NorthSide plan highlights age-old planning debate
When it comes to rebuilding American cities, there are two basic approaches: Big, sweeping visions. Or block-by-block rebirth.
And the conflict between those two ideas sits at the heart of the debate over Paul McKee’s plan to rebuild 1,500 acres of St. Louis’ north side.
Is the $8 billion vision — of job centers, and housing, new streets and parks — the kind of plan that St. Louis needs to become a new, more vibrant city? Or is it the top-down imposition of one man’s vision upon its citizens, bound to destroy even as it creates. Is it a shot for the moon? Or too big to succeed?
These are the questions city leaders and residents will be asking over the next few months as they consider McKee’s NorthSide proposal and his unprecedented request for $205 million in city backing and countless other incentives. And as they do, they’ll enter a debate between big and small that has existed in urban planning for generations.
A century ago, the great architect Daniel Burnham urged Chicago to "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood." He then authored a massive plan to rebuild downtown Chicago. It helped transform the city.
Fifty years later, famed urbanist Jane Jacobs urged the organic, block-by-block rebirth of
urban neighborhoods, and warned against ripping out the old to make everything shiny and new. She helped fight off plans to clear Greenwich Village for a highway.
Here in St. Louis, efforts at so-called "urban renewal" cleared the Mill Creek Valley to build Highway 40, then built the doomed Pruitt-Igoe housing complex. More recently, city neighborhoods such as Tower Grove South and Benton Park have revived themselves on a diet of small-scale rehabs, even as downtown silver bullets like Ballpark Village and the Bottle District remain just dreams.
"The areas that have fared best have really been driven by that block-by-block mentality," said Claralyn Bollinger, president of ReVitalize St. Louis, a coalition of neighborhood activists. "It takes a whole community to make projects happen that make a neighborhood strong.
SILVER CANNONBALL
McKee’s plan is much grander than those — perhaps the biggest ever proposed in St. Louis. It’s more like a silver cannonball than a silver bullet. To make it work, he pledges to combine the best of both approaches — the diverse urbanity of Jacobs with the inspiring scale of Burnham.
"You have to engulf that whole huge area with a new sense of belief," he said.
It’s a project on the kind of scope the government used to do, several local planners noted, back in urban renewal days. They didn’t always work out as planned.
Mill Creek, for instance, still generates resentment, said veteran St. Louis architect Andy Trivers, over the thousands of people displaced to build a highway.
"It was a different world," Trivers said. "And that was OK then ‘for the greater good.’ But it really wasn’t good."
Inevitably, there was a backlash. Citizen activists fought off big projects, and the government gradually took a more hands-off approach. Neighborhood-run development groups came into vogue, and public-private partnerships replaced big government projects.
That’s especially true in St. Louis, said Sarah Coffin, a professor of urban planning at St. Louis University. The city has taken a light touch to planning, especially at the neighborhood level. Coupled with a weak real estate market, that opened a window for a developer like McKee to create his own vision.
"The city’s not going to lead," she said. "So the private sector will."
REACHING OUT
And while private development may be more efficient, it raises its own set of thorny issues — like public involvement.
The sharpest criticism of McKee comes from those who say his plan is too top-down, that he hasn’t done enough to engage a community that feels alienated by his five years of silent land-buying instant cash loans.
But McKee, chairman of McEagle Properties in O’Fallon, Mo., is a private developer. Until now, he hasn’t had to engage the public, notes Todd Swanstrom, a professor of public policy at the University of Missouri—St. Louis. But he wants the city’s approval for $410 million in infrastructure financing — and its agreement to pay back half that sum if the project can’t — and that will force it into the public realm.
"He’s going to have to be very public," Swanstrom said. "There can’t be too much consultation."
Still, more consultation from the start would have been better, said Bollinger.
Most of the small local groups that have worked to turn around neighborhoods across the city in recent years have focused on community involvement, she said. They’ve woven rehabs and new businesses into the existing fabric.
"And I’m not convinced that putting down a huge-scale development like this is going to be a panacea," Bollinger said.
A DIFFERENT WAY
Just across Florissant Avenue from the footprint of McKee’s project, sits a contrast to that huge scale development — Old North St. Louis.
That neighborhood has seen a wave of rehabs and new homes built in recent years, and the nonprofit Old North St. Louis Restoration Group will finish a 27-building, $35 million redevelopment of the 14th Street pedestrian mall. The once nearly empty plaza will soon house shops and businesses on the street level, with 80 apartments above.
Local residents have driven nearly all these efforts, said Sean Thomas, the group’s executive director. And they’ve focused on building from existing assets of the neighborhood. It takes a long time, though.
"One of the great challenges is we have to do it piece by piece. We just don’t have the resources to do everything," Thomas said. "But it happens at a pace that people can adjust."
Farther west, where McKee is working, there’s less fabric to build on and fewer residents. McEagle’s request for city financing says 44 percent of the 1,500-acre redevelopment area is either vacant land or vacant buildings. About 8,900 people live there, many in apartment complexes or developments that would stay put. And McKee says he wants to build around and include existing residents.
TOO BIG TO FAIL?
While some observers blame McKee for helping tear down that fabric and drive down the population as he has bought land in recent years, others note that the near north side has long been troubled.
"It’s the scar of 50 years of disinvestment," said Rick Bonasch, a veteran of St. Louis community development who has launched a blog that follows NorthSide. "And it’s big.
So big, McKee argues, that the area needs a really big plan if it will ever turn around. Nothing small will do the trick.
"We’re trying to affect something in a big way," McKee said.
That’s why he bought as much land as he could, where he did, he said. And it’s why he’s asking the city for more: To create jobs and build new neighborhoods in a place that’s seen too little organic growth for too long.
It’ll take a lot of land. McKee’s already got some. And that speaks to another truth of really big plans, Bonasch noted. In a sense, they’re too big to fail.
"We all kind of have a stake in him being a success here," he said. "He controls a lot of land, and I don’t think he’s going away."