After Rejecting Project, Webster Groves Looks for Path Forward
Date Posted: December 14, 2021
Posted In: Discussion, News, Projects,
From St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Residents and city leaders alike described it as something of a reckoning.
A day prior, the Webster Groves City Council voted down a $320 million housing and commercial project that dominated public attention for months. Leaders on Wednesday said citizens had made clear that this was the wrong deal for Webster.
For residents, the vote was testament that elected officials were finally listening.
“It’s definitely a win for the people,” said resident David Yates, “versus people who have the money and power to do things.”
Over the past six months, Webster Groves officials faced intense scrutiny from those unhappy with their decisions — first with an affordable housing ordinance that was later overturned in a special election and then with developer SG Collaborative, which bid to remake 15 acres at the southwest corner of North Gore and West Kirkham avenues.
Residents often said they were not opposed to redeveloping the hodgepodge of warehouses, businesses and overgrowth at the north end of Webster. But they didn’t like this project, they said.
Yates, who lives a block west of the site, was initially excited. But he became disillusioned after seeing the details.
The developer, which includes St. Louis firms Green Street Real Estate Ventures and Seneca Commercial Real Estate, sought to build 700 apartments, 100 condominiums and more than 100,000 square feet of retail and commercial space called Douglass Hill. The development, the most ambitious commercial development to go before the city in recent memory, would have replaced existing businesses, including longtime gymnastics studio St. Louis Gym Centre. SG Collaborative sought $35 million in tax increment financing to offset the costs to buy and prepare the land for construction.
Residents were turned off by the project’s scale and size, its impact to Shady Creek and traffic, the public incentives and the potential for the city to use eminent domain to force unwilling owners to sell.
“It wasn’t any one thing,” said Emily Hixson Shepherd, who lives on the same block as Yates. “It was just all of it together.”