Present & Future Development Along Grant’s Trail

I’ve long made the case that in order for Kirkwood to get the most out of its significant development in the Grant’s Trail extension, they should clear the way for the private sector to invest in the land alongside it. That mostly means loosening zoning restrictions for what uses are allowed on adjacent land, but it also means looking for opportunities where city owned land near the amenity could be better utilized.

Today, I want to take a high level look at both the trail-adjacent projects that are already in the works, as well as what opportunities exist for infill in the medium to long term. In order to help you follow along, I’ve created the following interactive map:

What’s In the Works

Let’s start with projects that are already in various stages of development. These are organized by how far along these projects are, from those that are already under construction, to new developments that are in the earliest stages of infancy.

The Aria

First up, we have the 42-unit, mixed-use Aria, currently under construction at the southwest corner of Monroe and Taylor and depicted in teal on the map above. Beyond the general added density and retail that the project will bring, its most significant contribution to the quality of the trail will be the public plaza included at the property’s northeast corner.

Given the inclusion of bike parking, benches, and dining options, this public plaza will likely serve as an end destination for at least some users of the extension. I expect the Aria to be completed at some point in early 2026.

The Maje Residences

At the other end of the extension, near where it ties in with the existing Grant’s Trail, seven townhomes have been proposed for 507 S. Holmes. Dubbed “The Maje Residences,” this project would occupy two of the three total trail-adjacent lots outside of Downtown zoned for something beyond light industrial uses (the third lot, directly south of the Maje proposal, will remain as a non-compliant single family home for the time being). Because R-5 multifamily taps out at an allowed density of fourteen homes per acre, the seven homes included here are the max allowed by the code on the ~0.5 acre site.

Allowing seven families to live along the trail where only four could live before is a net positive for Kirkwood, both in terms of walkability and tax base, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t say I wish we’d allow something at least as dense as the apartments directly across Elliot from this site.

We’re not quite to the future development opportunities section of this piece, but I will note that 511 S. Holmes, the lot directly South of the Maje, is also zoned R-5 multifamily, with the single-family rental house currently occupying the site constituting a non-compliant use. Because the lot is 0.44 acres, it is eligible to host a small multifamily building of up to six units.

The Maje Residences will go before the Board of Adjustment to seek four variances (three pertaining to setback requirements and a fourth pertaining to its driveway), at the September 9th meeting.

The Public Works Site

The other pending major development along the route is the coming redevelopment of the old public works site (outline in green below). That site will be made available for development once the city moves its operations to a new site half a mile to the southeast that the city controversially purchased for $12.5 million last fall.

The primary reason given for making such a move was that the city wanted to put the land next to the KPAC, the coming Aria development, the Grant’s Trail, and Downtown Kirkwood as a whole, to a more productive, complimentary use. That seems very reasonable to me, but given the blowback the council and administration have received for the price tag of the new facility and the continuing sense that KPAC is underperforming financially (it’s lost an average of $108k each of the past three years and is projected to lose another $111k for the city this year), the city pretty clearly needs a financial home run here. That means the council is probably going to have to accept a much larger scale project than they’ve shown much stomach for so far on city-owned sites.

The good news is that the site is well suited for extensive infill. The site is very large —seven acres in total— and has access from both S. Fillmore and S. Taylor (as well as the small access road, Boyer Ln), meaning that traffic circulation should not be an issue.

The council should take some steps to make sure the scale and pace of the development is to their liking. I think the best way to achieve this is to break up property in question in smaller pieces and issues rolling RFPs for each of the properties into multiple phases. Right now, the property is pretty deep making it more difficult to use the space efficiently while achieving this more fine grained development pattern, so I also think the city should consider creating a new road running down the middle of the property that would connect Monroe in the North to Boyer Ln in the South. That way the city could develop properties both on the exterior of the property (facing Fillmore and Taylor) and on the property (facing what I’ve preliminarily dubbed “Grant Lane” on the map below, a name that also happens to fit the presidential scheme of our existing Downtown grid).

Not only would such new infrastructure allow smaller-scale development the Council says they prefer, but it would also eliminate the need for any new curb cuts on Taylor, Monroe, or Fillmore, facilitating a safer pedestrian and cycling environment on the adjacent streets. Instead cars would access their building’s garages through Grant Lane-oriented entrances.

