Fighting for Community Development

By U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill

Here in Missouri I’m proud to see the great work our citizens do to help one another and improve our communities. I see Missourians and their organizations ensuring our senior citizens remain an important part of their communities, providing safe after-school spaces for our children, mentoring young men and women, and developing our neighborhoods so that Missourians of all income levels have access to affordable housing and quality communities.

In the St. Louis area, groups like Beyond Housing are providing down payment assistance to help improve homeownership rates and build the wealth of working families, contributing to the financial empowerment of low-income communities. Prosperity Connection is helping individuals and families earn economic independence through financial education, community services, and low-cost banking. Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Missouri is providing mentoring services for at-risk youth. And the Carondelet Minor Home Repair Program, run by the Carondelet Community Betterment Federation, is allowing seniors to remain in their homes, promoting aging-in-place and supporting a sense of community.

While we all take pride in and appreciate the work St. Louis area organizations and volunteers do for their communities, many of us don’t realize where the critical resources that aid their missions come from. The truth is that many of these projects, including the work done by organizations in the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis, would not be as successful without funding from Community Development Block Grants (CDBG). These grants, administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and states like Missouri, help communities address a wide variety of needs, from providing affordable housing, to enriching the lives of our seniors, to providing nurturing spaces for our children and positive guidance for our young adults. Here in the St. Louis area, we see community-minded organizations, like the groups in the Community Builders Network, identifying community needs and creating solutions. Without these federal funds, many of these programs could not happen.

Unfortunately, the latest budget plan offered by the President’s administration cuts these grants completely. If these cuts were to become law, the Grace Hill Settlement House wouldn’t be able to run their elementary after-school program, depriving children of a safe and enriching environment. Eliminating these grants would hamper Urban Strategies, Inc.’s efforts to revitalize the Near North Side, where they are building and rehabilitating homes, providing homeownership assistance, and building public facilities. Cutting this funding would mean fewer homeless youth would be taken in by Covenant House Missouri’s Emergency Shelter Program.

I believe in using our tax dollars wisely. In the Senate I’ve made cutting wasteful spending a priority, and I share many of the same concerns about our national debt that many Missouri families do. It’s why I’ve launched investigations into wasteful defense contracting and led the charge to ban earmarks—which allowed certain members of Congress to use federal dollars for political purposes.

CDBG funding, however, targeted at communities in need, allows Missourians to focus on what’s important, and get a great return for the investment. Here in the Show Me State, these community programs show results. We see the results when families finally get into a quality home, or when a senior citizen gets to stay in theirs. We know these programs work when our kids have an enriching environment to spend time in after school, when mentoring leads to a college degree, when homeless youth are given shelter and support. We may not realize where their resources come from, but we see the programs helping our communities.

I’m supportive of these merit-based grants because I know the programs they support and I see firsthand good they do to help Missourians. I believe that Congress should continue to fully fund them. These competitive grants enable our great service organizations and their volunteers to make positive impacts in the St. Louis area and throughout the state of Missouri. We must continue to fight for and invest in our communities, because we see the results when we do.

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Claire McCaskill is Missouri’s senior U.S. Senator.

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Articles in “From the Field” represent the opinions of the author only and do not represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis or the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

We invite readers to contribute to the civic conversation about community development in St. Louis by writing an op-ed for the Community Builders Exchange. Op-eds should be short (400-700 words) and provocative. If you have an idea for an op-ed, contact Todd Swanstrom at swanstromt@umsl.edu.

Bike Share is Coming to St. Louis—But it Needs Community Input

By Liza Farr, Associate Project Manager, Economic Development at Bi-State Development

Ever been stuck in traffic? Had trouble parking? Been too far away from your destination to take transit? If you’re thinking “yes” to at least one of these, I’ve got a solution that’ll solve all three issues at once. Two words: bike share.

Bike share is a network of shared bicycles available at stations throughout a city to check out, ride, and return to another station near your destination. Many of you have likely used bike share in other cities, as over 55 American cities have implemented bike share, from New York City and Chicago to Chattanooga, Tennessee and our neighbors in Kansas City.

Bike share is like the public library of transportation—you can check out a bike from any location throughout the city, use it for a short period of time, and return it to any location throughout the city, just like a library book. You get to enjoy the benefits of riding a bike without having to own one.

Cities with all types of weather, topography, size, and bike infrastructure have exceeded bike share ridership goals and received overwhelmingly positive feedback for their bike share programs. Potential benefits are multifold. The vast majority of bike share users have said that it has made their city a more enjoyable place to live. Because a large portion of bike share trips replace a car trip, they save millions of gallons of gasoline while generating positive environmental impacts.

Bike share has value as a first-mile connection and boost for transit ridership, too, since riders often use their bikes to access transit. Bike share users are more likely to spend money with businesses that sponsor bike share or are located near bike share stations.

Finally, bike share makes biking accessible and safe for all adults. Cities are striving to engage disadvantaged populations, potentially improving their access to public transit, saving them money, and improving their health.

But the biggest benefit—one that’s hard to survey or measure—is that people love bike share and have come to expect it in a city. It is especially loved by the talented professionals that companies in St. Louis are trying to attract, with its highest ridership in the 20- to 35-year-old category.

Here in St. Louis, we’ve been quietly plugging away on bike share while learning from all the cities that have implemented it before us. Great Rivers Greenway completed a bike share feasibility study in 2014 that concluded it would be a valuable asset in St. Louis.

