The vision that developer Paul McKee has for re-creating north St. Louis is massive indeed.
Four and a half million square feet of new office buildings and stores, stretching from downtown to Natural Bridge Road to the Mississippi. Ten thousand new homes.
New streets and sewers. Parks and a trolley line. Even its own power grid.
This is what McKee envisions over the next 15 years across roughly 500 acres on the city’s north side. Nothing less than a wholesale rebirth of a swath of St. Louis that hasn’t seen much new life in decades.
“If our city is going to be great again,” McKee said, “it’s got to come from here.”
The developer, head of McEagle Properties, sat down with the Post-Dispatch on Wednesday and laid out some of his ideas for the land, which his company has spent five years and $46 million secretly and not so secretly assembling.
It was McKee’s most public discussion yet of his goals, and comes a week before he intends to ask the city to provide “hundreds of millions” of dollars in financing to get the project off the ground.
All told, the price tag for NorthSide, as it’s called, would run well into the billions — McEagle estimates nearly $5.4 billion in assets created — and would need a big chunk of public money. McKee said he and his partners will seek at least $1.1 billion in aid from the city, state and federal governments.
McEagle’s goal, McKee said, is to build four “job creation centers” — office buildings, stores and light industry — and massively upgrade the neighborhood’s run-down infrastructure. McEagle wants to partner with residential developers to create urban-style, mixed-income housing across other vacant land in the area.
It’s an ambitious plan that comes during the deepest recession in decades, and will likely need a huge infusion of federal stimulus dollars. It also hinges on the success of several other major projects, including the new, $640 million Mississippi River Bridge, and will have to overcome the residue of five years of neighborhood suspicion over McKee’s north city land grab.
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The key to it all, McKee said, is bringing in jobs. He envisions 22,000 permanent jobs and 43,000 to build it.
McKee cited his company’s regional successes as proof that his NorthSide plan can be achieved. McEagle helped bring MasterCard and its 2,500 employees to WingHaven, its O’Fallon, Mo., development. And the company’s NorthPark project in north St. Louis County houses the corporate headquarters of Express Scripts, with 1,000 workers. His company, he said, knows how to land big employers.
“We don’t think you can steal these jobs from Clayton or St. Charles or St. Clair County,” he said. “We’ve got to create new growth.”
One potential source, McKee said, is the ongoing talks with Chinese officials about an air cargo hub and other investment in St. Louis — talks he helped launch. Yet he acknowledged that the three companies most interested in moving to NorthSide are already in the St. Louis area. He declined to name the companies.
But right now, funding the project is the biggest hurdle.
McKee said he has spent $46 million of his own money on it so far. And in December he reached a financing agreement with the Bank of Washington for about $165 million, according to mortgage documents filed with the city. Otherwise, there’s no private money yet.
“I don’t have people standing in line, whether bankers or developers, to help us on this,” McKee said.
So while he waits for that, he’s pushing for public help.
McEagle wants to use as much as possible of the $95 million in tax credits Missouri legislators created in 2007 for assembling distressed land, he said. It will apply, likely next week, for tax-increment financing from the city worth “hundreds of millions of dollars.” McEagle plans to buy city-owned property and swap land with the Missouri Department of Transportation and other public agencies. And McKee said he’s working with area senators and congressmen to steer stimulus dollars to the project.
Several pieces of the project fit nicely with the priorities President Barack Obama has set for stimulus spending. Among them:
— Completely rebuilt sidewalks and streets, some with medians and bike lanes; separation of storm and sanitary sewer systems; new parks and green space; and better stormwater collection systems.
— Plans being discussed with MoDOT to reconfigure the intersection of Highway 40 (Interstate 64) at 22nd Street to ease access to north St. Louis and to rework the off-ramp of the planned Mississippi River Bridge to feed directly into Tucker Boulevard.
— Co-generation power plants and renewable energy sources to power neighborhoods across the site.
— New parks, police and fire stations, community centers and an in-ground trolley line to circle the neighborhood and connect it with MetroLink.
It’s a lot of public money, but it’s the kind of investment that government should be making, said Richard Ward, a longtime economic development consultant in St. Louis and vice president of Zimmer Real Estate Services.
“There’s no reason to think that this kind of endeavor would not involve public money,” he said. “If anything should and would require a partnership with the public sector, it’s this. It’s the fundamental regeneration of an entire sector of the city.”
The plan is a huge opportunity for St. Louis, said Jeff Rainford, a top aide to Mayor Francis Slay. It’s “like nothing that anybody else has ever come up with,” he said, and it’s worth a shot.
But, Rainford warned, McKee’s idea is a long way from a detailed plan. And it will need complete community buy-in if he wants City Hall’s support.
State highway officials said they met with McEagle several months ago and that engineers have reviewed the proposed 22nd Street interchange. But nothing has been approved, and there’s no money set aside to build it, said MoDOT director Pete Rahn.
“We have not had a formal proposal,” Rahn said. “Until we have something like that, it is difficult to respond.”
Any land swap would have to be “value for value,” Rahn said, and fit within the state’s transportation plan.
The energy piece of the plan fits well with AmerenUE’s long-term goals for efficiency and use of renewable sources, said Steve Kidwell, the utility’s vice president for regulatory affairs, and the company will consider providing financing to help get the projects started.
“We see some really innovative and interesting ideas here,” Kidwell said.
Ameren hasn’t yet decided if it will apply for stimulus money, which includes billions for energy efficiency programs, or if it will partner with McEagle for those dollars, Kidwell said.
McEagle also must assuage the concerns of neighborhood residents, who have watched with suspicion as the company has bought up more than 900 properties, many of which have fallen into decay. Parts of Old North St. Louis, where some rehabbing has already taken place and where residents were vocal in their concerns about McKee, were left out of the plan.
McKee said he plans to use eminent domain very sparingly — only a handful of homes are in the planned “job-creation areas,” and the distressed-area tax credits can’t be used on eminent domain property — and will “reuse, retain and maintain every building that can be saved.”
McKee also said he’s sorry for the secrecy around the project these past five years, as he bought up property without saying what he was doing. He said he was just trying to keep prices in check.
“If there’s anything to apologize for, it’s that,” he said. “But I didn’t know how else to collect all this land.”
McKee has met in small groups with some neighborhood residents, but he plans to attend a community meeting tonight and address them in full for the first time. He wants their input, he said, and their help, to fill in the crucial details that will make the big vision into a reality.
“This is the beginning of a 15-year process,” he said. “It’s a vision. Not a plan. We’re a long way from the finished product.”
Jake Wagman and Ken Leiser of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.
