How Double Eagle Won Over the Council

On January 8th, Kirkwood City Council will hold a public hearing on Double Eagle Development’s proposal for the former public works site. The proposal, the Council’s preferred response of the six they received, calls for 203 homes across six all-residential buildings and 303 surface parking spots.

In reviewing each of the RFP responses, a picture of the Council’s decision-making process begins to emerge. While the monetary bids associated with each of the responses are not public, it seems likely that Double Eagle’s proposal was the most lucrative of those the city received.

Nearly every response noted that the required inclusion of retail, hotels, or structured parking would lower the market value of the property and thus the return to the city. The more homes included, the higher the value. Double Eagle’s 203-home all-residential proposal optimized for both variables while checking at least a few other boxes the Council was looking for.

Amongst those additional perks is a new through-street connecting Taylor and Fillmore that was included in the original RFP criteria. The individual buildings that comprise the project are also decently urban, with minimal setbacks seperating them from the sidewalk and the street.

But chief amongst these x-factors was likely the traditional-style architecture employed by Double Eagle. Where other responses argued that more modern architecture would better complement the Kirkwood Performing Arts Center next door, Double Eagle embraced the current Council’s more conservative aesthetic preferences with a design that featured pitched roofs, chimneys, and covered porches.

Double Eagle also got a late boost when its work on the Bemiston Place Apartments in Clayton was cited as a reference point by TriStar Properties in their Commerce Bank / Pitman Place proposal, specifically with regard to the ground-floor private entrances featured in some of the apartments. That feature, sometimes referred to as “townhome style” apartments, is once again being utilized in Double Eagle’s Public Works Site proposal, in which each of the two-story 1st/2nd floor apartments will be directly accessible from outside. The 3rd/4th floor apartments will be accessible by stairwells at either end of the building that lead directly to the third floor.

The architectural design firm that Double Eagle partnered with on this proposal calls this layout ‘Breezestak” and it is meant to offer a wide variety of floor plan layouts depending on the tenant and their specific needs.

It is important to note, however, that despite all this rhetoric, the overall apartment format mix is very similar to other recent developments in Kirkwood. Pitman Place for example, will feature 38% 1-bedrooms, 40% 2-bedroom apartments, and 22% 3-bedroom apartments when complete.

What Could Have Been

Before I voice some frustrations, I want to re-emphasize that I support this project and am glad to see valuable city-owned land to put to a higher use, especially given Council’s uninformed instincts on housing policy. But I do have several regrets.

Perhaps my most direct complaint is that essentially none of the responses, including Double Eagle’s, put much of any value in the fact that a big impetus motivating the development of the site is the extension of Grant’s Trail to Downtown Kirkwood running directly next to the project. This is understandable, as construction on the trail isn’t slated to begin for another two years (woof), and it’s hard to underwrite amenities that do not yet exist. Still, once open, the trail will almost certainly drive up the value of the adjacent land and likely make the inclusion of retail catering to trail users much more viable.

To me, that means that a phased approach to the site’s development would have been much more prudent, much as I warned more than a year ago. No local developer has enough spare capital to actually develop the whole site at once, so Double Eagle will almost surely take a phased approach anyway. The City could have sold the Taylor-facing portion of the lot to Double Eagle and issued more RFPs for the remaining lots as the needs of the community and the economics of the site continue to evolve. Of course, this would have meant less money up front, but it also would have meant a greater return to the community in the long run. The one bright side is that after having asked for proposals, which would have also developed the KPAC parking lot at the corner of Monroe and Fillmore, they apparently backed off that approach, thus leaving a prime corner site available for future development once the trail gets closer to the finish line.

Secondly, while I’m glad to see the inclusion of the new through-street and the gestures at street-engagement, I do not believe this project will feel very walkable upon completion. It is simply too auto-oriented with too many curb cuts and too much asphalt. My preference would have been to include structured parking (which is expensive) while allowing the developer to include more apartments in the proposal to offset the higher cost. It likely wouldn’t have yielded a significantly higher sales price for the city, but it would almost certainly have yielded a more community-oriented project with plenty of common green space for kids to play in, families to barbecue in, and so on.

Finally, given the Council’s enthusiasm for Double Eagle’s walk-up building layouts, I hope that the Council will consider utilizing its authority to incorporate such designs into future projects by adding flexibility to our building code. Kirkwood gets big buildings like The James because it’s the only economical way to build under the current rules. The Council can —and should— allow smaller, more people-oriented buildings to be built. I think they’d be pleased by the results.

My write-up of the rejected proposals to come.