Today, Bi-State Development is leading a group of stakeholders to plan, fundraise for, and implement a bike share program in St. Louis. We’ve submitted a grant application to fund the capital cost for the first phase, and we’re soliciting sponsors to support operational costs.

But we can’t do this alone. We need your help to decide where bike share should go in St. Louis. Do you think you’d use bike share? Take our survey and tell us why or why not. The survey will gather feedback on use of bike share, potential program barriers, and where you’d like to see bike share stations.

You are the customer, so we need to hear from you to create the best environment- and money-saving, health-improving, option-providing, access-granting, smile-inducing bike share system for St. Louis.

Please contact Liza Farr (ejfarr@bistatedev.org, 314-982-1400 x1736) with questions, or if you’d like paper copies of the survey.

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Liza moved to St. Louis in August 2016. She manages projects on transit-oriented development and bike/pedestrian planning for Bi-State Development, including leading the effort to bring bike share to St. Louis. Liza grew up in Lawrence, Kansas but comes to St. Louis from California, where she graduated from Claremont McKenna College with a B.A. in Environment, Economics, and Politics. She previously worked in the San Francisco Bay Area on environmental permitting, transit-oriented development, and bike/pedestrian planning.

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Articles in “From the Field” represent the opinions of the author only and do not represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis or the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Generational Poverty: We Can Do Something About It

By Neal Richardson, Assistant Vice President, Assistant Director of Asset Management at U.S. Bancorp Community Development Corporation

Like asthma, sickle cell, and diabetes, poverty has been passed down for generations in the African-American community. Unlike physical illnesses, we have failed to fully diagnose and treat the generational poverty that has plagued our economy and created inequities in wealth that will take at least 228 years to be corrected, based on an August 2016 study conducted by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Corporation For Economic Development.

The American Dream is based on the premise that opportunity for success and upward social mobility are within reach through hard work and perseverance. However, many families fall short of realizing that dream when met with the challenges of generational poverty. Those challenges are disproportionately woven into the social, economic, and political fabric of many African-American communities.

The Cost of Disinvestment

In 1986, my parents were steered toward purchasing a home in the Lewis Place neighborhood in the west end of St. Louis City—which is 99 percent African-American and 1 percent White—and away from the adjacent, more affluent Central West End neighborhood, with a 70 percent White population.

My parents paid $55,000 for their home in 1986. By the time I entered college in 2005, my parents’ four-bedroom, two-bath home was appraised at $14,400. Average home values in Lewis Place are only one-quarter of those in the Central West End.

During this time period, vacancy rates nearly tripled in Lewis Place and several poorly performing schools closed thanks to disinvestment of resources in the neighborhood. As a result, my parents were not able to leverage their largest asset to assist with college tuition payments. The college debt I incurred delayed the purchase of my first home and still hinders the liquidity I have available to build assets for my daughter. Discriminatory steering led to my parents’ inability to build wealth and had a detrimental effect on my financial wherewithal.

American Dream versus American Reality

Based on a study conducted in April 2017 by MIT economist Peter Temin, escaping poverty requires almost 20 years with nearly nothing going wrong.

While I was blessed to avoid many of the pitfalls to “making it out the hood,” many of my neighborhood friends were not as fortunate. Most of them lived with a single parent working 16-hour shifts earning minimum wage, mostly due to lack of education and access to additional opportunities. Only 5 percent of the population in Lewis Place has a bachelor’s degree, compared to 67 percent in the adjacent Central West End.

While my friends’ parents stressed the importance of education and hard work, they did not perceive these ethics having a positive impact on their future. Their reality was that their moms were working extremely hard and still struggling to make subsidized rent payments to an absent landlord. To afford a two-bedroom apartment while earning $7.25 an hour, someone would have to work nearly three full-time jobs, putting in 112 hours per week every single week of the year. My neighborhood friends returned from school to empty homes and no support system. Often, drug dealers and others profiting from illegal activities are the only people that provide youth with support and an opportunity to earn money—which leads to a life of crime, resulting in incarceration or premature death. The cycle then continues for another generation.

Taking Action

Combating generational poverty starts with educating, training, and mentoring youth to become self-sufficient, productive members of society. Missouri State Representative Bruce Franks understands that challenge. In April 2017, he successfully sponsored an amendment to restore funding of $6 million toward the state’s youth summer jobs programs in St. Louis and Kansas City, expanding opportunity for 2,700 youths to be productive.

This is a step toward ending generational poverty. But it’s only one step, and generational poverty is a deeply entrenched and complex problem in America. To break the cycle, we need constituents to hold government officials accountable to implementing aggressive policies with clear intentions on racial equity.

There is no neutral ground here—even inaction is a form of action that reinforces disparate outcomes. You can play a role in perpetuating racism or work to reverse it. Fortunately, in St. Louis, many nonprofits, educational institutions, private corporations, neighborhood organizations, and government officials are working to reverse racism. A Regional Task Force comprised of a partnership between City Garden Montessori School, Crossroads College Preparatory School, Forward through Ferguson, and U.S. Bancorp Community Development Corporation, in collaboration with Crossroads Anti-Racism Organizing and Training, are hosting Anti-Bias/Anti-Racism workshops that are open to the public, focused on dismantling racism and building anti-racist multicultural diversity within institutions and communities.

Motivated by my personal struggles, experiences, and frustrations seeing generational poverty perpetuated in my own community, I co-founded, with Michael Woods, Dream Builders 4 Equity to teach at-risk youth about financial literacy and empowerment through real estate development and investment in low-income communities. Students learn the value of saving and investing and receive the opportunity to build wealth by attaining financial equity in homes to pay college expenses.

