Board of Education Continues Saint Louis Tradition of Dismantling African American History

The Board of Education voted to demolish Scullin, Hempstead and Euclid Schools by a margin of 4 to 2 in a meeting held on June 9.

Despite having a bid from a developer to purchase Euclid School, Board Members Dr. Karen Collins-Adams, Donna Jones, Emily Hubbard and Tracy Hikes voted to spend tornado insurance money that could be used elsewhere to demolish the salvageable school, further committing to the destabilization of Fountain Park neighborhood.

“Our school buildings are among our most powerful cultural symbols” said Stuart Keating, Executive Director of Landmarks Association. “They are community anchors and link our past to our present. It boggles the mind that the Board of Education, as stewards of taxpayer-owned property, would reject a reasonable cash offer to redevelop Euclid School into a property that contributes to the city’s real estate tax base in favor of an empty lot they will have to continue spending money on to maintain.”

Saint Louis committed to building state-of-the-art school buildings for students of all races across the entire city in the early 20th century and these buildings were nationally celebrated for their innovation, beauty and utility. Twenty thousand people marched in a parade to celebrate the opening of Roosevelt High School in south Saint Louis, and Saint Louis’ school buildings became templates for progressive educational institutions across the country.

School buildings are particularly valuable as historic buildings. Traditionally, proximity to schools has stabilized neighborhoods and bolstered property values. School buildings are very often among the largest and most visible buildings in a community and are buildings where common history and culture are created, as generations of students and families interact with the building over many years. These taxpayer-funded institutions represent a collective vision for future generations in which children are celebrated, nurtured and cultivated into educated and interested citizens.

“This is like burning furniture to heat your house,” said Keating. “The Board of Education rejected a cash offer for Euclid School that would have resulted in an eleven million dollar redevelopment project in favor of spending north of a million dollars to swing a wrecking ball around and leave yet another vacant hole in a northside neighborhood.”

SLPS and the Board of Education will face many tough decisions around school consolidation over the next few years, and Landmarks Association is committed to working them to prevent the city from facing situations where school buildings sit vacant for decades, crater their surrounding neighborhoods through crime, vandalism and decreasing property values, contribute to the drain on SLPS and City resources, and eventually require taxpayer-funded demolition.

A better future is possible, and Saint Louis already has the blueprint: There are seventeen former schools in Saint Louis City that have been converted into residential or commercial properties, and collectively they contribute 634 units of middle income, low income and senior housing along with $149,000 a year to Saint Louis Public Schools in real estate revenue alone. As tax abatements end, that number will grow to $250,000 each year, and these projects bolster the property values of the surrounding neighborhoods

“These buildings represent the legacy of SLPS’ efforts as a civic institution in Saint Louis, for better or worse. First as shining beacons of commitment to the future, then as decaying, neglected eyesores when they are left vacant,” said Keating. “Landmarks continues to urge the Board of Education and SLPS to consider strategically how to decommission schools directly into adaptive reuse so that SLPS’ legacy moving forward is one of adapting to the future, preserving Saint Louis’ unique culture and history, and ensuring safe, stable, beautiful neighborhoods for the flourishing of future generations of students.”

On June 8th, executive director Stuart Keating wrote the following statement to encourage the city to preserve the Euclid School:

I am writing today on behalf of our members, Saint Louis taxpayers and people who appreciate the legacy and impact of our school buildings.

I am writing to urge you to vote no on demolishing Euclid School and instead sell the property to Benjamin Anderson.

Euclid School is currently costing SLPS money, in terms of maintenance and security costs as well as diminution of real estate value in the surrounding neighborhoods.

Demolishing Euclid School will leave SLPS with a vacant lot that has to be maintained, mowed and surveilled and leave the surrounding neighborhood with another hole in the skyline. Vacant lots attract crime and trash and continue to depress property values. Here are several lines of reasoning as to why we oppose the demolition of Euclid School.

The economic case for saving Euclid School

I did some research on school redevelopments and discovered that (to the best of my knowledge) Saint Louis city has 17 redeveloped schools, most of which are former SLPS properties (one is from Harris Stowe and at least three others are former private school buildings).

The properties are overwhelmingly residential, with a diversity of tenants with transitional housing, low-income and middle-income apartments, senior housing and luxury lofts/apartments all represented.

Additionally, the school conversions are spread across the metro, from The Patch through a variety of South City neighborhoods to the Central West End, Academy and Old North.

These properties contribute 634 units of multi-family housing to Saint Louis and $149,841 in direct contributions to schools from real estate tax payments alone. Many of these properties are abated, meaning the amount of real estate tax will increase as the abatements sunset. A very rough estimate is that the contribution to schools (not counting any increases in assessed value) will be somewhere north of $250,000 once all the current abatements have expired.