So how should the city carve up the lot and what kind of development should it ask for on each of its component lots? Well, here’s a preliminary mock-up of the kind of scheme that I think would work well:

Then you could stipulate a different sort of project on each lot’s individual RFP. Ideally, I think you want a good mix of different kinds of development: residential and retail, rental housing and homeownership opportunities, small format townhomes and larger format multifamily buildings. Something like the following:

Lot 1 – Apartment building/parking garage

Lot 2 – Townhomes/parking garage

Lot 3 – Rental apartment building (potentially w/ Fillmore-facing retail)

Lot 4 – Mixed use ownership condos (w/ Taylor-facing retail) or expansion of Kirkwood house

Lot 5 – Townhomes/parking garage

Lot 6 – Corner mixed-use building with room for potential expansion of adjacent Life Skills building (affordability requirements/supportive housing using Low Income Housing Tax Credits)

Lot 7-Pocket park or parking garage

Now, I also think that the corner of Monroe and Fillmore, currently home to the KPAC parking lot, is probably better suited for development than some of these other lots (it’s on a high visibility corner and the trail will run directly by it), so we’re probably better off developing that land and replacing the parking we lose with a higher capacity garage on one of the interior parcels, like lot 1, 2, or 5.

All of this is just spitballing on my part, but the specifics aren’t as important as the general concept. The city and its elected officials should actively set up the conditions of the RFP to ensure they get an outcome that they like rather than saying “let’s see what you come up with!” and then complaining when they don’t like the results as they did with the Jefferson RFPs.

Longer Term Opportunities

So those are the developments along the trail that seem like they will happen in one form or another, but I also want to take a look at what kind of development opportunities exist along the trail in the medium to long term. We’ll start off at the Northwest (Downtown Kirkwood) end of the trail, since that’s where the zoning already allows the kind of mixed-use/multifamily development we’re talking about:

212 S. Taylor

Perhaps the most appealing of these longer term opportunities is the 212 S. Taylor property outlined in red above. This building is owned by the city and, at least according to google maps, serves as the current home of Kirkwood Electric, the Kirkwood Utilities Department, and Kirkwood City Purchasing.

That city ownership, plus the site’s location in the heart of the city’s most valuable and economically productive neighborhood PLUS the lot’s B-2 General Business zoning (the city’s densest) means that the site serves as a flip the Council could switch to maximize economic growth and affordability anytime they wanted to.Even better, the lot is relatively small meaning that the scale of any such project would probably be more agreeable with the Council’s aesthetic preferences.

There’s no real reason to think that Kirkwood Electric or the other departments need to be located in the small low-slung building that currently occupies the site. Back before Kirkwood Electric was a distribution-only utility (i.e. when it was generating its own power), 212 S. Taylor was the home of its coal-fueled power plant, but that operation ended during World War I as part of a patriotic energy-consumption reduction effort and Kirkwood Electric leased the site to Kirkwood Ice Cream Company in 1921.

The only real question is where would you move these operations, but there are several appealing options. Perhaps there’s some spare space at the new Public Works facility and there has long been talk of overhauling the police station building (a conversation that seems likely to kick into high gear after emergency dispatching services moves into the new public works facility). Hell, this 42,500 sqft class B office building off of Old Big Bend Rd, the “Kirkwood Office Center,” is leasing at just $19 per sqft per year (below the class B state or St. Louis area average) and seems to have been struggling to find tenants since at least 2020. I know everyone is mad about how much we paid for the Public Works swap in this same sort of parlay, but maybe we actually get an appraisal this time and see if the owner is interested in selling?

Kirkwood Post Office

Just next door, at 222 S. Taylor (fuchsia on the map above) is Postal Service carrier annex facility that the USPS uses to sort mail for the 63122 zip code. That’s exciting because according to a recent directive issued by the Biden administration:

“The United States Postal Service (USPS) will pilot the repurposing of certain surplus properties for housing. USPS owns more than 8,500 facilities nationwide, including some that are not needed for postal operations in areas that face a shortage of affordable housing.”

Now, there’s no indication that this particular site will get the nod, but a couple of things make me optimistic. First, there are some indications that the Kirkwood and Des Peres branches of USPS could be merging, so I’m hopeful that if such a move were to occur, USPS might look to identify some redundancies in terms of facilities and decide to let this particular site go to market.

Second, the building itself is not exactly cutting edge. It was built in 1962 (making it the second oldest of all the carrier annex facilities in the state) and its 9,614 sqft footprint makes it by far the smallest.

Unfortunately, because congress banned USPS from overriding local zoning, the fact that the 222 S. Taylor facility is zoned I-1 light industrial, a code that disallows residential uses, is a huge barrier to its participation in the program. It would be great if the city’s planners and elected officials could demonstrate some foresight and rezone the land B-2 General Business like all the properties surrounding it.

I wish USPS had full sovereign immunity!