Poverty knows no bounds, and people of all races struggle against its consequences. Due to policies that have given others incentive to discriminate, however, black kids are four times more likely to be living in poverty. It is this generation’s responsibility to reverse the wrongs of our forefathers and create a better tomorrow for our descendants. As the great Nelson Mandela stated, “Poverty is not an accident. Like slavery, it is man-made, and can be removed by the actions of human beings.”

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Neal Richardson is a product of the Lewis Place neighborhood, located in the City of St. Louis.

Neal earned his Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and Master of Business Administration with an emphasis in Finance from Webster University.

Neal has over 10 years of experience in the real estate finance industry. In his current role as Assistant Director of New Market & Historic Tax Credit Investments at U.S. Bancorp Community Development Corporation, Neal leads a team that manages over 300 tax credit financing investments ranging from  five to $50 million targeted for low-income communities.

His passion for improving the opportunities available to underprivileged youth and building stronger communities, coupled with his expertise in real estate finance, has motivated him to co-found Dream Builders 4 Equity. Dream Builders is a nonprofit organization that aims to build social equity through financial equity by teaching at-risk youth about real estate development and investing in low-income communities.

Neal is further involved in the broader issues of youth development and social justice as a member of the following organizations:

• City Garden Montessori School – Interim Chair of the Coalition of Neighborhood Diversity and Housing Justice

• Boys & Girls Club of Greater St. Louis – Friends Group

• InspireSTL – Mentor

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Articles in “From the Field” represent the opinions of the author only and do not represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis or the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Community Development at Work: Executive Director of Planning and Urban Design Don Roe

Want to Change Lives? Come Work in St. Louis, says Executive Director of Planning and Urban Design Don Roe

Don Roe at CBN’s 5th Annual Awards Reception in April 2017

When Don Roe moved to St. Louis from Boulder, Colorado in 1988, it was for a temporary consulting contract to work as an Airport Planner for Lambert Airport. He did not expect to stay longer than two years.

Now, almost three decades later, Roe is still here, with more than a few stories to tell.

Shortly after arriving in St. Louis, while waiting for his contract with the airport to start, Roe began doing consulting work on new neighborhood plans for then-Mayor Vince Schoemehl. That led to his involvement with Operation Conserv, a project that was profiling 13 city neighborhoods as part of an effort to adopt a more holistic approach to neighborhood development and build resident confidence.

At the time, Roe had “put his life on hold” back in Colorado, where he had been working with Frontier Airlines as a planning representative, negotiating deals with small towns and city councils throughout the state. He had not intended to make St. Louis his home.

But Roe ultimately decided to stay, and he worked as a General Planner for the City of St. Louis through the 1990s. In 1999, the City created the Planning and Urban Design Agency as St. Louis’ first standalone planning department in decades to consolidate fragmented planning processes that had previously been housed in several separate departments. Roe served from 1999 to 2002 as the agency’s first Director and from 2002 to 2008 as its Deputy Director under then-Director of Planning Rollin Stanley. He’s been the Executive Director of the Planning and Urban Design Agency since 2008.

Today, the Planning and Urban Design Agency employs 18 people across four main areas of focus. Their Research Division provides technical and field data related to planning, public works, and other issues affecting city government and maintains a GIS database for mapping and data evaluation. The Cultural Resources Office is the City’s Preservation agency and manages historic districts, landmarks, parks, and buildings. The Urban Design Department works on St. Louis’ physical form and public spaces to create a more functional, safe, and livable city. Finally, the Planning Office manages neighborhood, topical, and comprehensive plans to improve and stabilize the physical, social, and economic qualities of neighborhood life for St. Louis residents.

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In 2005, the agency created a Strategic Land Use Plan, the land use component of the City of St. Louis Comprehensive Plan. The previous plan had dated to the 1940s. Roe says this gap is typical of Rust Belt cities like St. Louis, where fighting decline has been a bigger priority than planning in recent decades. The Planning and Urban Design Agency produces a routine update to the 2005 plan every year, but now that it’s just over ten years old, they’re considering a more complete update soon.

Roe has a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Design from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a Master of Urban Planning from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. When asked why he chose to pursue his line of work, Roe talked about how a model train set he had as a teenager shed light on what was interesting to him. “It was a custom-made thing, and I worried about and worked on the topography and making the little town more than I did the train,” he recalled.

More importantly, though, Roe entered the planning profession so that he could make a positive difference in people’s lives. That’s one of the things he likes about working as a planner in St. Louis. When Roe joins other planning directors from across the country to speak with Harvard planning graduates each fall, he’s always careful to drive that point home. “I say to these students, ‘As you’re flying to interviews in L.A. or Seattle, think of us in St. Louis,’” he said. “‘If you were to come to St. Louis and do planning, you would be working on and influencing things that would help change people’s lives.’”

Roe’s experience is a testament to that. During his tenure here, he’s had opportunities to apply a “forward-thinking” approach to his work and lead important community projects like light rail, which helped pave the way for the Cortex Innovation Community. Roe created the original plan for Cortex, initially called Technopolis. The Brookings Institution recently highlighted Cortex as one of the country’s leading anchor-based innovation districts.

Cortex’s first major tenant was the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC), which has been “courted all over the world” with bids to expand. When the CIC team chose St. Louis as their first location outside of Cambridge, they had a few conditions, including a new light rail stop and an adjacent public space.

Thanks to the strategy and foresight of St. Louis’ community leaders, both contingencies were within reach.

