Friday, August 15, 2008

City in the City

Is St. Louis on the verge of seeing a new urbanist, major redevelopment effort on the near northside?

As has been well documented on the blogs, private site assemblage efforts, coupled with a vast amount of city-owned properties, creates the possibility of major planned redevelopment near the abandoned Pruitt-Igoe site.

With energy and transportation costs rising, St. Louis has the unique opportunity to rebuild a part of its original city with 21st century green building technologies coupled with cutting edge urban design.

Strategic historic preservation as part of a pedestrian scaled, new neighborhood is possible. Given all the private investment underway, a new development is on the horizon. What would make it appealing to you?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

So large scale reinvestments are not immune to the down turn in the housing market and the general credit crisis. Elsewhere on the near north-side, new construction has virtually come to a halt. Downtown has seen the collapse of a number of projects and the scaling back of the residential portions of others. In other parts of the northside, new housing construction has slowed. Most of these, like the unknown but highly speculated McKee, benefit from significant public incentive in one form or the other. Why wouldn't McKeeville suffer the same fate at these? In light of that, these large scale speculative efforts might prove to be the worse strategy that city leaders have not-pursued pursued in a long time.

Anonymous said...

I just hope they respect the street grid and use designs that set us apart from the boring developments in the suburbs.

Anonymous said...

Paul Mckee should be held liable for the massive devestation that he has been involved with in the North side of St. Louis!!!!