Developer Plays Key Role in Forest Park SE Revival

Date Posted: November 28, 2016

Posted In: Ideas,

From St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Successful real estate developers tend to drive luxury sedans. Not Austin Barzantny.

He went carless for nearly two years. Instead of driving, Barzantny got around by biking, walking, taking Metro and using Uber. He biked to business meetings.

“The two years I didn’t have a car and pulling up on my bicycle, people were quite taken aback at times,” he said.

They got over it. Barzantny’s Grove Properties is a main player in the rehab of residential and commercial buildings in St. Louis’ rapidly growing Forest Park Southeast neighborhood.

Grove Properties’ office fills the apartment once occupied by the family who lived above their shoe store on Manchester Avenue, a thriving commercial street in the 1950s. Over the next few decades, the neighborhood southeast of Forest Park emptied out as businesses and residents headed to the suburbs.

About 10 years ago, developers began buying Manchester’s abandoned buildings for a song and discovered the area was ready for clubs and restaurants. New residents, most of them millennials, followed. Success built on success and that stretch of Manchester, rebranded as the Grove, is thriving as part of a resurgent Forest Park Southeast.

Barzantny, 38, is in the middle of it. Grove Properties has rehabbed nearly 50 buildings to produce about 125 apartments. Occupancy is steady at 95 percent, said Barzantny, adding that most tenants are students or workers at the nearby Cortex tech district or the BJC complex.

“That age group is the age group that hangs out in the Grove,” he said.