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 all big strides for our residential market, but perhaps the biggest shakeup in 2022 came not in where people live in Kirkwood but in how they live. The remote work revolution has changed how urban places function in fundamental ways.
It would seem strange then, for urban places not to make adjustments of their own that reflect this new reality. What follows is an attempt to think through those changes and offer a few concrete changes we could (and should) make in order to adapt.
An Abundance Agenda
Before I do that though, I want to note that the rest of this article can also be considered an abundance agenda. The ideas below are amenities Kirkwood can offer thanks to its growing tax base and denser development patterns. More people living in Kirkwood comes with well known costs (added traffic, noise from construction, more congested parks, etc.). But more people also means more tax revenue (and importantly, more tax revenue achieved without raising tax rates). More tax revenue then means Kirkwood can pay for more amenities and services.
Now some of those have to go towards ameliorating costs (more trash pick-up, more police officers, more school capacity), but cities, like companies, come with economies of scale. You might have to pay more officers or more teachers, but you still only have to pay one Police Chief, pay one Superintendent, and upkeep one City Hall. Because of these economies of scale, the remainder of revenue is available to make people’s lives better. It’s important that people see density as something they benefit from, and I hope the rest of this piece demonstrates ways Kirkwood can help make that connection while providing amenities and services that help its citizens navigate as big of a change as a once in a lifetime pandemic. After all, that’s what government is for. Without further ado, let’s get into it.
1. Accommodate Digital Nomads
The increasing flexibility of some jobs post-covid has led to the rise of “digital nomads,” people who, thanks to remote work, are untethered from living in proximity to the company that employs them and thus can work from a new place every couple of weeks. At least some of these people are from Kirkwood and moved away for work, or have family or friends here and would love to spend a week or so in town, maybe catch a Turkey Day game, and leave.
Leveraging this new class of worker-tourists should be a priority for Kirkwood because it ensures increased tax revenue from people with a high propensity for recreational spending who simultaneously won’t be adding to the cost of our school system. As I see it, there are two main paths available to us in order to achieve this:
Legalize Airbnbs
Airbnb has become the go-to tool for these types because it’s typically more affordable to secure spacious accommodations with full kitchens for an intermediate length of time through Airbnb than it is to rent a suite at a hotel or something.
Currently, Airbnbs are only allowed as a special use in zoning districts R-1 through R-5. That means they’re barred from downtown —the part of Kirkwood most likely to be appealing to tourists— which consists entirely of B-2 zoning.
Even at Kirkwood’s fringes where they are potentially allowed, you have to gain special approval from the council that they may or may not grant. We need to loosen these regulations and allow all residential units to be rented out at the owner’s discretion. Make owners register their rental units and perhaps charge them an impact fee, but imposing an outright ban on airbnbs Downtown means that we’re likely both losing out on tax revenue from legal rentals while simultaneously fostering a black market of illegal units rented out by owners who are skirting the rules.
Boutique Hotel
Our Airbnb regulation is made even more untenable by the fact that Kirkwood presents no reasonable alternative for accommodations (save for the Best Western in the Kirkwood Commons parking lot which caters to a different customer base than the Airbnb / boutique hotel crowd). Securing a boutique hotel in Downtown Kirkwood has been listed as a priority for the city for over a decade and yet we are no closer to seeing it happen. The easiest way to bring the idea to fruition would be to issue a request for proposals for any of the several downtown parking lots owned by the city and see if anyone takes the bait and proposes something attractive to the city (like the boutique hotel Clayton recently landed). If we don’t see anything we like, then nothing changes and we go back to the drawing board with more information on what the market is. But the best case scenario is that we hit a home run and get something really great that everyone says they want and which brings a bunch of money into the city! The only way to know for sure is to try. There is no downside to having people bring you ideas.
2. Add Public Workspaces
We also have to think of the shifting needs of existing residents who are now working remotely full-time (or at least are working from home some of the time on a hybrid schedule). Work-life balance is difficult to achieve when both of those things are happening in the same place. Giving people spaces to work outside their homes should be a priority for Kirkwood post-COVID. Now most of these places will look like private businesses (more co-working spaces, more coffee shops, etc.), but there are absolutely things we can do in the public realm as well. Here are a couple:
Public WiFi
In the May 2021 interview with St. Louis Public Radio where he talks about the city’s new parking sensors that I discussed at length in the Leverage the Lots Balance the Books article, City Administrator Russ Hawes added that Kirkwood was, “also working on Wi-Fi installations in our downtown that go along with this installation as well.”
Now that article was published May 17th, 2021 so perhaps it’s just been a slow rollout and we’ll have an announcement soon, but otherwise, public wifi needs to be placed back on the agenda. It doesn’t have to be everywhere, but big important public spaces should all be on one integrated public wifi network. Start with KPAC, the plaza, city hall, the police station, McEntee Park, the train station, Ken Connor Park, the farmer’s market, and the library, and add Walker Park, the pool/community center/ice rink and Kirkwood Park as a second phase, and you’re looking at pretty solid coverage of Downtown.