Name	Address	Neighborhood	Unit count	Taxes to SLPS/year	Abated?	Est. Taxes to SLSP
Clark School Lofts	1020 Union	Academy	45	$1,800	Yes	$18,000
Shepard School Apartments	3450 Wyoming	Marine Villa	56	$4,251	Yes	$17,004
Lafayette Lofts	815 Ann Ave	Soulard	36	$7,461	No	$7,461
Sherman Lofts	3942 Flad	Shaw	42	$5,875	Yes	$23,502
Gratiot School	1615 Hampton	Gate District	22	$5,262	Yes	$52,619
Theresa Park	1517 S Theresa	Gate District	35	$12,629	No	$12,629
Franklin School Apartments	814 N 19th	Downtown West	75	$10,582	No	$10,582
Grant School Apartments	3009 Pennsylvania	Tower Grove East	27	$11,509	Yes	$11,509
Blair School Apartments	2313 N 14th	Old North	35	$1,955	No	$1,955
Irving School Apartments	3829 N 25th	Hyde Park	82	$6,512	No	$6,512
Lyon School Apartments	7417 Vermont Ave	Patch	32	$25,740	Yes	$25,740
Macklind School House Apartments	4716 Macklind	Southampton	18	$3,299	No	$3,299
Field School Lofts	4466 Olive St	CWE	33	$42,031	No	$42,031
St. Thomas Aquinas	4021 Iowa	Dutchtown	22	$1,314	Yes	$13,135
Webster School Senior Apartments	2127 N 11th St	Old North	49	$982	Yes	$9,822
Lucas Schoolhouse	1220 Allen	Soulard	0	$3,043	No	$3,043
Garfield School Apartments	2612 Wyoming	Benton Park West	25	$5,596	Yes	$11,191
		Totals	634	$149,841		$258,843

The racial justice case for saving Euclid School

Saint Louis has done a terrible job of preserving cultural heritage (which includes historical buildings) in North Saint Louis, which leads to a sense of displacement and rootlessness, disconnecting residents from the community of the city at large and the history of their own past. We encourage SLPS to not contribute to this problem.

We are in favor of redevelopment, whether Benjamin Anderson (for whom we offered a letter of support) or another developer takes the project on does not matter to us, though we would like to see the building’s historical character preserved as it is beautiful and contributes to the character of the neighborhood.

The environmental case for saving Euclid School

Euclid School, like all of SLPS’ buildings, is a marvel of construction. We simply cannot construct buildings with this level of artisanship anymore. Modern multi-family buildings are typically constructed for a 20-25 year lifespan.

By demolishing Euclid School you not only remove the money, time, effort and greenhouse gases that were sunk into building it in the first place, you expend money, time, effort and greenhouse gases to demolish and remove it in order for someone to expend money, time, effort and greenhouse gases to build something less significantly less sturdy that will have less than a quarter of the lifespan of the original building.

It’s like burning your furniture to heat your house–it doesn’t make sense financially or ecologically.

The civic pride case for saving Euclid School

In the early decades of the 20th century Saint Louis set a national example by commissioning state of the art public school buildings for all of its students, regardless of race. These school buildings were so revolutionary, so functional and so beautiful that the architect, William B. Ittner, was commissioned to build them across the country. The Saint Louis style school became a national cultural icon.

We have the chance in the early decades of this century to lead the way yet again–we are facing a national trend of school closures and a housing crisis around low-income, middle-income and multifamily housing. We can come up with a pipeline to redevelop our schools that maximizes their value to SLPS, minimizes rehabilitation costs and dramatically accelerates the redevelopment timeline, ensuring the schools contribute to the city’s real estate tax base (and thus to the SLPS general fund) as quickly as possible.

I have some further reading for you if you are interested, each article concerns the trend of adaptive re-use for decommissioned school buildings.

Thank you so much for your public service to SLPS and to the city in general, and thank you for your thoughtful consideration of this letter.

Yours in preservation,
Stuart Keating
Executive Director

On June 11th, executive Stuart Keating provided the following response to the Board of Education’s vote two days prior:

I would like to offer some clarification and response to comments made by members of the Board of Education in the aftermath of the vote taken to demolish Euclid and Scullin schools on Tuesday.

First of all, real estate prices are based on their opportunity cost—what would it take to make a building viable for commercial use at a rate that justifies the expense of buying and rehabbing it. In areas where land is intensively used and relatively scarce (think Manhattan), buildings or even vacant lots can sell for eye watering sums. Buildings that are in good shape and are already occupied can also command a premium, as banks will look at them and immediately understand the investment potential.

