In the Path of a University City Costco, the Displacement Has Already Begun
Date Posted: September 24, 2019
Posted In: Projects,
From RiverFront Times: Inside a Costco, anything seems possible. It is a monument within itself, a vastness of pallets and supersized packaging, aisles selling widescreen televisions and caskets and rotisserie chickens. And it is astonishingly lucrative for both the corporation that owns it and any city that hosts it.
That is why, for the promise of a new Costco — and the expected influx of millions of dollars of desperately needed tax revenue — University City is willing to wager a chunk of its soul.
The $190 million project, dubbed “University Place” by Webster Groves-based developer Novus, would install a 158,000-square-foot structure to house the behemoth wholesale club just off the intersection of Interstate 170 and Olive Boulevard, one of the city’s most diverse commercial corridors.
Olive is a street of contrasts. It is home to numerous small businesses, and although it is among the densest urban stretches of St. Louis County, it is in disrepair. In many places, the areas between storefront and street are slabs of uneven concrete, the ground bulging and cracked, and cars often use these surfaces for parking, right there on the “sidewalk.” Pedestrians must find their own way around.
But for years, what they also find on Olive, to their delight, is a galaxy of immigrant-owned restaurants, making the street the closest thing the St. Louis region has to a Chinatown.
Driving west on Olive toward I-170, one passes an unassuming strip mall called Jeffrey Plaza, home to more than a dozen businesses, a celebrated sushi restaurant, a barbershop and an East Asian grocery. In 2018, the strip mall got a new owner: Novus Development.
In the renderings Novus submitted to the city that year, the entirety of the strip mall is erased within the vast boundaries of a parking lot and the Costco itself. The full project requires razing 67 homes, dozens of apartments, two churches and a school, among other things.
There are all very reasonable reasons to do this, University City officials say. By unleashing millions in new tax revenue, they believe Costco can help revitalize slumping neighborhoods and protect the city from future financial calamities. As part of the deal with Novus, University City committed $15 million in community benefits earmarked for improvements in the Olive corridor and the northern, predominantly black Ward 3. There, neighborhoods remain in a stranglehold of bottomed-out home prices, and the communities are on a downward path of disinvestment and disrepair.
Not everyone is onboard. A spirited opposition movement raised alarm at the scale of displacement, including the loss of longstanding, successful small businesses. Despite vocal efforts, the project is now beyond the reach of its detractors. In June, the city council approved a development agreement with Novus, pledging $70 million in diverted property and sales taxes to help make the project more than just a rendering.