A controversial developer submitted his company’s application to the City of St. Louis this week to obtain redevelopment rights and public financing for thousands of acres of land in North St. Louis.
The proposed plan, called NorthSide, calls for a mixture of housing and business centers. It proposes to generate some $5.3 billion in asset value and $99 million annually in taxes, said Paul McKee Jr., chairman of McEagle Properties.
“We on the North Side can lead, not follow,” McKee said last Thursday, as he showed area residents and business owners how his “vision” would create thousands of jobs in some the city’s most blighted neighborhoods.
McKee’s “vision” (as he describes it) calls for the construction of 4.5-million square feet of office and retail space and 10,000 homes that would be a mixture of low-income, market-value and executive housing. “Economic diversity is the basis of all other diversity” is a development mantra of McKee’s.
He said the project will bring about 22,000 permanent jobs and 43,000 construction jobs to North St. Louis.
All data on the project were developed independently by Development Strategies, according to McKee.
But many residents and small business owners in the area are leery because of McKee’s recent history with the neighborhoods in which he plans to build.
McKee encountered some skepticism, mistrust and rage last week as he unveiled his “vision” to a standing-room-only crowd of more than 300 residents anxious to hear how the multibillion-dollar plan would impact them.
Alderwomen April Ford-Griffin (5th Ward) and Marlene Davis (19th Ward) offered their support of the plan, which would be built largely in their wards. They both encouraged residents to listen to McKee’s ideas, which they said could generate jobs in a community whose residents are overwhelmingly African-American.
But many residents said they don’t trust McKee because his company, McEagle Properties, purchased about 1,000 pieces of property using shell companies to hide McKee’s identity for five years – a tactic commonly used by developers to drive down costs when buying small parcels of land to develop into a large-scale project.
McKee readily admitted to using this tactic. “I was hiding,” McKee said. He said he did it to save money and nothing more.
McKee was exposed by local preservationist and researcher Michael R. Allen, who succeeded in getting his work, first published on his EcoAbsence blog, covered on the front page of the Post-Dispatch.
Residents also alleged that McKee does not maintain his properties and that he does not care about local residents or their quality of life. Others have gone so far as to suggest McKee’s company played a role in a large number of fires that have burned in buildings his companies own in North St. Louis, which McKee has dismissed, saying some of the buildings that burned would have been rehabilitated under his plan.
McKee said he has paid about $1.4 million to maintain his properties (by mowing grass and boarding up buildings) and wants to revitalize North St. Louis because his father was raised there and because it is time for that segment of the city to develop jobs and a strong economic base.
Several residents interviewed said they fear that their homes and property will be bulldozed in McKee’s quest to create job centers and housing development complexes.
“They just come along and take people’s stuff,” said Mildred Henderson, who lives in the proposed site area.
Thus far, McKee has only bought land in North St. Louis from willing sellers, though eminent domain will present itself as a reasonable concern if his development plan moves forward.
Eminent domain is the power of the federal or state government to take private property for a public purpose, even if the property owner objects.
“We will not use eminent domain to take your house to build someone else’s,” McKee said, adding that a few homes may be claimed by eminent domain to construct the job centers.
“He is going to displace all the people in the neighborhood,” said Reggie Bobo, a developer who lives in the proposed area and owns property there. “He has bought up the property. He’s written his own redevelopment plan. Who is going to stop this guy?”
‘Mapping decline’
In an interview with The American, McKee said, “It’s not redevelopment that should outrage people, it’s the status quo.”
McKee’s plan for the future of North City is based in a detailed, deeply researched sense of its past. He can cite chapter and verse on what is for many a generalized sense of the decline of North St. Louis over the course of the previous century, as disinvestment led to desolation, poverty and crime.
McKee and Bill Laskowsky, director of development for McEagle, have spent years poring over maps that show the precipitous drop in population density and average income on the near North Side. They came to the conclusion that this is particularly damaging to the potential of St. Louis, since these neighborhoods in deep decline are the nearest neighbors of Downtown, which has been pegged as the economic engine of the city, and ultimately the state of Missouri.
This dismal evidence is gathered in a book often seen under McKee’s arm, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City by Colin Gordon. It also has appeared in various redevelopment plans over the course of several generations – plans that never were acted upon, McKee concluded, for a simple reason: No one ever got off the dime and began buying the land.
“It’s my generation’s time. This community has suffered for 60 years,” McKee said at the public forum on Thursday. “If not me, who? And if not now, when?”
McKee still calls his development a “vision,” and estimated it will take 15 years to bring it to fruition. His critics say it could drag out far longer, especially if public financing is not made available in the large numbers included in McKee’s request to the City.
McKee said he has spent $46 million of his own money on the project thus far. He said he will seek a whopping $1.1 billion in funding from city, state and federal governments.
Since McKee began to develop his plan, a new U.S. president was elected and passed a federal economic stimulus that no one could have predicted, and that McKee describes as “pennies from heaven.” Laskowsky has taken apart the Northside development plans piece by piece and matched every imaginable element to a funding opportunity in the stimulus package.
However, government entities and agencies, rather than private developers, are eligible for the funds. McKee has succeeded in getting federal and state legislators to commit staff and resources to seek allocations from stimulus funds, but a cash-strapped City of St. Louis has been slower to act. More recently, McKee has turned to his colleagues in the region’s business elite for help funding a grant writer.
In addition to finding the necessary public funding, McKee still has work to do in winning the trust he needs to gain in the neighborhoods he proposes to develop. For more than a year, he has been meeting in smaller groups with local residents and quietly earning allies with his detailed sense of the area’s decline and his evident personal passion for improving it.
His first public performance in North City received more mixed reviews.
“It’s just a bunch of rich folks making money,” said resident Rosie Willis. “It’s all a bunch of crap.”
“Nobody says you have to trust him tonight,” Alderwoman April Ford-Griffin counselled her constituents about McKee.
“But remember, it’s about building a relationship.”