Properties with serious damage or in areas of less-intensive land use (areas where there are fewer people and lots of vacant land or buildings) sell for significantly lower prices because they will both cost more money to develop and are likely to command lower rent or sales prices, meaning that the developer has a smaller pool of money to work with overall.

The sales price of a building for a significant historic rehab is usually a very, very small fraction of the overall economic picture. A commercial redevelopment of a school typically involves the acquisition of the building and then the expenditure of millions of dollars in construction costs—money that goes to local construction firms, local material suppliers and local workers, adding money to the economy and spurring on local economic activity as those firms and suppliers and workers spend the money they earn. Every dollar in construction cost results in significantly more than a dollar in local economic activity. This is known as a Keynesian multiplier.

Focusing on the sales price of a vacant school also ignores the active cost the building poses to SLPS. Vacant schools currently cost tens of thousands of dollars a year each to maintain and are site for crime and vandalism that depress the home values of surrounding neighborhoods, erasing any equity homeowners have in their properties.

The longer a property sits vacant, the more it costs SLPS, the more expensive it becomes to rehabilitate, the more it depresses neighborhood values, making the value proposal of a rehab more difficult. These properties become toxic assets that cost far more than they are worth. In a sense, many of these vacant schools are worth negative money, you would have to pay someone to take it off your hands.

Demolition costs money and results in a less-intensive use of land. A vacant lot in a neighborhood with a high vacancy rate will remain vacant, and will still cost SLPS money in terms of maintenance and security. Vacant lots also depress property values and become sites for crime and illegal dumping, making neighborhoods less safe and further eroding the equity homeowners have in their properties.

Long vacant buildings are very expensive to rehab. The idea that a developer would hire burglars to vandalize a property to lower the sale price makes no sense economically. If metal thieves take the copper out of a building and put holes in the roof that lets rainwater into the building, that water intrusion will raise the cost of a rehab by several million dollars. No developer is going to hire a crew of vandals to lower the sales price of a building by a hundred thousand dollars in order to then spend three or four or ten million dollars to repair that damage later.

Projects of this size cost a lot of money and doing these projects in depressed neighborhoods (and in a way that can keep rental and purchase prices low) require a suite of tax credits and incentives, including Historic Tax Credits. Historic Tax Credits do not alter the real estate tax basis of the building and only apply to state and federal income tax.

Additionally, using Historic Tax Credits requires the developer to maintain the historic integrity of the building, ensuring higher levels of craftsmanship, higher quality materials and a more beautiful and useful end product. They increase the values of surrounding properties, increasing the wealth of homeowners and giving them access to increased equity and credit at significantly lower interest rates.

If you sell a property to the developer, it instantly enters the city’s tax rolls, contributing to the SLPS general fund. As a vacant property it may not contribute much, but even by giving away a property for no money the Board of Education will have stopped some amount of expenditure and started gaining additional funds from the new property owner paying taxes, plus all ongoing security and maintenance must now be borne by the developer and the property can be targeted for CSB requests and property code violations.

I understand that Paul McKee has absolutely wrecked north Saint Louis. I opposed Northside Regeneration when it was originally opposed and I oppose it still. When I owned a microbrewery in Gravois Park we made a beer called TAX EVADER that featured a caricature of Paul McKee as the hamburglar stomping on houses.

McKee has made a huge mess and it is unfortunately up to us to clean it up. But that means we get to find ways to fix things that are equitable and just for everyone. I understand there’s a total loss of trust in the development community. But we will require at least some trust, some faith and some optimism to get out of this mess.

We can redevelop these schools without gentrifying neighborhoods and pushing people out. In fact, not redeveloping these schools is more likely to push people out as vacant lots become sites for crime and illegal dumping and neighbors get fed up and leave, or don’t have enough equity in their houses to justify repairing them after natural disasters and simply abandon their homes, creating a downward spiral that saps the vitality, history and culture out of once-thriving neighborhoods.

Every vacant lot in a neighborhood increases the likelihood of someone else moving out and another house going vacant, or vandalism and fire that demolish surrounding properties. If we want neighborhoods to stabilize or recover from the decades of structural racism, strategic disinvestment and municipal neglect that they have suffered, we will have to work together to ensure a diversity of building ages, building uses and resident incomes.

I urge you to give Benjamin Anderson, or any reasonable developer, a chance to save Euclid School. Benjamin Anderson has a track record of success on big projects and he lives in Fountain Park—if anyone is willing to go the extra mile to do right by the school’s neighbors, it’s him. We are committed to doing the hard work with you to ensure stable neighborhoods across Saint Louis and SLPS’ legacy for the future.

As always, I remain available to discuss any questions or concerns you have about historic preservation, adaptive reuse, commercial redevelopment or the legacy and importance of SLPS’ amazing buildings.

Yours in preservation,
Stuart Keating
Executive Director

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