But congressional NIMBYs reigned in USPS immunity to proceed "only after consideration of all requirements…of zoning laws, land use laws, & enviro laws…that would apply if [it] were not a building…of the Government of the US" https://t.co/OQblGlg1hb pic.twitter.com/kRvY12Giha

— @Alex_Armlovich (@aarmlovi) July 16, 2024

Given the stark divide between the two parties so far on the campaign trail, I’m much more bullish on this coming to fruition under a Harris administration than a Trump one, but who knows, current Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Trump appointee, has shown a significant interest in cutting loose some of USPS’s excess holding and maybe that effort just continues chugging along under the radar. I will add that if it’s the Harris administration carrying it out, it seems likely that any such development is very likely to include a mandate that some of the resulting units be income-restricted.

Industrial Land / B-GT

While the individual sites listed above are appealing, the real key to unlocking the long-term potential for Grant’s Trail lies in the development of the significant light industrial land surrounding the vast majority of the extension:

When it’s all said and done, Kirkwood will pay more than $1.7 million for this project. The total cost, 80% of which is incurred by the federal government, will be more than $8.5 million. That’s a massive public investment in our community, but the city currently blocks it from spurring any private sector investment along 90% of the trail (since industrial uses don’t really have much use for a bike trail.

I think that should change that, ideally by allowing mixed-use multifamily projects along the trail (in addition to the current industrial use), but even allowing the 14-dwelling units per acre R-5 density of the Maje site would be a step in the right direction.

Unfortunately, the Council has shown little appetite for such a change. Despite a lot of positive rhetoric around such a move at last Spring candidate forum, just a month earlier, the council directly contradicted that intent by watering down a zoning text change that would have allowed professional and commercial services as a permitted use on industrial land. Instead of the changes pertaining to all I-1 lots, Duwe, Gibbons, Luetzow and Wurtz overrode Council Member Sears and Mayor Griffin to amend the change to only apply to the light industrial property flanking South Kirkwood Road.

Sears and Griffin are no longer on the council while Luetzow, Gibbons, and Zimmer have all been reinforced by other anti-development councilors, so if we couldn’t get nail salons and gyms approved, I’m not holding me breath that we could get a zoning change that allows housing any time soon, but let me try to address a concern that I’ve occasionally heard voiced.

Environmental Hazards

A natural argument against allowing residential uses on historically industrial land is that these two uses are incompatible. In fact, separating noxious industrial land from residential land is the original reasoning for the legalization of zoning as a construct. But while the argument might make broad sense, in this particular case, I think it significantly overblown. First, the “industrial” uses we’re talking about aren’t coal plants. The land is specifically set aside for “light” industrial uses. That means things like ice carving businesses, t-shirt printing, and warehousing. While these businesses do generate a decent amount of annoyances like truck traffic or maybe the occasional loud noise, they’re not exactly environmental hazards that are going to harm the health of nearby residents.

Now, Kirkwood is pretty old, so just because current uses aren’t all that noxious, it doesn’t mean that previous uses haven’t introduced significant toxins to the land. Luckily, we have several indications that this is not the case. The trail extension project itself included significant analysis of environmental hazards in the area.

The results? Three hazardous substance investigations were completed, ultimately leading to the conclusion “there appears to be no environmental feature that is a barrier to  the trail development.” You’ll also notice that the the 100-year flood plain does not impact any of the trail-side plots:

The Planning Problem

Rather than any sort of environmental hazards, the single biggest hurdle to allowing residential uses along this stretch of trail is that Kirkwood hasn’t planned for it. The existing master plan, EnVision Kirkwood 2035 —the document that is supposed to guide all future zoning change and development decisions— makes no suggestion of allowing more varied uses in this section of Kirkwood. And because the master plan is supposed to guide all future zoning change and development decisions, defying it would require some justification or edit to the document itself. Even worse, if the name of the plan is to be believed, we’re stuck with that oversight for the next decade. There are ways to pre-empt the master plan or edit it, but it is, at the very least, messy.

If that sounds sort of circular, that’s because it is. Planning is supposed to anticipate the needs of the future, and here the future has been placed on hold because it hasn’t been planned. Predicting the future is really hard, so this isn’t a knock against any individuals that participated in the planning process, just an argument that the more flexibility the city can provide and the more it can simply get out of the way of enterprising individuals —and allow them to put valuable land for its highest and best use, no matter if we can anticipate what that use may or may not be— the better off we will be.

The Grant’s Trail extension likely won’t be complete until 2030 or so, so perhaps by that time, we’ll already be working on the next Master Plan and we can get this included. But such a delay does not come without costs. Every year of inaction that passes, the cost of living in Kirkwood goes up and tax revenue for improved city infrastructure and services is left on the table. I’d prefer we build consensus, act boldly, and reap the benefits now.