or if it will still be allocated to stabilization efforts, was inconclusive.
“We’re looking into that and hope we’ll continue to have dialogue about it,” Spencer answered. “Making sure we spend those dollars in the intended way to improve communities, particularly in north St. Louis, is really important and how we do that is something we’re still evaluating at this point.”
The same day Spencer announced she was shuttering the program, a lawsuit was filed in federal court targeting former Mayor Jones and others. Plaintiffs claimed the program “Unilaterally hired construction crews to perform alleged repairs on a property, billed the owners for costs, and then placed a tax lien on the property for those bills.”
Sylvester Brown Jr. is the Deaconess Foundation Community Advocacy Fellow