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Originally Posted by Steely Dan
Downtown St. Louis hasn't built a significant class A building in over 30 years now. Meanwhile, Clayton has built half a dozen of them.
Clayton is winning.
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The closest is the PwC Pennant Building at Ballpark Village, but it's only a handful of floors of actual office space vs the parking podium. It was the first new class A space in downtown STL in 30ish years.
There are rumors that the next phase of BPV might include more office though for a large tenant. We shall see though.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Right. I'm not disputing that downtown STL office market is crap, I'm just skeptical that Clayton's presence is some magical kryptonite that permanently prevents downtown STL from being anything other than crap.
Clayton has apparently been an important node for generations. It was getting downtown retail anchors in the 1940's already. STL didn't have this extreme level of core distress until very recently. The office building that just sold for $3.5 million sold for $205 million in 2006.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
Yeah, not exactly zero sum.
But as stated before, to whatever extent there is a market for new class A commercial office space in an urban setting within metro St. Louis, downtown Clayton has being seeing ALL of that action for the past 25 years or so.
If I'm the city of St. Louis, I'm not happy about that fact.
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I would like to point out that downtown St. Louis is still objectively healthier overall than it was in the 90s and early 00s. Its residential population is at an all time high, and it's one of the few parts of the city actually growing. Its office market is another story, but the vacant buildings have been vacant for years (in some cases 10+ years). There's been no mention of the buildings brought back online that were also massive.
As for Clayton, its appeal is simple. Less crime, no 1% tax on employee base, shiny new office space, and closer to the center of gravity of metro St. Louis' ever sprawling yet stagnant population. That center of gravity is continuing to shift west in Missouri. The city is still shrinking, the Metro East overall is slowly shrinking (assuming the Census Bureau didn't botch their counting there like the rest of Illinois, long story...), St. Louis County is (allegedly) slowly shrinking/stagnant. That leaves St. Charles and Jefferson Counties as the growing areas.
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Originally Posted by The North One
Pretty much agree that Clayton is the main problem. Maybe when metro STL was healthier they were able to coexist. But Clayton is clearly the parasite here (aside from suburban office sprawl in general). If there was an effort to direct resources to downtown and not Clayton the situation would be much different.
The trend of the last couple of decades are that Midwest city downtown's have gotten exponentially better. It is very odd that downtown STL seemed to have went in the opposite direction as recently as 2013.
I also had no idea that behemoth of a building that is the railway exchange is also vacant. That hotel on the riverfront is vacant too. Really hard to paint a rosy picture of downtown STL. Things are indeed bad, but there's still time to fix it.
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Downtown St. Louis has improved over the years, but the article paid little to no mind to what has changed for the better in the last 20 years.
In terms of what you listed, the Railway Exchange is awaiting a redevelopment plan and has been tied up in litigation for years. It's also going to be a pain to redevelop due to fire and water damage.
The Millennium Hotel suffered because the owner refused to do anything with it. They have sat on the property for years refusing to sell it. The city threatened to eminent domain it, and
now they're willing to sell it. They were paying security and maintenance to keep it up to minimum standards while allowing cops to use it for training. That's been its life for ages now.
Meanwhile, the Butler Brothers Building, a 735k sq foot historic warehouse / industrial building that sat vacant for years just got turned into apartments in the last year. It's also sitting next to our brand new urban soccer stadium that they removed an interstate exit to build. Additionally, the Jefferson Arms, which is more than a million square feet and has sat vacant for years, is also in the middle of redevelopment / construction with plans for ground floor retail, apartments, and hotel space. Various smaller buildings in downtown St. Louis have also been restored and rehabbed in the same period of time, and yet crickets.
I will fully admit that downtown St. Louis has lagged behind its Midwestern peers for years in downtown redevelopment, but what I don't understand is where the media was when these buildings initially went vacant, rather than jumping on buildings like the AT&T tower 7 years after the fact.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
That's why I have to believe that's it's got some bigger issues going on than just "well, it doesn't have any directly attached accessory parking, so it's value is now zero".
For such a giant piece of urban real estate, $3.6M is essentially free.
It's saying, "this thing is such a ridiculous white elephant, will someone, ANYONE, please take it off our hands?"
If it was really a case of someone trying to give away 1.4M SF of urban real estate for free (without some unknown MAJOR issues going on behind the scenes), I believe that someone with some imagination would've bitten on it to something silly with it, like the local city museum guy, but this time on fucking steroids!!!
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The funny thing is that other, much smaller buildings, are selling and being listed for more. The Chemical Building, one of the other previously mentioned problem properties, is being listed for $12 million. It's a complete gut job that requires a second set of stairs for the entire building to bring it up to modern code. A beautiful historic building though.
As for the AT&T tower, AT&T at one point was taking up multiple buildings across several blocks, including the dedicated parking garage that served all said buildings. AT&T downsized to the neighboring skyscraper, but kept the parking that was meant to serve them all. The former AT&T tower now has something like less than 20 dedicated parking spots, and it was designed in the 1980s to serve just one corporate tenant.
Now it faces the issue of an expensive redevelopment to transform it into possible office, retail, and residential, but the guarantee of no parking. Each time a new developer takes over, every news article we get complains about the parking. If we had a stronger office market, maybe this wouldn't be such a dealbreaker, but here we are apparently.