“We opened MetroLink 22 years ago, and that was a regional decision. And Great Rivers Greenway was an output of a big community effort that came together in 2004,” Roe explained. “If we as a region had not made the decision to have MetroLink and the greenway system, then we certainly would have stagnated. We would not be in a competitive position to compete outside of our region as well as we do. And Cortex has really come along.”

Cortex’s success corresponds with one of Roe’s core principles: that ensuring a bright future for cities like St. Louis depends on a balanced “triple bottom line” that incorporates social, economic, and environmental outcomes. It also calls for creative solutions to community problems, something that St. Louis doesn’t always embrace as well as it could. “We have boundaries, we have divisions, and we don’t always think of ourselves as a community,” Roe said. “Where that comes quite radically is in the racial divide, but it’s also an economic divide, and it’s in political divides.”

Roe wants to change that dynamic, and he points to positive momentum at the neighborhood level as a promising starting point. Several years ago, Roe spent some time introducing St. Louis to a representative from the Rockefeller Foundation, which named St. Louis one of its 100 Resilient Cities in 2014. During their tour of the area, Roe and his guest visited with the Executive Director of the South Grand Community Improvement District (CID), who talked with them about the post-Ferguson civil unrest that had damaged district storefronts in November 2014.

“There were 22 stores that had their windows knocked out,” Roe recalled, but that’s not what moved the South Grand CID’s Executive Director the most about the experience.

“She mentioned to me a time when she had cried. It was when she got to work the next day. And it wasn’t the destruction that caused her to cry,” Roe continued. “It was the fact that neighborhood residents had gone out and everything was swept up, cleaned up, and painted. The community had come and done that.

“I’d like to do that—in a bigger sense,” Roe concluded.

When asked for his thoughts on how we can strengthen community development in our region, Roe’s response was twofold. One opportunity, he said, involves cultivating a better sense of identity and ownership among St. Louis neighborhoods. “That’s gotten far too watered down,” he said.

The second piece? Building a more robust charitable funding base for community development, something Invest STL is working to establish right now. “One of the things that we have little of in comparison to other cities—Pittsburgh being a shining example—is involvement from the philanthropic community,” Roe said. “That’s an old song, and it’s just started to build momentum. But it’s really, really important.”

That type of visionary work—projects that “break the mold”—are what excite Roe most about his field.

“The future of our locations and places in society is the future. It’s not today,” he pointed out. “And we want it to be better.”

Written by Jenny Connelly-Bowen, CBN Community Development Specialist

Food Access in St. Louis: We Need Better Policies

By Melissa Vatterott, Chair, St. Louis Food Policy Coalition (STLFPC)

Over one-quarter of St. Louis City residents are food insecure: they face uncertain access to nutritious food. An even higher percentage face low food access, which means they lack grocery store options that are close to home or accessible given the transportation available to them.

Food insecurity and low food access in St. Louis stem from institutional problems related to government policies, race, economics, and transportation infrastructure that prevent residents from accessing nutritious foods. Local NGOs are working to address these problems, but we need our City government’s support.

We must prioritize better food policy in the St. Louis region, especially when it comes to food access for our most vulnerable residents. Living wages are crucial for nutritious food access, and a higher minimum wage in the City of St. Louis would empower more households to access and afford healthier foods. Improving public transit routes, adding more routes, and increasing service frequency would also increase city residents’ access to nutritious food.

Ultimately, though, we need policy that incentivizes bringing grocery stores back into disinvested communities. Without it, we cannot effectively fight obesity, diabetes, malnutrition, and other diet-related illnesses in our city. Given the health disparities between black and white city residents, this is especially critical from an equity standpoint.

The St. Louis MetroMarket, a St. Louis Food Policy Coalition (STLFPC) member organization, bypasses the barriers created by limited transportation and grocery store access with their converted Metrobus market, which brings fresh food directly to the JeffVanderLou neighborhood. They and other food access organizations recognize, though, that approaches like the MetroMarket are just temporary fixes, not long-term solutions. Communities need access to permanent healthy food outlets.

We recommend incentivizing the establishment of new grocery stores that provide fresh nutritious foods in food desert neighborhoods—perhaps through a partnership between the Mayor’s Office and IFF, which works with grocery stores to locate in neighborhoods like these, or by involving the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability in this environmental and social justice-focused concern.

There is another dimension to the issue of food access in St. Louis. While we work to invest more resources and infrastructure into underserved neighborhoods, the City must also empower residents to use vacant lots to feed themselves and to cultivate economic opportunities through food and farming enterprises.

The number of teen employment opportunities focused on food production is growing. Organizations like the St. Louis Green Teen Alliance, STL Youth Jobs, and the St. Louis Agency on Training and Employment (SLATE) have capacity to employ more youth with increased funding. With the City’s financial and political support, these groups could foster a generation of St. Louis youth working in local food production and entrepreneurship.

We can use vacant lots as a tool to both employ youth seeking green jobs and meet regional demand for local sustainable food. The results of our 2016 urban agriculture survey—taken by 850 residents—indicated broad support for food growing activities. In fact, 97 percent of respondents supported using vacant lots in their neighborhood for urban agriculture and 77 percent of respondents would like the City to make it easier to acquire land for food production. If residents were incentivized to grow food on vacant lots, they could increase food access for themselves, their neighborhoods, and local organizations working on emergency food access. The Mayor’s Office should support the Land Reutilization Authority (LRA) in developing a new process that makes it easier for residents to buy land for food production, with priority given to residents who live near the lot they want to purchase so that any food production movement is community-driven.

