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Another bye-week until ARB and the Council return next Monday and Thursday, respectively, but a few items to discuss nonetheless. Let's jump into it!
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- I watched the recording of the July 6th City Council meeting to see how the public hearing for 422 S. Clay went. A quick reminder: the building is vacant and in disrepair and the owners are asking the council to allow them to rezone it from B-4 (commercial with requirements that buildings be set back at least 40ft from the street and 25ft from the side property lines) to B-2 (the same zoning as Downtown Kirkwood) so that they can build a new small office there. The whole block was rezoned from R-5 multifamily to B-4 commercial back in 1968 becuase Southwestern Bell was going to build a new regional office there, but then that plan fell through, Woodbine Center was built on half the block in 1986 and we've been left with B-4 ever since. But the B-4 setback requirements are basically unworkable unless you want to build a strip mall so people are stuck either 1) sticking small businesses in the (legally unalterable) gradfathered-in houses or 2) applying to the council for rezoning as the owners of 119 W Woodbine did a couple of years back and as the owners of 422 S Clay are pursuing now. How did it go? Well, I can't read the Council's minds, but CM Arnold signaled his support for rezoning arguing (rightly, in my opinion) that B-2 makes much more sense for the neighborhood, while CM Jaksetic argued we should try to hamstring the property with unworkable zoning so that the Council could exert direct control over the project. Economic growth relies on a solid pro-business environment and a solid pro-business environment relies on certainty. Discretionary Council review of individual projects is the opposite of that. My advice? If CM Arnold believes B-2 is a better fit, he should push to amend the zoning code to allow B-2 typologies on the handful of remaining B-4 properties in town and if CM Jaksetic has concerns about how the final project will look, she should push to amend the code to require new developments adhere to her aesthetic preferences. Should all new commercial be built of brick or utilize a specific architectural style? I'm sincerely so open to something like that and think that such changes might even be broadly popular with the public at large. But we should make consistent everyone has to follow, not tie ourselves in knots trying to micromanage individual projects. Businesses rely on certainty!
- A couple of items of note from page 1 of last week's WKT:
- The Council continues to pass public works site spending resolutions on narrow 4-3 majorities. As an economics guy, I'm certainly sensitive to sunk-cost fallacy, but the lesson of the sunk costs fallacy is not that it never makes sense to throw more money into an over-budget project, it's that you should assess marginal spending decisions on their own basis regardless of the spending that has already been committed (i.e. the sunk cost). That means we should be evaluating whether the benefit of spending an additional $500k on electronic security and safety systems for the project outweighs the cost of $500k to the city. The fact that we've wasted millions on this thing is important in a political sense, but it should not enter into the rational economic consideration of the Council's vote. If people don't think those systems are worth $500k, I'm open to that argument, but treating these things as referendum after referendum on the project as a whole is irresponsible. I'd love to hear someone in the opposition articulate their vision for what they think should happen. Should we cancel the project, try to sell the Mazerak site, cancel our $8 million contract Double Eagle has to develop the old site and move public works back in there? The fair market value of the Mazerak site was assessed at $6 million in 2023, so I think that chain of action would cost us at least a million more than the status quo with no facilities upgrades to show for it. But maybe I'm missing something? Let's hear the plan!
- Page 1 also brought the disappointing news that the Ladue City Council voted to reject the 277 homes that had been proposed for the Rock Hill Quarry site. A few thoughts:
- 1) When we reject the construction of apartments on parking lots in Kirkwood, we're not secretly protecting Kirkwood's affordability or character or something, we're behaving like the rich, exclusionary snobs of Ladue, and that's bad.
- 2) Because the Kirkwood housing market is very closely tied to those of our neighbors, Ladue refusing to build 277 new home unfortunately means that housing in Kirkwood will be more expensive than had those homes been built. The people who would've lived in them will now look to The James or Pitman Place instead, keeping their rents elevated compared to if those projects would've had to compete with the Rock Hill Quarry apartments for tenants. This exact dynamic is why allowing new housing to be built —even if it's luxury housing!— improves affordability.
- The end of the article quotes the Mayor saying that at least, "we can all agree the process worked"! I strongly disagree that listening to the loudest few voices who have enough time on their hands to comment at a public hearing is the optimal way to make communal decisions. You know who they didn't hear from? All the people who thought the project was more or less fine but weren't going to waste a night saying so, the people who would've lived in those apartments one day but don't even know they would have yet, and everyone else in the St. Louis region who would be made materially better off if we collectively embraced a dynamic, growing economy. The people who comment at these things (myself included!) are highly ideological weirdos, not some kind of representative sample of the community. Hell, they're not even a representative sample of the Ladue electorate that entrusted the Council to make decisions of their behalf only to have that Council defer to the most annoying people in the room!
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That's all for this week! Salt of the Earth performing at Tunes at 10 Saturday morning! Have a great weekend, everyone!
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