NorthSide St. Louis is a massive redevelopment project on the north side of St. Louis. Encompassing 1,500 acres, the project promises to redevelop a wide swath of the North part of the city, just outside its revitalizing downtown. Paul McKee has been handed a $390 million Tax Increment Financing package in order to improve infrastructure for his project. However, despite the huge amount of land and massive public subsidy already dedicated to this project, the citizens of St. Louis have been given only vague information about what the project actually will look like when it is completed. In short, Paul McKee was handed a check and the key to an area of the city larger than St. Louis' Forest Park in exchange for vague promises.

McKee’s NorthSide Regeneration LLC has released documents that speak of vague plans for redevelopment focused around four “Employment Hubs.” The first two to be developed will be located near the new Missouri River Bridge carrying I-70 and at the site of the proposed new 21st street interchange with I-64 at the west of the Gateway Mall. The third is near the current Sensient Technologies campus and the fourth is the Pruitt-Igoe site, called a “Retail Center/Employment Hub.” The TIF application describes the three Employment Hubs as “major hubs for the creation of employment opportunities” but gives no further details. The Pruitt-Igoe site is described as “a major neighborhood and regional mixed use entertainment center” with development “envisioned” to include “a new hotel, several small scale office buildings, a grocery store, retail operations, restaurants, a higher density residential property, and a park.” The rest of what we know includes vague mention of “retail opportunities” being marketed throughout the property and a “proposed trolley line.” (NorthSide TIF Application. http://www.scribd.com/doc/15983326/McKee-NorthSide-TIF-Application)

What is conspicuously missing from these vague proposals are concrete details of the FORM that any of this development will take. And form matters. What scares people the most when they think of this project is that we have no idea what the final outcome will look like. When the dust settles, the North side of St. Louis could look like anything from a strip mall in Brentwood to Manhattan. People who love St. Louis’ urban environment are terrified that just as downtown St. Louis is starting to revive itself, the NorthSide will become a wasteland of strip malls and Wal-Marts, bleeding the city dry of any vitality it has gained. Indeed, there are already worrisome signs that Paul McKee will look to cash in quickly via a cheaply made, suburban development model, despite the negative consequences this would have on the surrounding urban fabric. The first property being developed in NorthSide is a Dollar General store on an important intersection, one block away from a Family Dollar.

It is not too late for Paul McKee to take steps that would convince the public to believe that he can build a community that is worthy of the citizens of St. Louis’ confidence, not to mention the $390 million pledged by the city. One way forward that would be a win for citizens, the City of St. Louis, and Paul McKee himself, would be for Paul McKee to voluntarily pursue certification by LEED for Neighborhood Development for the entire NorthSide project.

LEED is familiar to many as a system for certifying the sustainability of individual buildings. What is less well-known due to its relative youth is LEED-ND, or LEED for Neighborhood Development. According to the US Green Building Council website, LEED-ND “integrates the principles of smart growth, urbanism, and green building into the first national system for neighborhood design.” (http://www.usgbc.org/leed/rating-systems/neighborhoods) Or, as Kaid Benfield of the National Resources Defense Council describes it, LEED-ND is “the country’s first comprehensive system for defining, measuring, and certifying smart growth.” (http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kbenfield/leed_for_neighborhood_developm.html)

Pledging to follow LEED-ND guidelines would be a win for all parties. The public would begin to have confidence that NorthSide would create neighborhoods that are well designed and capable of continuing St. Louis’ revitalization. The city would be able to tell its citizens it is spending taxpayer money on a plan that will be certified by the best, most modern set of planning standards for sustainable development we have available. These standards reduce the financial risk for the city, increasing the likelihood that NorthSide will provide a sound return on its investment. And finally, pursuing LEED-ND certification would allow Paul McKee to move forward on his project by reducing the risk of future lawsuits motivated by fear and uncertainty over his plans for NorthSide.

The full details of why LEED-ND certification would improve the NorthSide project are available on my guest blog post at nextstl.com, which I invite you to read. If you believe that St. Louis deserves the certainty of the nation’s best certification system for neighborhood design for the largest private redevelopment project in its history, sign my petition.