New Town Booming as St. Louis Region Grows at its Edges
Date Posted: March 6, 2020
Posted In: Ideas,
From St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Rhonda Horack’s house is five feet from her next door neighbor, and she likes it that way. The close sense of community is part of why she and her husband moved to New Town two years ago.
“We just fell in love with the neighborhood,” said Horack, 56. “The price was right, and it’s just beautiful.”
New Town is booming.
The new urbanist community, plus its neighboring subdivisions, had among the most home loans of any place in the region: more than 1,000 closed between 2015 and 2018, according to a Post-Dispatch analysis of mortgage loan data.
Mortgages don’t necessarily correlate with a rise in population. But what they show in the St. Louis region is that the hottest housing markets and the fastest growth is happening at the area’s edges. Home owners closed on 1,100 loans near Imperial, in the woods of northeast Jefferson County; more than 800 in the hills of Eureka; and more than 850 among the fields and creeks south of Collinsville.
In comparison, St. Louis regional mortgage figures are trending down. In 2009, residents of the metro area closed on more than 126,000 home loans. By 2018, that number had fallen by 44% to about 70,600.
Suburbs like New Town are stabilizing metropolitan population numbers, even as the region’s core continues to hollow out.
From 2010 to 2018, St. Louis lost 7,500 people. St. Louis County’s population flattened. But the outskirts didn’t: Franklin County welcomed 2,000 new residents. Jefferson County tacked on 7,000.
And almost 39,000 flocked to St. Charles County.
It is an old story here, of migration from St. Louis’ inner neighborhoods, first to St. Louis County and then further, to the region’s exurbs on both sides of the Mississippi River.
But it is also a story of newcomers.
‘Kind of scary’
New Town sits at the northern edge of the city of St. Charles, within a 2 square-mile area — about the size of Forest Park.
It is a community of compact living with an old-style street grid and housing stock that mimics days past: Grand, three-story antebellum-era homes, as if plucked off of a plantation in Georgia. Tall columns that support second-story verandas. Brick storefronts that belong in Lafayette Square, or even New Orleans.
At the same time, signs of new construction — unfinished drywall in open garages, naked dirt lawns, freshly poured driveways, empty lots — dot the landscape. Multiple construction crews secure roofs on other homes. The occasional construction truck rumbles by, kicking up dust.
It wasn’t always this busy. The new-urbanist idea caught a lot of attention at first, but then developers struggled to sell lots.
Linda Niemeier, 33, rented in New Town for a while, and now lives in St. Charles. She still works in New Town, at the senior living facility. She remembers driving around the community in 2005, when it was just beginning. Back then, few houses were built and business activity was scarce.