its akin to insider trading- you have an org that has inside access to Governments in the region and non public info on all kinds of things before they become public thats also running a for profit fund for a select few elite families in stl.
as i said few posts ago, there is no issue whatsoever with the for profit real estate fund existing and filling the finanical gap for projects in the urban core but it should be its own entity housed outside GSTLI and have its own staff.
I work for one of the main Cortex partners and participate in Gov't Relations activities, and can confirm the dislike of Alderwoman Pihl is palpable, no doubt in part because she replaced Joe "blank check, no questions" Roddy.
"A spanking-new 160-unit apartment building in the desirable Cortex area would largely attract tenants from other places in the city. New renters can hardly be expected to migrate to the city from surrounding counties anytime soon.
At best that means the TIF-aided building would represent a zero-sum game to the city. At worst it would crush other apartment buildings or small real estate investors in places like Soulard, Lafayette Square, downtown and north city."
^^Yeah, I don't get the line about new renters migrating from other counties, and he over-states his case about its affect on other developments. But I agree with the larger point that the Cortex endeavor does not need and shouldn't get more public funding. 20 years is enough. WU is basically a hedge fund with a university attached to it, and BJC is moving in that direction. They, combined with the other players and the GSTLi/APEFllc crew, have more than enough resources to carry the project into the next phase without public assistance.
Living in Cortex is desirable? Remains to be seen.
No one is moving in? Then how is it that earnings tax receipts are up?
Speculating on earnings taxes, it could be that, while the number of taxable employees (and/or residents) has remained flat, their incomes have increased. I know for certain that BJC has been "rebasing" salaries, especially for clinical labor, in response to the pandemic. They also were paying exorbitant rates for nurse staffing agency labor during 2020/21, though that has subsided somewhat in 2022.
I would consider Cortex a pretty desirable place to live. Easy Metro access, easy walk to CWE and Grove. There just isn't any residential available in the area. WashU had to tear down the last little bit on FPP earlier this year.
Residential needs to happen here. Outside of areas with heavy industry, there should be residential sprinkled everywhere in the city.
The City may still be declining in population but rents have gone way up in the last few years and I don't see how adding new apartments would make things worse.
^The city as a whole may be declining in population, but the central corridor is not. And I'm also skeptical about the idea that this would pirate renters from places like Soulard and Lafayette Square, which are both highly desirable, have skyrocketing home prices, have plenty of recent projects, and both of which could probably stand to have their own TIF pipelines examined more closely as well. Maybe Pihl is right to take a closer look at this, but this article doesn't do a great job of selling the idea. Talking about Boulder, or even Denver as a "more serious city" isn't a great way to start. And calling the local movers "yahoos," even if true, isn't likely to win many friends. Maybe Pihl is right, but Hartmann isn't doing her any favors. The article is pretty good, but the tone is darned off putting. I nearly didn't read the second half.
All good points by the commenters on this forum. Despite Ray's misses, I appreciate seeing an alternative opinion presented in the press regarding the "issues" surrounding Alderwoman Pihl.
As a totally naïve outsider (talking about myself here) it's hard to know where the truth really lies. I can understand the frustrations on both sides, and believe that they both probably have some fair points. Pihl is probably struggling to keep up with the workload (I've got my own unanswered emails to deal with, so who am I to judge?), but at the same time it sounds like she probably could be a bit more responsive.
That being said, I know that we collectively agree that we probably don't need to be handing out development incentives to multi-millionaires and billionaires, but at the same time we also don't want to "punish" developers who choose to invest in underutilized properties in the city (by taxing them more than they would have been if they instead kept the property as a low tax-assessed parking lot, for instance).
In other words, I feel that developers should probably have their feet held to the fire a bit more when asking for incentives in "hot" districts, while at the same time I feel that we should just give everyone a property tax break if they want to add value to their property, so as not to disincentivize investment.
That's all a longwinded way to say, "I don't know what to think."