This is not an out-there idea. Plenty of cities big and small have free public wifi, including Kansas City, and Kirkwood is rich enough to have it too. I don’t know that public wifi is like the key or anything, but during the hardcore COVID months when I couldn’t sit inside Kaldi’s, I’d walk up to the Farmer’s Market, sit at the picnic tables, and work on Kirkwood Gadfly pieces using my phone’s hotspot. That would’ve been a lot easier with public wifi and I’m sure I’m not the only one that would find a good use for it. It’s an easy amenity to give to residents.
Parks
I had a whole piece about parks, so I don’t want to dwell too long on them, but I do think downtown’s parks have two important roles to play in the remote work era. First, with more people working from home (and more people living in Downtown Kirkwood), demand for parks will rise. Lunch breaks, dog walks, and morning coffees, things that have all of a sudden become possible in the middle of the work day, will necessitate more and better urban parks, and if you read the above piece, I offer several options for how we can get them.
Second, as I just mentioned, parks have provided a surprisingly suitable workspace for me in the past, and if they feature the right amenities, I think could play a similar role for a broader audience too. WiFi helps, bathrooms helps, outlets for charging help, shade (natural or otherwise) that helps prevent the sun’s glare from rendering screens unreadable helps, and perhaps even more simply, small tables and chairs (preferably in the shade next to outlets) help.
My favorite idea for where to do this is on the side of the hill looking over the tracks in McEntee Park where I think it would be sick if we added steps like miniature versions of the ones in Glass Onion: Trees for shade, throw some tables and chairs at the top, boom, all of a sudden you’ve take some random hill you have to pay someone to mow and made it into a fantastic spot to bust out some emails (or blog posts). Or, if you want to be boring, you could just add some umbrellas to Ken Connor Park…
Library Hours
But the ultimate co-working space is the library. And Kirkwood’s is beloved. Even so, I think an easy way to make it better would be to expand its hours. Its current hours are: Sundays 1-5, Monday-Thursday 9-9, and Friday-Saturday 9-5. Expanding those hours to include Sunday mornings sounds like a fantastic and useful service the city could offer with its growing tax base. 2024 will mark Kirkwood Public Library’s 100 year anniversary, what better way to celebrate than rolling out Monday-Thursday 9-9, Friday-Sunday 9-5?
3. Re-Imagine Office & Commercial Space
Of course, the fact that we’re looking for suitable replacements for the office means we’re going to have to do something with the offices themselves. COVID wiped out a ton of demand for traditional office space as employers and employees jointly shifted their preferences towards a work-from-home model.
In addition to our office space dilemma, we add in the fact that it’s also not exactly a golden era of retail. The rise of online retail, which was only accelerated by the pandemic, has further eroded demand for commercial space in downtowns all across the world, including our own. For Clayton, a place that has good agglomeration effects, proximate access to various County government institutions like the court house, and like a bunch of good business lunch options, that probably mostly just means cheaper commercial rental rates.
But as Clayton offices become more affordable, I’m worried that will mean just Kirkwood’s tenets will all of a sudden be able to afford Clayton, and Kirkwood’s offices will sit empty. Obviously, we’ll still have demand from psychologists and dental offices and the like that are serving primarily local customers, but things like law offices or small marketing outfits might just no longer consider towns like ours.
Kirkwood is going to have to figure out a way to both utilize these spaces as they’re vacated and draw other people downtown during the week to replace the employees and customers that populated downtown and added to its economic base. I think the way to achieve both of these goals is by injecting flexibility into our land-use rules (big shocker, I know).
Before we get there, though, you can get a glimpse of what the current market for Kirkwood commercial rents looks like (and a bunch of other cool stuff) by checking out this nifty website the city launched this past year (one of a number of items that has left me continually impressed by the city’s tech-savvy and a tool that itself is likely part of the solution).
Residential Conversion
First, Kirkwood must become more flexible in allowing second-story offices to be converted into residential units. I’m not sure if the hurdles here are regulatory or financial, but we should look into it and figure it out!
If the answer is regulatory, we should see if we can eliminate some of the most burdensome regulations. If the answer is that it costs too much to add some extra walls and run some extra plumbing, then maybe the Downtown Kirkwood Special Business District could stand up a grant/loan program to assist owners with the cost of these conversions. I suspect it’s a little of both.
Allow Unconventional Businesses, Including Marijuana Dispensaries
I also think it’s worth exploring allowing more flexibility in the types of businesses we allow to operate in Downtown Kirkwood. In 2019 Kirkwood City Council approved a special-use permit for the Electric Unicorn tattoo studio to operate on the second floor of 108 Kirkwood Rd, above Kirkwood Pop Co. I haven’t heard of any problems with that operation, so I think it would be good to look into other businesses that would like to operate downtown but are currently barred from doing so.
