DENVER — You don't get many chances to remake a big chunk of an old city. But at an abandoned airport on the east side of Denver, they're doing just that.
It's called Stapleton, and although only half completed, it is already the largest urban redevelopment project in the United States. When finished, it will have 10,000 new homes spread across seven square miles. Vast parks. New jobs. A walkable, sustainable community for the 21st century, stitched seamlessly into the tired, troubled blocks around it. Sound familiar?
If Northside turns out anything like Stapleton, I will be very impressed. Look at that density in the picture. I would like to see housing similar to that, but of course it has to pay homage to St. Louis' red brick heritage and not the western frame and stucco look that Denver is known for.
Yeah, they announced this back in May at the first public information meeting. It was also disclosed then that the Stapleton project was the reason McKee hired Mark Johnson in the first place. Mr. Johnson seems very nice and very sincere and was nice enough to come visit our house to see what is possible with abandoned LRA shells.
I can tell you that knowledge of the Stapleton project's influence on McKee's "vision" did not give comfort to the residents in attendance and in fact had the opposite effect: they saw that the NorthSide project would be modeled after a project that had been built on a clean slate, and this created the impression that:
1. North City is not a clean slate so this project is completely different, so these guys are idiots who don't know what they're doing; or
2. North City will become a clean slate through clear-cutting of existing businesses, houses and residents, so these guys are devils who know exactly what they are doing.
This looks very nice, just like all of his pictures, graphics, computer simulations and power point slides. It's hard to appreciate or even acknowledge them when one is faced with the history of McKee's actions in North City, the history of past redevelopment plans for North City, and financial irregularities in McEagle's public filings.
However, the City has signed on for the project as proposed and so we shall see what happens. I hope that every one of his promises and projections come true and in 30 years this area is swimming in new jobs and dense urban housing and people and stability and alternative energy and fixed rail and security and puppy dogs and retail and new infrastructure and everything else. That would be wonderful and my property value would be a wonder to behold and a joy to my fantastically lucky heirs.
That is my hope, but I possess the nagging feeling that he will use his large North City holdings as leverage/DALATC qualifiers for construction of the sites by I-64 and the new bridge only to do nothing else he's promised and let his other properties languish forever until repossessed by the bank or sold to other speculators. Time will tell if Mr. McKee's commitment to the complete project area is a match for the vision and skill of his lead project planner.
This article was interesting given that since the public meetings a few months ago Mark Johnson did not speak at the Board of Aldermen in support of passing the redevelopment ordinance. After a big splash in town the planner hasn't been part of the roll-out lately.
Yeah and what about the fact that we have no mechanisms to ensure anything like this project gets built? No urban design guidelines, nothing for historic preservation, no zoning changes, we have no guarantees for transit, no commitments for anything in the redevelopment ordinance.
Beyond Mark Johnson, we don't even have a Director of Planning and Urban Design? We trust Barbara Geisman and our Aldermen to ensure the largest project in the history of St. Louis meets acceptable standards for all of those above?
Wait, we have no standards so we'll settle for whatever gets decided upon with McKee, the City, and his other suburban residential co-developers.
The Stapleton Project is far too suburban. It was built on an airport. This is not a valid model or comparison.
Unless they plan on letting it burn to the ground or get rustled before the TIF money gets issued and they rebuild the greenfield.
There are many differences, but some similarities as well. McKee's land acquisition has been a huge issue, but they had things pretty easy for Stapleton. In fact, I'd say that both projects followed the same timeline in these respects: site control-development plan-TIF. The advantage with Stapleton is that the city had site control from day one and could dictate terms of development, engage the public over a lengthy time period etc. For an individual to acquire so much land it had to be somewhat under the radar. I'm not saying that this is right, but only that McKee, nor anyone else, could have step forward and said that they were going to work with the city and residents of NorthSide on an $8B redevelopment plan before they had significant ownership of the land in question.
Community development is an entirely different strategy than McKee's top town Urban Renewal model. We've seen many examples of it in St. Louis and other cities.
McKee was silent because if he said he wanted to demolish the area and build campuses with huge parking lots then people wouldn't exactly go for that. If McKee said from the beginning that he wanted to work with the community and do development like in Old North or Wagoner Place, but on a larger scale, then the community -- and myself -- would have reacted differently. But then again McKee doesn't really build communities insofar as he assembles land for "jobs" and relies upon others to do housing. He also has no experience doing anything in occupied areas. These are not excuses, because he has disrupted the lives of many and while the project had a much better chance of succeeding with community support from the get go.
By Rebecca Rivas Of The St. Louis American
Thursday, January 21, 2010 6:32 AM CST
Denver, Colo. – In 1999, Landri Williams was vice president of community affairs for Forest City, the company that developed Stapleton. It was one of the largest infill projects in the United States, and he was in charge of bringing the communities together. Taylor shares his experience of integrating the existing communities with the new development.
What role did you play with Forest City?
Part of my responsibility was community relations. That meant going out and listening, more than telling the story about what this picturesque new development was going to look like years down the road. It was very difficult to say, “This was what it was going to look like,” when there had been nothing comparable to what it would look like.
My job was to listen to what they wanted it to look like – to make sure their dreams were coming true about this blighted land that had existed in the surrounding communities. And to ensure them that we were going to capture that in the redevelopment.
The people understand that there are going to be challenges along the way. But they want to be part of those challenges. They don’t want to be looked at as separate from what’s going on in their own backyards.