We also recommend that the Mayor’s Office appoint a cabinet member specifically tasked with advancing food system issues in St. Louis. STLFPC conducts outreach and community education on food system issues and has identified priorities for our city through engagement with stakeholders, aldermen, and City departments. STLFPC and other stakeholders should meet regularly with the City to improve food access policies.

At STLFPC, our goal is to create a thriving local, sustainable, and equitable food system for St. Louis. With the right policies and priorities in place, we’re confident we can get there.

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Melissa Vatterott is the Food and Farm Coordinator at Missouri Coalition for the Environment (MCE). Since writing MCE’s St. Louis Regional Food Study published in 2014, Melissa has worked to support environmentally responsible farming practices and healthy local food systems across the state, which includes directing the St. Louis Food Policy Coalition (STLFPC). STLFPC’s mission is to promote a thriving local food system that supports the health, community, environment, and economy of the Greater St. Louis area. Melissa received her law degree from Michigan State University College of Law with an emphasis in natural resource law and her B.S. in Environmental Science with an Agricultural Economics minor from the University of Missouri.

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Articles in “From the Field” represent the opinions of the author only and do not represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis or the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Trees—Yes, Trees—Are Part Of Community Building

By Chris Krehmeyer, President and CEO of Beyond Housing

This column was originally published on Chris’s blog.

When most folks think about community building, they think about housing, health, education, economic development, and jobs. Rarely do you hear anyone speak about trees. As a matter of fact, a number of the mayors in our 24:1 Initiative have long viewed trees as liabilities rather than assets. Those trees had the nerve to get sick, die, and then fall, and usually in an inconvenient place!

I will have to admit I never gave trees much thought as they related to helping make our community better. Rather than seeing the trees, I just saw the homes that needed to be demolished or rehabbed and the streets that needed repair. I was drawn to the abandoned commercial buildings that needed to be revitalized. Several years ago, however, we were approached by the Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC) and given a crash course about the value of trees in our community. MDC states that “the trees of a community are visible and valuable assets, and contribute greatly to the appearance and character of any town. They are a part of the public infrastructure and are just as important as the streets, sewers, and utilities. Often, trees do not receive the attention or care they deserve. Tree planting alone is commendable, but may have little long-term value without proper maintenance.”

Just as I am the evangelist for our work at Beyond Housing, I found my peer in the world of trees—Mark Grueber. Mark has opened our eyes to the great beauty and long-term benefits of healthy trees in our community. He made me realize that the most attractive and vibrant parts of our region feature trees as an integral part of their appeal. MDC has long wanted to create an urban forestry program in St. Louis, and once we became more educated on the issue, we wanted in as well! Fortunately, we proved to be good students and jumped into action, finding the right people and environment to support our work. With the encouragement of MDC, we applied for and received a five-year, $500,000 grant to hire a community forester for the 24:1 footprint in mid-2016.

“There’s great benefit in a healthy forest canopy in urban areas. Trees, parks and other green spaces increase property values, protect from soil erosion, and protect homes and streets from the harsh effects of the sun,” said Doug Seely, Community Forester with Beyond Housing. “Our initiatives in community forestry have helped to create vibrant green spaces for the 24:1 Community and show how important the forestry canopy is when building a community that can sustain generations of families.” Doug has become the most popular Beyond Housing staff person in the 24:1 Community and it kind of bothers me! His passion for the beauty and purpose of trees in our community is contagious.

I am proud to note that the Missouri Community Forestry Council and MDC have recognized Beyond Housing with the Missouri Arbor Award of Excellence for their work in community forestry. The award recognizes projects that demonstrate a sustained effort to care for the trees of Missouri. “Beyond Housing has achieved more success (in regards to community forestry) than some cities do,” said Daniel Moncheski, Community Forester with the Missouri Department of Conservation. “I work with cities that range in population from 200 to 80,000 people. The buy-in for trees by the mayors in the 24:1 rivals the largest cities I work with. I pinch myself when I help out here to make sure this is real.” Working with 12 municipalities, we have completed tree inventories, begun a tree trimming process, and will soon embark upon tree planting work. The leaders of our communities have grown enthusiastic about caring for their trees and, like me, see their great long-term value.

The next time you drive through our community or yours, stop for a moment and look at the trees—they matter.

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Chris Krehmeyer is the President and CEO of Beyond Housing, a NeighborWorks America organization in St. Louis. He has served in that capacity since 1993. Chris has sat or currently sits on a variety of boards, including Midwest Bank Centre and Midwest Bank Centre Holding Company, the United Way of Greater St. Louis Asset Building, both Washington University and the University of Missouri’s Not-For-Profit programs, and the National NeighborWorks Association Board. Chris has been an adjunct faculty member at Washington University teaching a class in social entrepreneurship. He is married with three children and has an undergraduate degree in Urban Studies from Washington University.

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Articles in “From the Field” represent the opinions of the author only and do not represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis or the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Community Development at Work: University Square CDC

University Square CDC Taps Potential in North St. Louis County

University Square Community Development Corporation (USCDC) may be most recently well-known for the Natural Bridge Great Streets project, an initiative that developed multi-use pedestrian paths along Natural Bridge Road to promote safety, accessibility, and opportunity. Phase One, completed in the spring of 2016, created this stretch of pedestrian paths beginning on Hanley and traveling east to Lucas and Hunt. Final outcomes included a raised median, additional storefront development, enhanced landscaping, a four- to two-lane road conversion, a traffic circle, and far more pedestrian activity. The project was made possible through a collaboration between USCDC, the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT), Great Rivers Greenway, East-West Gateway Council of Governments, Bi-State Development, North County Incorporated, St. Louis County, St. Louis City, and the City of Normandy.

