Imagine we made housing free in Kirkwood for everyone. Kirkwood has good schools, low crime, and a quaint Downtown with lots of good restaurants and shops, so I imagine our free homes would be quite popular. Actually, even if it didn't have all those things, it'd be quite popular; where the hell else are you… Continue reading What If We Made Housing Free
The natural way neighborhoods have traditionally developed was as follows: People decide to live in an area and then a smattering of businesses that cater to those people open up shop nearby. Or perhaps the opposite happens: Some place is well-suited for business (maybe a canal is built, or gold is discovered, or, as in… Continue reading Urban Villages: A Vision for a Quainter Kirkwood
There has long been a lament amongst the Kirkwood intelligentsia that maybe adding more homes is good in theory, but the development we've actually gotten in the recent past are of the wrong type. They're too big and too expensive. In other words, they're ruining the charm of Kirkwood while doing nothing to address its… Continue reading A Closer Look at Kirkwood’s Building Code
Kirkwood is the only municipality in Greater St. Louis with its own electric utility, Kirkwood Electric. This setup has several advantages: it ensures more accountability and higher levels of responsiveness than a natural monopoly like Ameren might provide. Kirkwood Electric also operates at a profit, thus allowing the city to reinvest the dividends into other… Continue reading Elective Pay: Why Kirkwood Electric Should Go Bold
Early this summer, Kirkwood released the fruits of a multi-year effort to study the extent of our attainable housing crisis and propose some solutions for how to fix it. That effort, known formally as the Attainable Housing Study , was developed by PGAV and URBRNRX, presented to the Council for comment and review, and ultimately… Continue reading Attainable Housing Study: 19 Solutions Examined
It's hard to tell if Connect Our Community actually has the grassroots support that the yard signs and Webster-Kirkwood Times coverage seem to indicate, or whether it's the narrow project of a couple of incredibly hardworking gadflies who have managed to drag support for the project out of the swamp as if it were Sutpen's… Continue reading Connect Our Community: Wheat from the Chaff
This past weekend we got good news (about the North-South MetroLink expansion) that quickly turned into bad news. The good news is that the expansion is moving ahead: The Bi-State Development Board of Commissioners approved a resolution authorizing the BSD team to plan, design and develop the Jefferson alignment of the extension utilizing $7.4 million… Continue reading N-S MetroLink: Devil In The Details
Now that the dust has (finally) settled on the first round of voting in the St. Louis aldermanic primary, I want to take some time to advocate for a policy change that the City should implement but which the entire region would benefit from. That policy is the legalization of Transit Oriented Development (TOD) through… Continue reading To Unlock Promise of MetroLink, TOD is Key
Update 01/27/2023: Good news! Kirkwood will, in fact, be pursuing Phase 1B in this year's call for STP grant proposals according to next week's City Council agenda. The proposal matches that which I outlined below, running from Fillmore to Leffingwell. The city is asking for $1,731,310 in Federal funding and will match that share, should… Continue reading Grant’s Trail: More Work to Do
Happy 2023 Kirkwood, thanks for another great year. In 2022 we: Approved 60 new homes and additional retail via the Kirkwood Apartments Began construction on another 152 homes and retail via The James Completed construction on The Hutton's 12 homes Finished 24 townhomes along Big Bend known as The Townes at Geyer Grove These were… Continue reading How To Adjust To The Remote Work Era
