Teeing up change: Jeff-Vander-Lou residents size up plans for youth golf venue and new NGA campus – STLtoday.com

ST. LOUIS — In a community long starved of investment, some signs of change are coming into clearer focus for the Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood on the city’s near north side.

Superfund cleanup efforts recently concluded at the 10-acre Carter Carburetor factory site on North Grand Boulevard, left empty and toxic for more than 30 years. The site’s future use as a youth golf facility for the neighboring Herbert Hoover Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater St. Louis was announced in September.

Less than a mile away, along the neighborhood’s eastern edge, bare dirt is being transformed into a $1.7 billion campus for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Set to open in 2025, the 97-acre site represents north St. Louis’ largest new project in decades.

Although the projects have very different purposes, scales and timelines, conversations about one can easily weave into thoughts about the other as community members wonder about how these developments will affect Jeff-Vander-Lou.

Many residents regard the developments as long-overdue investment in the community. Others wonder how existing residents — most of them Black — will be affected by gentrification, displacement or other dominoes that might ultimately be put in motion. Reactions to the projects also stoke discussion about unaddressed priorities, ranging from better access to groceries to some way of cracking down on reckless drivers.

After so many years of inaction, some residents around the Carter Carburetor site worried that its cleanup might never happen. Now, the plans for a youth golf facility can invite questions like “Why golf?” but many residents agree that it’s a positive addition.

“I think it’s a great idea. We can use all the good help and advancements we can get in the neighborhood here,” said Andy Krumsieg, a pastor at Jubilee Community Church, who was born in Jeff-Vander-Lou and has lived in the neighborhood for decades. “It should add some nice brightness and space to Grand Avenue that’s a whole new facelift to our community.”

‘We need what we need’

Even those who appreciate that progress may also see the plan as a missed opportunity to convert prime land into something that could benefit larger swaths of the community.

“We need more than a golf facility down here. We need a grocery store,” said Latecia Clay, a Dodier Street resident who, along with her husband, Christopher, owns property directly across Grand from the site. She says she routinely travels to Clayton Road in St. Louis County for groceries and other essentials, taking money out of the community along with her.

“I’m welcoming change,” she added. “But we need what we need.”

Others echoed that opinion.

“We get it, it’s for kids, and I think it’s certainly a good tool,” said Andre Maurice Alexander, pastor of The Tabernacle Church nearby and president of the neighborhood-focused Tabernacle Community Development Corp. “I just don’t know if this is the best mechanism to help youth long-term or help this community as a whole.”

Beyond a full-service grocery, his list of features the neighborhood could use includes an insurance agency or wealth management office.

“No one’s mad about the remediation or the cleanup, but there are a lot of questions about the reuse,” adds Jeremy Main, a resident who has lived in the neighborhood for 16 years.

Given the site’s huge footprint and the nature of that stretch of North Grand, he says that at least some mixed-use commercial development could have been a logical fit, and potentially an anchor for businesses or jobs like those the site used to support.

“It is really just going to feel like a field dropped out of nowhere,” Main said.

There is indeed a long list of needs in Jeff-Vander-Lou. Improved {a style=”font-size: 12px;” href=”https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/mobile-farmers-market-ready-to-roll-soon/article_6f2d3baf-b17f-57c9-8efe-2583d019b300.html” target=”_blank”}access to{/a} healthy food is just one example. Businesses and services have left over the years, and the social fabric has eroded, as forces like redlining and disinvestment have taken their toll.

In fact, Jeff-Vander-Lou has thinned out more than anywhere in St. Louis. Since the city hit its peak population in 1950, it’s estimated that the neighborhood population has fallen from about 40,000 residents to 5,500.

Where dense housing stock and historic brick buildings once filled city blocks, swaths are now occupied by empty fields and vacant homes, often with light green boards covering their windows. In some areas, only sparse pockets of isolated homes remain intact.

One of those “islands,” as residents describe it, sits on St. Louis Avenue, across from fresh rubble of recently demolished vacant buildings.

“I’m glad I’m one of the two (occupied homes remaining), but I hate that the others are gone,” said John Chambers, a 72-year-old retiree who has lived in Jeff-Vander-Lou for decades and remembers attending the 1964 World Series in the neighborhood at the first Busch Stadium, formerly Sportsman’s Park. “It was a bustling place. But time really brought change.”

‘Roll with the punches’

He and other longtime residents say they’ve accepted the swirling backdrop of uncertainty that comes with living in the neighborhood, amid external forces that are beyond their control — whether the sea of surrounding vacancy or the acquisition of nearby lots by the Sensient food coloring factory and controversial land baron Paul McKee.

“I roll with the punches,” said Chambers, adding that he’s always ready to call a U-Haul moving truck if need be. “I thought you might be someone knocking and saying, ‘It’s time to go.’”

His only remaining neighbors can relate.

“We’ve become more of a prairie, I guess you could say,” said Michael Riechers, next door. “You’re at the mercy of other powers that are going to sweep you off the face, if they want to.”

Riechers and his wife, Donna, have lived in their house on St. Louis Avenue since 1976, although it’s been in the family for far longer. On the sidewalk out front, a carriage step — used back when people would exit horse-drawn carriages — bears the family name.

They’ve heard promises of regeneration — particularly from McKee — but have yet to see it. They expect the NGA’s completion could coincide with a groundswell of gas stations, fast food and light development along Jefferson Avenue, but are skeptical that the neighborhood will see more sweeping change.

As one of the last houses standing in their area, they often wonder whether they fit into the bigger plans of the forces at work.

“There are concerns. I figure there’s a plan and you don’t know where you fit in the plan,” Donna Riechers said. “You feel like you’re standing in the way.”

Planning for change

For some, the NGA project amplifies that uncertainty. They see it as a bigger change than the Carter Carburetor redevelopment.

Many around Jeff-Vander-Lou are hopeful that the arrival of the NGA and its 3,000-person workforce could boost local property values, but their optimism is paired with concerns about rising taxes, gentrification and displacement of residents.

Officials need to anticipate those forces now, residents say, well before the pendulum begins to swing.

“That’s always something that has to be on the radar now, in the area,” said Alexander, pastor at The Tabernacle Church. “It’s something to have been mindful of a long time ago, honestly.”

He would like to see taxes reduced or frozen for residents, especially the elderly, so they’re not priced out.

Already, some residents say that fewer homes seem to be up for sale, and that houses don’t stay on the market as long. The golf and NGA projects form “mental bookends” for some as they evaluate the neighborhood’s trajectory, Main believes.

“I think there’s this cumulative impact that’s starting to be imagined for some people,” he said.

“The people that are here need to be able to stay here and benefit from the rise in the tide,” Krumsieg said. “We need mixed-income development in our community here. That’s healthy. … Just poor people or just rich people, that ain’t too healthy, I don’t think.”

But some are skeptical that complex change will be properly controlled, particularly because basic problems like scofflaw drivers speeding on the streets haven’t been addressed.

“If you can’t control that — if you can’t control basic traffic law — how are you going to control these other things?” Christopher Clay said from his front porch on Dodier Street.

Longtime resident Rosie Willis said she’d rather see small-scale reinvestment, home by home and block by block, than wait for big projects to drive change.

“There’s really good housing stock down here that’s just been left abandoned,” said Willis, who has lived on her block since 1970. In 2009, she launched the Fresh Starts Community Garden to beautify her part of the neighborhood, while growing thousands of pounds of produce that is given away each year.

“I would feel a growing change if I saw more smaller development,” she said. “We can’t just sit on the sideline and wait for a few crumbs.”