Enrique Flores, USCDC Real Estate Development Director

Enrique Flores, USCDC’s Real Estate Development Director, emphasizes that reviving Natural Bridge Road—beginning with the Hanley to Lucas and Hunt stretch—is an important initiative that’s already generated community-wide ripple effects. Nearby are an elementary school and library, and the new multi-use pedestrian paths have helped to enhance safety for passersby of all ages. The higher frequency of walkers and bikers has in turn drawn more businesses to the newly renovated area. Moreover, since the Great Streets project took place around the same time as renovations at the St. Louis Public Library, the heightened foot traffic brought by the pedestrian lanes prompted the library to extend their hours and ensure that the paths around the building were well-lit into the evening.

“In the end, the project was very well received,” Flores remarked. “It improved pedestrian access and highlighted investment.”

Phase Two of the Natural Bridge Great Streets project will continue from Hanley to Interstate 170. “The first issues to tackle are to clean up the street, address the runoff issue, clean up the infrastructure, and facilitate pedestrians up and down the street,” Flores said. USCDC is currently working with MoDOT to determine funding for engineering. This project area could help draw more business and foot traffic to strip malls, drive-up services, and residential areas nearby. Flores referred to this potential as a “wave effect”: with each project completed at the center, whether it’s development or collaboration between organizations and communities, more opportunities open up.

USCDC is currently working with property owners to create transit-oriented development (TOD) opportunities at the North Hanley MetroLink station. Alongside adjoining properties, the North Hanley MetroLink station constitutes a 50-acre project area with 30 acres immediately available for development. Enrique notes that this is an ideal location for redevelopment: it’s one of busiest MetroLink stations, and is close to Lambert International Airport, the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL), and North Park, the fastest growing industrial park in the St. Louis area. USCDC’s service area encompasses stable communities that could benefit from expanded development of hospitality, retail, dining, and conference spaces.

When done well, community development provides a voice for those that are directly impacted by development changes in an area, and USCDC has made it a priority to incorporate the direct input of community members. To engage residents and amplify community voices, the CDC uses community forums, focus groups, and public panel discussions featuring community stakeholders. Event attendees typically include residents, business and property owners, political figures, and UMSL faculty, staff, and students.

USCDC has also made inter-organizational collaboration a priority by leveraging relationships with their partners, who in some cases have conducted past community forums in an area of USCDC’s interest. Instead of asking the same group of people to meet several different times to report the same information to various organizations, USCDC consults with their partners and incorporates information they have already gathered into their work and planning. For example, in the area affected by USCDC’s North Hanley MetroLink station development project, resident UMSL staff and faculty can informally address their neighbors to gauge a sense of what a community response to USCDC’s initiative might look like.

USCDC continues to seek new methods for conducting community outreach. One new initiative, for instance, involves a group of UMSL alumni hosting coffee gatherings at their homes to update their neighbors and fellow alumni on USCDC’s plans and projects. Ideally, these gatherings will address the need for communication between the university and the community, bring in different perspectives, and provide those gathered with an opportunity to voice opinions and concerns. The chancellor of UMSL, who sits on USCDC’s Board, also offers a venue for connection and exposure by hosting quarterly community meetings on Saturday mornings.

As USCDC works to grow its development arm, their goal is to continue to provide a critical link between the community and developers. This offers potential development partners insight into the types of business and community initiatives they should consider bringing into the area—such as coffee shops, drugstores, grocery establishments, and other businesses.

In the meantime, USCDC is ready to spread the word about the North Hanley MetroLink station initiative and Phase Two of the Natural Bridge Great Streets project. Their objective is to gain traction, generate buzz in the community, stimulate resident involvement through forums and panels, and produce an outcome that’s suitable for everyone.

The map below outlines the Natural Bridge Great Streets Project. Click the image to access a full-scale PDF copy.

Written by Elisabeth Coats, CBN Practicum Student

Public-Private Partnerships Make Good on Trump’s Housing Promises

By Vincent R. Bennett, President of McCormack Baron Salazar

This column was originally published by The Hill.

During his first address to Congress, President Donald Trump declared that “our neglected inner cities will see a rebirth of hope, safety, and opportunity.” That pledge is more achievable now than ever, if the administration plucks some low hanging policy fruit.

In such too-often-written-off cities as Memphis, New Orleans, and Pittsburgh, a pilot public/private neighborhood-turnaround program now called the Choice Neighborhood Initiative has produced major community improvements: a 40 percent increase in employment of public housing residents and 30 percent decrease in crime in Memphis; a 53 percent employment rate of the public housing residents in our mixed-income communities in New Orleans; and 60 percent of the middle and high school youth from Pittsburgh neighborhoods participating in enrichment programs that keep them on-track for college and employment.

The Initiative transforms neighborhoods. It replaces obsolete, deteriorating publicly owned housing that isolates poor residents with modern privately owned and managed mixed-income housing supported by coordinated private, philanthropic, and local neighborhood investments. It is designed to engage private developers and America’s top private-sector financial institutions to create a better model for housing, one with private market efficiencies and public accountability. According to my firm’s calculations, its projects have secured a 3:1 ratio of local and private investment for every HUD dollar spent.