An example that I’ve written about before are Marijuana Dispensaries. Currently, medical dispensaries are permitted only as special uses in the B-3 and I-1 areas. As recreational weed comes online, the planning department is recommending that it too be limited to these same districts by simply deleting the word “medical” from the relative portions of the code.
I think this is a mistake. Allowing a marijuana dispensary downtown would provide an incredibly financially stable tenant downtown and draw foot traffic to the area all while adding another amenity for carless residents (especially the elderly, who are theoretically recipients of many of the existing medical marijuana cards).
I also think relegating dispensaries to our strip-mall-dominated peripheries endows them with an unnecessary shadiness. Dispensaries will be much more tightly regulated than bars (even though liquor seems to have more harmful effects on both individuals and societies), and yet bars are allowed in Downtown Kirkwood and dispensaries are forced to exist amongst auto body shops and fast food drive-thus. Shadiness begets shadiness and this feels like the creation of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
4. Get People Here
Finally, making sure people can get to Downtown Kirkwood more easily for entertainment, retail, and dining will at least partially offset the decline in people coming to Downtown for business.
Improving the Metro bus connections with downtown Kirkwood will be important not only in getting patrons to Downtown, but especially in getting workers here. The recent hot labor market has given Kirkwood businesses fits in trying to attract workers. Kaldi’s, for example, has moved their close time up to 3pm; PJs has had to close on Tuesdays to try relieve staffing pressures. Obviously this is not ideal, but you also get why it’s happening. Kirkwood is an expensive place to live and restaurant jobs are relatively low paying. That means very few of the people who work full time at a coffee shop or a tavern are likely to be able to afford to live here.
When the labor market was cooler, that was fine because workers were willing to commute to find whatever work they could. Now that there are more jobs than there are people to fill them, our service employers are finding that hiring has become much more difficult. Now, you can offset some of that by offering higher pay (Kirkwood residents are richer than those in Fenton, for example, so you get more in tips), but another way you can boost Kirkwood’s labor supply is reducing potential employees’ cost of commuting by improving public transit. We should do it.
As I talk about in the piece, implementing a lane diet on Kirkwood Road could help improve this transit infrastructure. As an added benefit, making the pedestrian route between the incoming James and Kirkwood Apartments and Downtown Kirkwood more comfortable would also help to entice the residents of those 212 new apartments to walk to Downtown on their lunch breaks or on a Friday night to spend money without taking up parking spots (or driving drunk).
Finally, figuring out a way to fund the full extension of Grant’s Trail to Downtown Kirkwood would be an incredibly huge win in getting both patrons and employees to Downtown. That project ran hit a snag when our application for a competitive STP grant did not score high enough to receive funding, but now seems to have been given new life. On January 4th, East-West Gateway’s Missouri Transportation Planning Committee announced that they were recommending approval for the first half of the first phase of the extension (the quarter of the path most central to Downtown) via the slightly less well-funded (but more specific to the project at hand) Transportation Alternatives Program. Getting the rest of Phase 1 over the line and then coming up with some creative ways to get Phase 2 funded absolutely must be a priority. For a few ideas on how to do that, check out the link above.
5. Housing. Always, Housing.
Finally, there’s a lot of evidence that remote work has increased the demand for housing in places like Kirkwood. Part of that is that people’s demand for amenities like yards has gone up, and places like Kirkwood have more and bigger yards than places like the Central West End or South City. Part of it also is that as people work from home more, they have more demand for home offices.
That often means converting a spare bedroom into a home office and having two roommates instead of three. This means you need to build more housing to serve the same number of people than you would have had to a few years ago. Eventually these market prices filter down to Kirkwood and make our prices go up. Increased prices mean fewer workers to employ in our small businesses, while increased housing supply means more patrons, so adding more housing really allows us to address multiple post-COVID problems.
I’ve offered a two-part solution for how I think we should address housing supply within our current political constraints, with Part One consisting of reforms to our minimum lot size and lot splitting rules and Part Two consisting of the liberalization of our Accessory Dwelling Unit law. I would love to see us make progress on some of these items in 2023, especially the ADU piece, given how strong I think the politics for it are.
Finally, Kirkwood has commissioned a big expensive Housing Study from a consulting firm that should be published this year. I’m really hopeful that the results of that study will give the issue of housing supply some momentum in City Council, and we can begin to chip away at the issue.
Happy New Year!
I’ll have more coming soon, but until then, if you have anything else you think is worth considering as a solution or a looming problem for Kirkwood in these strange times, please, drop them in the comments below!
As always, thanks for reading and Happy New Year!