^Good answer. Hartmann's article does genuinely give one more pause . . . if you can get through it. I joined the chorus of alarm, since I've been so excited to see what Cortex has brought. (And I want the sandcrawler for stupid fanboy reasons.) But I don't know Pihl or her experience. Or anyone else in that elevated circle, really. So I was probably too quick to jump on the bandwagon. Put me down as a "Huh?" Or maybe even a "Hmm." I'll shut up and listen now.
I would consider Cortex a pretty desirable place to live. Easy Metro access, easy walk to CWE and Grove. There just isn't any residential available in the area. WashU had to tear down the last little bit on FPP earlier this year.
Residential needs to happen here. Outside of areas with heavy industry, there should be residential sprinkled everywhere in the city.
It's a 30 min walk including crossing FPA to Euclid and Maryland from Sarah and Clayton, so not an easy walk. And it's surrounded by parking lots and a highway. DeBaliviere and Pershing has easy access to Metrolink and it took 25 years and a big TIF to get it developed. So a slam dunk here is not apparent.
So my question to the thread, would you prefer aldermen deciding on a form based codes that will give a development and planning framework for the city for the years to come? or do you prefer a owner/builder/developer the city and the alderperson in a three way negotiation everytime a parcel comes up for rehab or development, so on? Wouldn't, shouldn't it be the same for incentives? and or if you establish a given district with a given frameowrk of expected incentives?
I think whether you know the alderperson personally or not, what his or her intentions and agenda is not so relevant at the moment when it comes to CORTEX. To be fair, obviously I don't know one thing about her nor she me and doing my best not to google because that is not knowing a person either. However, I just can't help to think from everything being reported that she is doing the opposite of good governance, the opposite of her elected role should be for the taxpayers. Her focus should on be on forthcoming Cortex tax district renewal Instead of spending countless hours in these piecemeal individual development proposals within an establish development district trying to ad hoc items based on her agenda. Why not advocate her agenda for changes to the framework itself? That to me is the role of city aldermen.
At the moment, she seems to be only hindering further development with the current development framework in place at the same time putting the renewal in jeopardy. Sorry, but taking a path of blowing things up because it is successful sounds like foolish policy on behalf of the city taxpayers Finding ways to tweak the framework so some of the success bleeds into north and south city sounds like good governance to me.
I don't pretend to understand the complexity of development subsidies/incentives. When I think about this issue with Cortex (or other "hot" neighborhoods in the city), I'm interested in what STL County, STC county and other peer cities do. Not that Wash U is going anywhere, but are other cities (both regionally and nationally) similar to STL City doing something similar with incentives or no? It seems like this should be something the city takes into account when developing frameworks. I work with many business owners as part of my job. When they discuss purchasing property or developing land, tax abatement and subsidies feel more like an expectation than a question and most of these business people work in STL or STC counties.
Good points above. My understanding is that the Jones Administration is working on a standardized protocol for submitting, reviewing, and approving public funding for private developments. I assume this will require approval from the BOA, which I suspect won't be an easy lift given historical norms around development, e.g., aldermanic courtesy, and the long track record of failed civil service and good governance reform initiatives in the City. Until that standardization happens, we're stuck with the piecemeal approach. Some in the know please correct me.
If you're Cortex, or you believe the Stl P-D's reporting, then Ald. Pihl is dragging her feet because of some mix of incompetence and antipathy toward developers/development. Based on her resume as reported in the Hartmann piece, I don't think it's incompetence. If anything she's grossly overqualified. Assuming then that she's skeptical of StL developers in general and Cortex in particular, I find that to be a refreshing change of pace from the status quo of writing blank checks with no accountability and no post-project evaluation (still waiting on SLDC to produce their promised analysis of the last 30 years of TIF/TA projects).
