This is an article originally aired on STL public radio in 2016 regarding abandoned buildings and vacant lots. The article highlights how the St Louis Land Reutilization Authority came to be the largest landowners in the city and highlights some of the challenges the agency has faced. The main point of the article is to highlight new strategies for using/dealing with vacant land. These strategies include selling lots to adjacent residents for a price of a low dollar amount and 2 years of maintaining the land (like an urban homestead act) and creating tree farms and other green infrastructure projects on vacant lots. Additionally the articles discusses efforts made to manage LRA holdings more effectively, including increase funding for demolishing abandoned buildings that affect property values, utilize AmeriCorps volunteers to gather better data about the land within the agency’s ownership.
Land banking - the practice of aggregating land parcels for future sale or development and/or converting vacant/abandoned lots into “productive” property. St. Louis has the oldest land bank in the country (created by a Missouri state statute in 1971), with the land acquired when property owners fail to pay taxes for 3 years OR a parcel fails to sell in public tax foreclosure sales. A document on land banking from the Center for Community Progress: https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/LandBankingBasics.pdf
--perhaps interesting to think of this as an urban form of public lands? Seems like it is ripe for all kinds of similar multiple interpretations of what it means for a gov’t entities to own something, whether it is labeled public, whether it viewed as land meant to be for the benefit of all, etc.
People/Entities/Orgs:
Land Reutilization Authority(LRA) - is the largest landowner in the city! Although it is a city-level entity, it was created by the Missouri legislature, so any changes have to be approved by state lawmakers.
Otis Williams, the executive director of the St. Louis Development Corporation, which acts as an umbrella organization for LRA.
Patrick Brown, a deputy chief of staff for Mayor Francis Slay. Brown leads the Vacant Land and Blight Task Force.
Harvard by the Center for Community Progress, a national think tank on vacant land issues
ENERGY TECH: In April of 2018, Ameren, a Midwestern based power company, announced a 12 week energy tech incubation program. The incubation program was funded and developed through a partnership between the University of Missouri St. Louis, UMSL Accelerate (a tech incubator), Capital Investors (venture captialists), and Ameren (a Midwest power company). These sorts of partnerships, with their emphasis on innovation in the electric utility energy mark a recent and significant change in the way utilities futures are being structured and imagined. See this Q&A with Brian Dixon, the Chief Operating Officer of Capital Investors.
Dam construction along both the Missippi River, and the Artibonite Rivers have called into question corporate interests, vernacular responses, and the future of the communities that are supported by these ecosystems ( humans and nonhuman alike). Infrastructure for who? becomes a very important question that this project will examine.
Links
https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2010/11/21/a_dam_for_the_people_and_a_people_damned.html
Dam construction along both the Missippi River, and the Artibonite Rivers have called into question corporate interests, vernacular responses, and the future of the communities that are supported by these ecosystems ( humans and nonhuman alike). Infrastructure for who? becomes a very important question that this project will examine.
Links
https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2010/11/21/a_dam_for_the_people_and_a_people_damned.html
CIVIC INFRASTRUCTURES: Like many other cities in the US, the city of St. Louis offers open data sets. There is also a group on GitHub that draws together different open data projects in St. Louis.
NUCLEAR LEGACIES: In September 2018, after years of controversy, the US Environmental Protection Agency ordered an aggressive cleanup of West Lake Landfill near St. Louis. The landfill is contaminated with radioactive waste and has been on the EPA’s Superfund list since 1990. The Washington Post explains: “[EPA Acting Administrator] Wheeler’s decision is the latest signal that he intends to largely follow the policy course set out by his predecessor, Scott Pruitt, who resigned from EPA in July amid a flurry of federal ethics The Washington Post explained this as in keeping with the Trump administration’s stated commitment to accelerating cleanups at the nation’s Superfund sites, saying such work was more central to the agency’s mission than combating climate change and helping shift the nation to cleaner sources of energy.” See the Washington Post coverage, EPA orders extensive cleanup of radioactive waste site near St. Louis. Also, see local coverage (St. Louis Dispatch), EPA reaches cleanup decision for radioactive West Lake Landfill Superfund site, and the (very richly documented) website for Just Mom’s STL.
Two documentary films have been made about St. Louis’s nuclear legacy: Atomic Homefront and The Safe Side of the Fence. Read this interview with Tony West, director of The Safe Side of the Fence.