Photo by Chris Naffziger
An abandoned house in the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood
I read with interest this last weekend the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s coverage of vacant buildings in St. Louis. As longtime readers might suspect, I have strong opinions on the subject, having spent much of the last decade documenting largely abandoned neighborhoods and meeting the residents who remained. First and foremost, I must stress that no one deserves to live next to an abandoned building that is structurally unstable, beyond saving, sits on a block that is largely vacant, and poses a clear and present danger to them and their family. Under no circumstance do I advocate saving those buildings. But I’d like to discuss how those buildings get to that point of no return, and how we can prevent this continued deterioration of our historic city.
My own block on the near South Side has multiple abandoned buildings, which, mercifully, are well-secured and, for the most part, have not proven to be nuisances. What concerns me about the Post-Dispatch article (and frequent editorial commentary) is that the newspaper considers vacancy the problem, and not the symptom of a greater illness. I liken abandoned buildings to the sores caused by measles: Yes, the sores hurt and itch terribly, but they are not the source of the problem. We must inoculate or treat the measles infection in order to heal the sores.
The reason there are thousands of abandoned buildings in St. Louis is because there is poverty, a lack of investment, and a legacy of government policy that clearly favored suburbanization. Chesterfield has but a few abandoned houses. Why? Because capital and investment flow to that suburb, and government policy—which favors home mortgages and the interstate highway system—has made Chesterfield fiscally solvent. There will continue to be thousands more abandoned houses “coming on line” in the city in the next two decades, as thousands of elderly African-American Baby Boomer homeowners on the North Side age out of their homes and crime pushes young families out of these neighborhoods. If we do not address these causes of abandonment, we will see more and more empty houses.
What concerned me even more about the Post article was the glaring omission in the discussion of who owns many of the abandoned buildings in St. Louis. No, I’m not talking about the Land Reutilization Authority (LRA), everyone’s favorite entity to blame. The LRA receives all the property that no one wants, and is then given the task of trying to sell it. (Though many of my friends would argue that people do want to buy some of those houses.) Let’s stop making the LRA the scapegoat for vacancy. I’m talking about the other owners of all those abandoned buildings that are left to rot, particularly on the North Side but also, increasingly, in many neighborhoods of the South Side. Who are these owners, and why are they sitting on abandoned property on the loneliest streets in the city?
As any neighborhood leader will tell you, the biggest threat to the stability of a neighborhood with abandoned buildings is the speculator, who nearly always lives far from the communities in which he or she “invests.” When I do detective work in my own neighborhood—or become curious about the owner of a stunning but rapidly deteriorating house I find somewhere on the North Side—I frequently discover that the owner lives out in St. Louis County, in St. Charles County, or even, due to the increasingly astronomical real estate prices on the coasts, in California. At one point, the historic Chuck Berry House in the Greater Ville was owned by someone from Utah. In talking to some of these investors on the phone, I’ve learned that many of these out-of-town buyers have absolutely no idea what they’re doing; they are purchasing houses sight unseen. After a couple of years, confused that no one has shown any interest, they stop paying property taxes, and the house goes to the LRA. Does this cost the California buyer much? Not really, thanks to the incredibly low house prices in St. Louis. For these speculators, I imagine it’s much like playing the lottery: You buy tickets all over the Midwest, and you only need to win one to eat the loss of the losers and still turn a profit.
Unfortunately, actual people, mostly lower-income African Americans, have to live next door to those losing lottery tickets.
I took a random sampling of 20 abandoned North St. Louis buildings, none of them owned by the LRA, where I could determine the home address of the owner. (Some savvy owners hide behind the anonymity of an LLC registered at a P.O. Box.) Of the 20 abandoned buildings surveyed, 15 were owned by an individual or LLC outside of the City of St. Louis, with six of the owners outside the metropolitan region. St. Louis County had five owners; St. Charles County came in second with three; and the Metro East had one. In some instances, the owner inherited the house from a relative. But we all must follow the law, and I counted several dozen housing code violations that have little chance of being fixed.
I will never forget the community meeting in which a slumlord from Town and Country laughed dismissively and admitted he’d never want to live in, or next door to, the building he owned in my neighborhood.
The City owes its residents a safe and welcoming environment, if only to make sure their properties have sufficient value to secure a home mortgage.
St. Louis has tried to address the lack of maintenance by private owners in “A Plan to Reduce Vacant Lots and Buildings,” but the penalties are loaded at at the end of an abandoned building’s lifespan, by placing liens on the property when the owner sells. When a slumlord investor realizes he’s never going to sell his abandoned building, he’ll often stop paying property taxes, and after three years’ time the house will be seized by the City. The property will then be offered at the Sheriff’s auction with a starting bid of the outstanding property taxes. Cost to the former owner who didn’t pay the property taxes? Zero. Also, consider this: Many of the fines for property code violations are so low, slumlords can still make a profit when they sell their buildings in “up and coming” neighborhoods. So the city’s fines simply become a business expense for the cynical investor. Of course, that’s little comfort to the dilapidated house’s long-suffering neighbors, the tax-paying citizens of St. Louis.
What’s the solution? It’s not simple. The recent court victory allowing for the passage of Proposition NS will help save countless LRA building. But a slumlord living in California must learn to suffer at the same level as the single mother of two children who lives next to his crumbling building. Anything less would be an injustice. Just look at how Paul McKee got away with his shenanigans for over a decade. We will not scare away investment if we simply start enforcing the laws we already have in place and making slumlords pay now, not later. We might even attract investment if St. Louis develops a reputation for ensuring that its residents, whether or not they have political clout, don’t have to go to bed next door to another abandoned building.
