urbanSTL

Home construction has been falling off a cliff since rates have risen. Construction workers and materials are fairly available and cheap compared to the past few years. No better opportunity to start wholesale renovating and rebuilding upon these LRA properties. We've got the COVID and Rams money. Not that I'm saying it hasn't been well spent so far, but it would help everybody politically to have physical buildings to point at to represent where the money has gone.

Next round of ARP allocations, $93,000,000 in total.

Interesting, I wonder what the implementation of those projects will look like in practice. Like who gets the revolving loans to buy where and what affordable housing is built, what the LRA will do with all that $$, etc. 

^ all of those programs are well established and been around for a while. should be able to find the guidelines somewhere on the City website 

Can you just post the title and link to the article instead of the tweet?

Five million won't go very far.

pattimagee wrote: ↑

Nov 03, 2022

Isn't that what the preview of the TWT link does? I'm confused, is it not giving you a preview of the title/article-link?

For what it's worth, worked just fine for me.  One click and it took me directly to the story.

Great to see that St. Louis will be working with these cities over the next year. I think we have a great opportunity to learn new strategies and also share some of what makes St. Louis great.




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Is there a newer revision of the proposed new scoring than this?
https://www.lewisrice.com/publications/ ... subsidies/

Is that just building permits?

Yeah

I wonder what a rule of thumb multiplier might be to account for mechanical, electrical, plumbing permits, soft costs, furniture, equipment, and finishes in the buildings, etc. For example the big building permits for Expo totaled $56M, but according the recent BJ article it was a $90M project.

that $90M is ALL IN costs, and some of those don't need a permit- for example, property aquation cost, developer fee, furnishings like unit dishwashers, fridges, microwaves, carpets etc.  

I know, that's the point.

There are a lot of building permits that are not development/redevelopment related that add up.  For example, in the CWE, BJC is constantly doing large plumbing and HVAC work on existing buildings.  Its been a while since I dug into it, but I remember going through the data and trying to categorize each permit as development/redevelopment or capital upgrades.

For example, looking at a largely residential neighborhood, do you count someone's upgraded kitchen, new siding, or new deck as "development" activity?  It is certainly investment, but I'm not sure it is "development" as we typically think of it.   Lots of ways to look at this.

City dash does break it down by new, reno, res, commercial etc  but I've noticed sometimes a lot of residential new construction gets coded as "commercial."  and im just guessing but i assume its any building which has first floor commercial space is carries that commercial code for whole building 

^Which leads to the further question of how many people are actually getting permits for new kitchens and decks? Decks are more obvious being on the exterior, and with how dangerous a poorly built deck can be I hope people are getting permits and inspections, but anything interior is often not done with permits. Sometimes to the peril of the owner. So it's basically impossible to know what's truly going on in any neighborhood.

Then add on the already mentioned fact that regular building permits don't include MEP, FF&E, etc., and that people regularly undershoot the construction cost when applying for permits to save on permit fees (meekly raises hand), and if cost goes up during the project you don't go in and offer the Building Division extra permit fee money, we have even less of an idea of what is truly going on. I have a building permit application in that should be approved any day now that I truly have no idea what the cost is going to work out to except stupidly expensive (not every day you get to save and completely rebuild an early 1850s house), so I just listed a number that sounded reasonable. You're not necessarily going to get that on big commercial jobs as much, but smaller jobs are just made up numbers as often as they are polished exact budgets.

Back in a former life about 5ish years ago I was assigned a project researching affordable housing production in the City. Part of it was looking at units per Ward compared to tax-incentives for affordable and market-rate projects. Let's just say that the costs listed in the tax-abatement applications vs values in Building Division data were interesting.

quincunx wrote: ↑

Jan 12, 2023

Is there a newer revision of the proposed new scoring than this?
https://www.lewisrice.com/publications/ ... subsidies/

Here it is
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/ ... 4.2023.pdf

MattnSTL wrote: ↑

Jan 31, 2023

^Which leads to the further question of how many people are actually getting permits for new kitchens and decks? Decks are more obvious being on the exterior, and with how dangerous a poorly built deck can be I hope people are getting permits and inspections, but anything interior is often not done with permits. Sometimes to the peril of the owner. So it's basically impossible to know what's truly going on in any neighborhood.

Then add on the already mentioned fact that regular building permits don't include MEP, FF&E, etc., and that people regularly undershoot the construction cost when applying for permits to save on permit fees (meekly raises hand), and if cost goes up during the project you don't go in and offer the Building Division extra permit fee money, we have even less of an idea of what is truly going on. I have a building permit application in that should be approved any day now that I truly have no idea what the cost is going to work out to except stupidly expensive (not every day you get to save and completely rebuild an early 1850s house), so I just listed a number that sounded reasonable. You're not necessarily going to get that on big commercial jobs as much, but smaller jobs are just made up numbers as often as they are polished exact budgets.

Back in a former life about 5ish years ago I was assigned a project researching affordable housing production in the City. Part of it was looking at units per Ward compared to tax-incentives for affordable and market-rate projects. Let's just say that the costs listed in the tax-abatement applications vs values in Building Division data were interesting.

^First, good on you for rescuing that 1850s gem. Do you intend to live in it or is this a commercial endeavor? Just curious.

Second, I can confirm anecdotally that many here in deep South City are not pulling the requisite permits you describe. I experienced this directly when my real estate taxes spiked ~30% percent for 2022. A clerk at the assessors office confirmed that the reason was because they previously had no record of my finished basement w/ bathroom and large deck.  Seems the previous owner (or their contractor) did not acquire the necessary permits and thus the city had no formal record of the improvements. They were alerted to the prior 25 years of upgrades only when the house was put on the market with pictures and then bought by me, and then reassessed on the regular timetable.