The St. Louis American has obtained a copy of original research commissioned by Paul McKee Jr. and presented to him in early February 2003, just as he was beginning to develop plans for McEagle’s proposed development in North St. Louis.
Interestingly, this report (prepared by Brandtrust and Right Brain People) reveals that some of the worst fears expressed about McKee’s project would have been well-founded, but only in the earliest planning phase. In fact, McKee did at first plan to impose a suburban-style development on the city – but this idea was rejected when research told him it wouldn’t work.
“Initially, McEagle’s plans for this new community called for duplicating the suburban development of WingHaven in the city of St. Louis. The findings from the Civitas report submitted by Brandtrust changed these plans,” reads part of the report prepared by Right Brain People, a consumer psychology firm based in Memphis.
“The Civitas report outlined the major changes in ‘urban pioneering’ over the last few years and explained how planners and developers have attained success in their respective markets … It became evident that much of what made WingHaven successful would not work in the city.”
It is fascinating that the experiences of “urban pioneers” would redirect McKee’s plans once they were presented to him through research, because urban pioneers in the Old North neighborhood that borders on McKee’s NorthSide development area would become his most vocal critics, once McEagle’s covert land banking was unmasked by local preservationist Michael R. Allen.
The resulting recommendations in the research – presented under the rubric of a “New Urbanism” – read like literature that would be thumbed with approval in Old North.
“New Urbanism aims to put an end to the kind of suburban development that has dominated American life in the past 50 years: the anonymous cookie-cutter houses, congested eight-lane intersections, cavernous soulless shopping malls. New Urbanism argues for the traditional urban neighborhood and the small town where in five minutes a resident can walk to a store, a park, even to work,” Brandtrust (a strategic planning firm based in Chicago) advised McKee.
“New Urbanism strives to de-emphasize the car by hiding garages in alleys and replacing parking lots with parallel street parking. Mixed building types, sizes and prices is the answer to building a human made neighborhood.”
In fact, Brandtrust’s recommendations for mixed-income residential development – “a diversity of housing types located within close proximity to each other” – gets very detailed.
Diversity in the housing also is recommended in terms of old vs. new. “City architecture feeds Heritage,” McKee was advised. “Substance and permanence. Rehabbed homes seen as more authentic.”
The worst suburban nightmare projected upon McKee’s development by urban pioneers is presented in this research – but as a suburban nightmare to be avoided: “What repels are the giant parking lots positioned in front of buildings, the pylon signs, the lack of sidewalks, the disorienting jumble that constitutes much of the postwar suburban style.”
In place of this suburban nightmare, the research calls for “regional architectural syntax used as a basis for ecologically responsible design” – jargon one associates much more with an urban pioneer like Michael Allen than a suburban developer like Paul McKee. But McKee paid handsomely for this advice and says it continues to guide him.
Dropped like a bomb
At the same time, reading this research one winces at advice that McKee did not heed properly – or, at best, his planned adherence to the advice was scrambled by having his plans unmasked prematurely.
In one of many interviews conducted in the St. Louis area by Brandtrust between December 2002-January 2003, someone warned, “People oppose development when it’s dropped on them like a bomb.”
Since McKee’s project has been publicly exposed (and, in some quarters, demonized), he has stepped up his efforts to network within the community he proposes to develop, often meeting in small community groups in the company of his wife, Midge. When McKee talks about his project today, insights from Brandtrust and Right Brain People come intermixed with nuggets of wisdom he has collected in North City churches and community centers. The mostly black city residents who have since volunteered their face time and mind to McKee interest and excite him as much as the experts he paid to study the challenges of urban development.
Theft of hope (and bricks)
But for McKee in North City, it has not always been – and will not always be – a productive and pleasant meeting of the minds.
One of the breakout boxes prepared by Right Brain People based upon its interviews with 27 area homeowners (a mix of city and county dwellers) now reads as prophecy, given the characterization of McKee as evil by some who distrust his motives.
The research described the psychology of living in the city as a “Battle between good and evil,” broken down as: “Revitalization of the city and the hope for a world where people get along and work together = good” vs. “Blighted blocks, perceptions of increased crime and bad schools = theft of hope = evil.”
Surely, McKee categorized his development on the “Revitalization of the city = good” side of this equation, when he read this report in 2003. But, as he accumulated more and more “blighted blocks” and did not do enough to maintain them, he became a symbol among the activists and residents who opposed him of “theft of hope (and bricks) = evil.”
More advice from his research McKee might have taken more swiftly to heart: “Save what you can. As far as possible, restore the important buildings, link with history – addresses powerful preservation expectations. But what you cannot rehab must be cleared or screened off quickly. Rubble and derelict buildings evoke fears.”
In fact, the phased developments described in his revised application for Tax Increment Financing (TIF) take this advice into account.
‘Choosing diversity/city’
At the larger public meetings McKee has convened more recently, some African Americans voiced in no uncertain terms the suspicion that there would be no place for black people in a revived North Side engineered by a wealthy white developer.
Those suspicions may never die – certainly not before black investors, contractors, workers and homeowners are associated with the project, assuming the project ever breaks ground. McKee still faces a controversial fight for massive amounts of public financing, limited right to eminent domain and the approval of a redevelopment plan before he moves any dirt.
But the research McKee paid for is clear on this point: the people who like the city like it for its diversity.
“Diverse kinds of people allows for personal diversity,” Right Brain People summarized its research. And: “Diversity of people, places and things: good for business, employees, city.” Indeed, in one formulation “diversity” and “city” are equated: “Choosing diversity/city = growing and living life to its fullest.”
There is no evidence that McKee ever envisioned his North City project as a reversal of white flight, with all the black people driven into North County (as is feared by some). But it is clear that his expensive research told him that such a plan wouldn’t work, because the people willing to take a chance on the city want to take a chance on a city that is diverse.
If they wanted suburban monotony, one might say, they would move to WingHaven.