To be selected for the program, communities must bring together local leaders, residents, housing authorities, educators, police, business owners, and nonprofit organizations to improve education and job training, economic development, commercial development, and job creation. These tie-ins encourage coordination with other federal investments, such as: the Justice Department’s Byrne Grants that address crime, safety and reentry and Department of Education’s Promise Neighborhoods that encourage school choice and school infrastructure, Treasury’s New Markets Tax Credits that support economic development and job creation, and Transportation and EPA programs for rehabilitating deteriorating infrastructure and public services.

The Initiative has already proven to be among the most successful uses of the IRS’ federal low income housing tax credits yet tested.

Since 1986, these credits have undergirded the financing of nearly three million apartments. In a typical year, credit-enabled projects create nearly 96,000 jobs, $3.5 billion in federal, state and local taxes paid, and $9.1 billion in wages and business income. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson, in his confirmation hearings, called housing credits an “excellent example” of incentives that bring the private sector into low-income housing.

In early March, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and committee member Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) reintroduced legislation with strong bipartisan support to increase the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit by 50 percent and make additional improvements to the program.

This suite of successful strategies has the capacity to catalyze a vast transformation to our nation’s biggest urban trouble spots.

The need is great. More than one in four American households spend 50 percent or more of their income on rent. There is a national shortage of 7.4 million homes affordable to the lowest-income families. Deferred maintenance on 100 percent publicly owned housing was estimated by HUD at $26 billion in 2010 and was growing by $3.4 billion each year. For every three units added to the overall rental stock between 1995 and 2005, two units were permanently removed from the inventory. Many of the new units targeted the higher end of the market and were unaffordable to those with more modest incomes. The housing boom-and-bust of the years that followed did little to improve the situation.

Today, a look through project submissions to HUD shows that public-private public housing transformation projects in 48 cities await federal support. In limbo is $5.7 billion in housing infrastructure investment, with most funding coming from private sources. Based on estimates by the National Association of Homebuilders, these projects would produce 26,000 tax-paying good wage construction jobs and 23,000 privately maintained, modern, healthy, low-impact apartments and homes for families, seniors and veterans. Equally important, formerly homeless veterans and others experiencing homelessness would be among those housed.

But to get these kinds of results, the Choice Neighborhood concept must go to scale. Past funding limited investment to $30 million per neighborhood. The number of awards allowed was kept at an average of three per year. Even when matched 3-to-1 by local and private investment, $30 million per award is not sufficient to achieve the intended impacts in places like Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Louisville.

With President Trump intensifying focus and demanding action on our nation’s crumbling infrastructure and distressed urban neighborhoods, expanding the public-private Choice Neighborhood model—supported by efforts such as the Cantwell-Hatch Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act of 2017— would be a strong, cost-effective step toward fulfilling the president’s promise to urban America.

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As President of McCormack Baron Salazar, Vincent Bennett is responsible for the overall performance of the development company, overseeing all aspects of operations and managing a talented multi-disciplinary team of design, construction, legal, finance, and project management staff across the country. He has particular expertise in the development of public housing transformations (though Choice Neighborhoods, HOPE VI and other public housing funding) and large-scale neighborhood master redevelopment efforts.

Mr. Bennett’s experience includes structuring and negotiating mixed-finance/mixed-income transactions that include Low- Income Housing Tax Credit equity, Community Development Block Grants, HOME, HOPE VI/Choice Neighborhoods, PHA Capital, foundation, corporate donations, grants, and conventional debt. He facilitates communication with local community organizations and elected officials, neighborhood residents, lenders, foundations, and state, local and federal agencies. Mr. Bennett has been a champion of the company’s sustainability efforts and has overseen three LEED-ND certifications and eight Enterprise Green Communities certifications.

Prior to joining the firm in 1993, Mr. Bennett managed commercial and economic development activities for a community development corporation in the City of Pittsburgh. He is a graduate of the University of California in Santa Cruz with degrees in Economics and Psychology, and received his master’s degree in Management and Public Policy with concentrations in Financial Management and Urban Development and Planning at Carnegie Mellon University. Mr. Bennett serves on the Board of Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Eastern Missouri.

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Articles in “From the Field” represent the opinions of the author only and do not represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis or the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

A Comprehensive Plan for the City of St. Louis: 70 Years is Too Long to Wait

By Robert Lewis, FAICP, CEcD, Principal at Development Strategies

Public safety was a foremost topic of our St. Louis mayoral and aldermanic candidates in this spring’s elections. But there were also undercurrents about development and developer incentives in the Central Corridor versus the lack thereof in the rest of the city. How are decisions on development and the distribution of incentives determined in St. Louis?

While I have my own opinions on such questions, more important to me is the lack of a comprehensive vision of how we—the residents, workers, businesses, and institutions of St. Louis—want our city to function and look. Almost all of us have no idea how decisions on incentives, zoning, parks, traffic flow, streetscapes, public health, and so on are made by the Board of Aldermen and the Board of Estimate and Apportionment.

As a career-long urban planner—two years in the public sector and 39 (so far) as a consultant—I am astonished that we do not have a functioning comprehensive plan to guide such decisions at the political and citizen commission levels. Wouldn’t it be better if there was a common vision, expressed in text, graphs, and pictures, of how we want our city and neighborhoods to evolve? Wouldn’t decision-making be easier if the politics and horse-trading could be eliminated? Development decisions and priorities could be determined by comparing ideas to the common vision.

