A-List 2026: Visionary Award

THE BUILDER

Pastor Andre Alexander

Pastor Andre Alexander is emphatic and direct when he talks about housing and homeownership. To him, they are things that everyone should be able to attain, regardless of financial background.

“We treat it much like it’s an option, an add-on, nice to have. But for me, housing is not an option. It is a right, and everybody should have it,” he says.

Armed with this attitude, the senior pastor of the Tabernacle Church and president of the Tabernacle Community Development Corp. set out earlier this decade to achieve what many had written off as impossible: to build new housing in North St. Louis. It’s a monumental task in a part of the city where homes are chronically undervalued. This keeps banks from issuing loans even for existing housing stock, and new construction tends to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars more than what homes could be sold for.

Yet Alexander has demonstrated that it’s not only possible to bring back density in this part of St. Louis, but also that there’s a market of eager buyers waiting to scoop up newly built or rehabilitated homes. 

“The demand is through the roof, which debunks the myth we often hear that people don’t want to live in North City,” he says.

Since breaking ground in April 2023 on new homes mostly concentrated on the 3700 block of Hebert, Alexander says 20 have sold, another five were under contract to sell by the end of August, and seven more are in the development pipeline. Alexander is now planning a similar project on the nearby 3800 block of Labadie that, along with the construction on Hebert, would yield nearly 60 new homes in the JeffVanderLou neighborhood. 

“All of the sudden you’ve got a hustling, bustling, thriving neighborhood,” Alexander says. 

It hasn’t been easy to develop, or finance. Tabernacle Community Development Corp. has relied on a mix of funding sources, including millions in federal dollars, grants, and philanthropic support. Proceeds from homes that have already sold will also help fund the construction of new ones, he adds.

Alexander is also excited about the range of people who are keen to purchase the homes. Some early funding made it possible to set aside homes for people making below 80 percent of the area’s median income. 

Indeed, many of the earliest to be completed—three-bedroom, three-bathroom houses of roughly 1,500 square feet—sold for less than $200,000, according to city records. Alexander is especially encouraged by that affordability, considering the changes that are afoot in this part of the city, which has seen investor interest after the recent completion of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s headquarters and ongoing construction of the Brickline Greenway along North Grand. 

“It’s allowing people who normally wouldn’t get a chance to be an early adopter to be one,” he says. “When something is the next greatest thing, the next hottest real estate area, most times, Black people, people of color, are locked out of that.”

The work is personal for Alexander, who graduated from Berkeley Senior High School in North County before earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Missouri–Columbia, and later, an MBA from Webster University. After a brief stint in the corporate world, he returned to school for a master’s in theological studies, then founded the Tabernacle Church.

While his day-to-day schedule tends to be packed to the brim, it doesn’t show in regular interactions. Alexander is warm, patient, and actively engaged with whomever he’s speaking to. And however busy things get, he has said his wife, son, and daughter motivate him to keep pushing forward. 

Alexander admits it’s been challenging to balance the gratification he feels having managed a feat many wrote off as impossible with knowing how much of the surrounding neighborhoods are still struggling to recover from last year’s tornado.

“Our heart as a nonprofit and as a church goes out to everybody. We have members of our church impacted that we’ve helped along the way,” he says. “We have properties in the field that we’re battling right now with insurance companies [that were] totally demolished.”

He says that in the aftermath of the tornado, Tabernacle Community Development Corp. lost roughly 20 affordable units it had developed.

But Alexander argues the pathway he’s forged to successfully produce new, reasonably priced housing can be replicated—and, indeed, should be. He says he’s happy to offer guidance and support to others who want to take this task on. He doesn’t want to be seen as the only person who’s capable of bringing new housing to North St. Louis.

“It’s that kind of spirit too that has hurt our region in the past, where someone feels like, ‘I’m the answer to everything,’ or an organization feels like, ‘I’m the answer to everything,’” he says. “We are a part of an answer; we are not the answer.”

A robust recovery depends on broad collaboration between a plethora of organizations, Alexander says. “We, in the past, have struggled with moments like that,” he says. “I’m praying this can be different. It’s going to have to be different.”