Developers Say Current M/WBE Rules Hurt Projects; City Searches For a Balanced Fix
Date Posted: May 19, 2026
Posted In: Ideas, Regionalism, What we are thinking about, Workforce,
From St. Louis Business Journal: By the time construction began on Matt Masiel’s roughly $9.5 million redevelopment of the Lyon School in late 2019, the project had been already been approved for a 100% property tax abatement for 10 years.
Led by Masiel’s Screaming Eagle Development, the redevelopment converted the former school at 7401 Vermont Ave. in St. Louis’ Patch neighborhood into 32 apartments. Masiel said even with the abatement, making the project work financially meant “pinching every penny.”
Three years later, in December 2022, Masiel learned that the city would be denying his project the tax abatement after St. Louis Development Corp. found the project had not met the minority and women business enterprise (M/WBE) participation goals set in its redevelopment agreement.
Three Years to Regain Abatement
It took three years to convince SLDC that his firm had put in a “good faith effort” to meet the M/WBE goals. The tax abatement for the project was instated in March, but by then the damage had been done.
Screaming Eagle’s upgrades to the school led to a one-year property tax increase of 750%. The financial instability of denying the tax breaks left the project “severely distressed,” and prompted Masiel to pause any new development to focus on getting Lyon School back on track.
Masiel isn’t the only developer to complain about the city’s M/WBE requirements or its overall tax incentive program, which has been called cumbersome, confusing and inefficient.
Creating a City Open for Development
That’s a serious problem if the city wants to be open for development, said Stephen Westbrooks, the new CEO of SLDC, the city’s development arm. The agency has acknowledged the current system isn’t perfect and is attempting to make it easier to build in the city, where development activity has plummeted in recent years.
City leaders, from the office of Mayor Cara Spencer, to the Board of Aldermen, to SLDC, have expressed a commitment to redesigning the M/WBE program in a way that both serves its purpose of spreading construction work equitably in the community but also addressing the sorts of disparities that lead to situations like that of Screaming Eagle Development.