Maybe the interests of taxpayers are best served by diverting prospective tax dollars from public programs (schools in particular) to private developers based on the expectation that increased sales/use/earnings/whatever taxes will be greater than those foregone property taxes. That's a complex analysis that takes time to produce, and it sounds to me like Pihl is actually bothering to do it, whereas her predecessor (and I suspect most of the BOA) would just take the developer/CORTEX/SLDC/GSTLI's word for it.
Seems like if the form based code is satisfied the project should default to approved unless the alderman initiates a request to hold within 30 days of receipt of plans. Something like that. Aldermen should still have some discretion in flagging project that meet the code per the text but are not desired for some other reason.
This avoids the bog of red tape and it puts pressure on the alderman to justify the choice, but they retain the power to represent their constituents in development matters.
With all going on, does everyone get a feeling that city might be hitting a wall soon on developments breaking ground in the near future? Or least for a big part of Central Corridor. City has definitely been on the plus side of multi residential construction and believe that carrying the momentum is needed more than ever.. To me I'm of the believe, just because you build doesn't mean they will come but if you don't build then they will never come.
But it just seems like a lot of good proposals over the last half year that stalled for all sorts of reasons at pretty much the same time whether it be say nymbism (Opus Delmar & Skinker comes to mind - or FPSE Lux Living), to hitting the mid century preservation wall (take your pick in CWE) to too much success in one part of the city means a kickback (Cortex K) to probably some projects simply hitting the reality of inflation, labor shorages..
At same time, the one area within the city that seems like the least amount of speed bumps outside of economics would be Downtown - BPV AreaWest Downtown/Mid Town which seems ready to explode if all that is proposed from waiting on 2CW, Spruce street, to 1800 Washington, maybe Jeff Arms Rehab finally, to Jefferson Connector & AHM.
Just seems like a tale of two cities moment in terms of development.. Or maybe always that way but more pronounces. Obviously everything that gets proposed doesn't happen
I'm not sure if Central Corridor development is slowing down or not, but I do think it's worth having some historical perspective that NIMBYism is not new to these areas. In the 2000s neighbors shot down the skyscrapers proposed for Euclid & Lindell and Euclid & West Pine.
Also Joe Roddy was the first one in fact to pour cold water on plans to tear down the Optimist building by refusing incentives for that 14-story apartment building on the grounds that we shouldn't subsidize tearing down historic buildings. That project never made it as far as the preservation board but I think there's more continuity going on here than you think.
Dredger, roadblocks need to be removed and processes streamlined. This is not a good time to put up roadblocks as keeping momentum is crucial. But, it does seem these things always go in waves.
Development is going to slow down due to national (rising interest rates) and global (resource shortages of all kinds, snarled supply chains, etc.) economic factors beyond the control of local, state, and arguably (elected) federal policymakers.
Locally, when the money gets tight, every dollar will be fought over, including development subsidies, even for projects that seem to make short/medium/long-term sense. Time horizons will shorten as immediate needs go unmet and people will become increasingly risk averse as the fear of losing what they already have outweighs the allure of gaining something better.
On the plus (?) side, increases in the cost of fuel and food may make city living more attractive (or at least prudent) to sub/ex-urbanites with gas guzzlers parked in their McMansions that they MUST DRIVE just to live. There won't be enough electric vehicles to replace those 1:1, and even if their were, we don't have the grid to accommodate them and won't for a long time, if ever. This is the long-term bet I've made on the city, and present circumstances would seem to vindicate me...(oh sh*t).
As I believe some folks have pointed out, the FPSE Form-Based Code appears to have contributed to the denial of a lot of building permits that wouldn't have happened prior to adoption, and of course that has increased the workload of the Board of Adjustment as it hears FPSE appeals. The builder behind some new homes coming to Norfolk e.g. had to get 9 area variances approved on 1 home and 7 on the other two. Everything from first floor heights to stoops to on and on. (He also had to work with Cultural Resources to get the demo permit for the previous contributing structures.) Anyway, it all got worked out, (and Tina Pihl had a letter of support) but I wonder if this Form-based Code is causing more complications relative to most FBCs.