Technically, St. Louis does have a comprehensive plan on the books. It was adopted in 1947 at virtually the height of the city’s population and economic density. Since then, we’ve had astounding challenges in urban decline, but also great successes with pockets of revitalization. The population is less than half what it was, the tax base has dramatically declined, and we now have many square miles of redevelopment opportunities. We have space and infrastructure to support roughly double our current population and employment. Yet we have not adopted an up-to-date plan.

We tried in the early 1970s. It’s a beautiful plan that was well-conceived and involved a lot of citizen engagement, but the Aldermen couldn’t agree. Racism, elitism, and the paranoia of urban decline got in the way.

We’re a lot more grown-up now. Aren’t we? We should act that way.

Downtown St. Louis got its act together in the late 1990s with the Downtown Now! plan, which triggered substantial, coordinated changes. Washington University Medical Center Redevelopment Corporation has adopted and adapted plan after plan to lead the Central West End and much of Midtown from the ravages of urban decay in the 1960s to a national model of urban functionality. Forest Park Forever prepared and is updating a master plan for this world-renowned park.

It can be done! Sure, Downtown and the Central West End had well-funded leaders (banks and a world-class university, for example), and so did Forest Park, thanks to its world-class institutions. All those strong leaders worked with and continue to work with city officials and state-enabled planning and development laws to re-shape crucial parts of the city.

The 2013 Sustainability Plan for the city is a remarkable achievement that encompasses many comprehensive planning and visionary concepts. It lacked some citizen engagement, but all City government departments helped shape it into a comprehensive plan by another name. We don’t call it that, and we don’t use it that way. And the Board of Aldermen has never formally adopted it as City policy (although the City Planning Commission did, to its credit).

There are inklings that planning could once again be held in higher regard in St. Louis. The Board of Aldermen is working closely with St. Louis Development Corporation to perfect better policies and quantitative analysis of development proposals to remove political motivations from decisions and ensure that not too much is given away in parts of the city that don’t need it. Several neighborhood plans exist, most created by the neighborhoods themselves. There are Great Streets plans in the city, community development plans, parks plans, economic development strategies, and public health plans. And the recent mayoral and aldermanic elections (including those of 2015) show signs that more progressive political leadership is emerging.

In short, St. Louis has a disaggregated appreciation of the value of planning for the common good. What we need now is to pull this city together into a one-to-two-year engagement process, with ample technical support and formalized facilitation, to civilly discuss our likes and dislikes, our trusts and mistrusts, and our wide range of visions and desires. A properly designed planning process will make this city-wide conversation fun, exciting, and even exhilarating. We’ll learn more about one another and that we have far more in common than otherwise. We’ll find unexpected ways to develop leadership, share funding, attract investment, and guide our decision-makers instead of relying on them to tell us what will happen.

St. Louis was a big city. It has capacity—functionally and in our hearts—to be big again. We continue to demonstrate creativity in addressing challenges. Just look at Cortex or Great Rivers Greenway or any number of city and regional efforts that we’ve invented and now serve as examples to other cities. And we can learn from other cities, in turn.

But we need to agree on our direction, mission, vision, and the paths to collective success. We need a comprehensive plan, now 70 years in the waiting. The process to create it will be stimulating. Let’s get started!

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Bob directs economic planning and implementation assignments at Development Strategies, based in St. Louis. He was part of the team that created Development Strategies in 1988 after ten years with Team Four and two years with the St. Louis County Department of Planning.

The focus of Bob’s professional work is analyzing the market, economic, and organizational forces that influence urban development and economic growth. His consulting services yield strategic recommendations for clients seeking to maximize economic value. Clients include state and local governments, private property owners and developers, corporations, government agencies, non-profits, and institutions all around the United States.

A native of Glencoe, Illinois in the Chicago area, Bob holds a master’s degree in city and regional planning from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville (1976) and a bachelor’s degree in business economics from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio (1973). He is a member of the Leadership St. Louis class of 1986-1987.

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Articles in “From the Field” represent the opinions of the author only and do not represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis or the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Excellence in the Public Sector: Alana Green

Congratulations to Alana Green, Executive Director of the City of St. Louis Community Development Administration, winner of our 2017 Award for Excellence in the Public Sector!

CBN’s Award for Excellence in the Public Sector recognizes an individual, government or quasi-government department/agency, or tax-supported entity that:

• Develops or protects policy that supports investment in communities.

• Demonstrates innovative use of resources for community improvement.

• Is proactive, persistent, professional and efficient in finding ways to support community building initiatives.

Alana Green has a demanding job as the Executive Director of the City of St. Louis Community Development Administration (CDA). She manages a staff of 30 professionals who are responsible for the implementation and evaluation of approximately $20 million in federally funded programs. While working full-time, Alana earned a Juris Doctor degree from the St. Louis University School of Law, with a concentration in Urban Development, Land Use and Environmental Law. She is a graduate of the CORO Women in Leadership program and a recipient of an award from the Clinical Legal Education Association for her outstanding work in the SLU Law Legal Clinic. Alana’s persistent and professional work at CDA has increased the level of trust between community-based organizations and city government. Alana has always been open to collaborating with community-based organizations and soliciting their input, while also striving toward the highest level of professionalism for CDA.

While the process of receiving block grant funding continues to be difficult, Alana has been updating, streamlining, and improving the process since day one, endeavoring to make the grants based on community need, not political pressure. She was a key player in the successful $29.5 million Choice Neighborhoods grant and has also worked to identify Neighborhood Revitalization Strategy Areas that will bring a new level of strategic investment in low-income communities from the City and the agencies it funds.