Justin Barr
For a hype man, Brooks Goedeker is not an amped-up guy—not really ever, but specifically not on the November afternoon I’m riding shotgun in his Ford Explorer. We’re rolling east on Chouteau toward Grand (both wearing masks) and he’s making the case—in his slow, quiet way, and as an ambassador for Saint Louis University and SSM Health in their bid to lure private investment to Midtown—that sure, this industrial patch of the city may look bleak, but it could be The Next Big Thing in the city’s central corridor, that belt of prosperity between Forest Park and the Arch. Or, to use Goedeker’s phraseology: “It’s totally set up to succeed.”
That’s tough to refute, by this point in the day. We’ve just visited the Element Westin hotel (a $40 million project) and City Foundry ($346 million), on the north side of Highway 40, and then, on the south side, the Armory building ($55 million), Steelcote Lofts ($9.5 million), and the adjoining Mill Creek Flats site ($26.5 million). Right outside Goedeker’s driver’s side window, just across from the new $550 million SSM Health Saint Louis University Hospital, is the site of the proposed 14-acre Iron Hill complex ($335 million), which is expected to draw a big-box tenant—a huge deal to the many Midtown and downtown residents who bemoan the lack thereof. And running through this area, besides the MetroLink and the 70 Grand bus route, will be the future Brickline Greenway, a bicycle/foot path designed to connect the whole central corridor, with spurs shooting north and south.
“We’re finally connecting the fabric,” Goedeker says, with that South City vowel shift that makes the last word fyabric. He holds the wheel steady, hands at 10 and 2. “We’re finally connecting the districts. Finally.”
He’s giving me this tour as the executive director of the Saint Louis Midtown Redevelopment Corporation, a legal entity birthed by SLU and SSM. His job is to recruit and manage redevelopment in the 400 acres that surround us, an area that SLU/SSM pitched to the Board of Aldermen as “a natural eastward extension” of the growth spurred by the Cortex Innovation District and a way to connect SLU’s main campus to the new hospital. In that sense, it’s a massive infill project, the kind of thing you’d expect from research universities and hospitals, or “eds and meds” in urban-planning lingo. But I don’t expect what he shows me next.
Goedeker turns us toward a neighborhood in the redevelopment area’s southeastern corner. He calls it the Gate District West. Its residential section north of Park comprises only six blocks: old brick homes, newer townhouses, and vacant lots in between, some with “Coming Soon”–style signs. SLU used to own the vacant lots, Goedeker explains, yet it recently decided to put them back on the market—and to allow the mostly African-American residents already living there to decide what kind of private development should fill them up. This move surprised some neighbors. One remarked to me later: “They could’ve said, ‘It’s our land; we can do whatever we want on it.’ But instead they brought the community in and asked what we wanted. I was positively shocked.”
Private development just beyond the footprint of any thriving urban medical campus could go badly for longtime residents in many ways. But in the central corridor, neighborhoods just to the south of SLU’s medical campus and Washington University Medical Center are transitioning fairly smoothly. One reason for that is Brooks Goedeker. In a city where so many voices are calling for equitable development, he may be finding ways to pull it off.
To be clear, Goedeker is not a developer. (His master’s degree is in social work). Nor is he a resident of the central corridor. (He lives with his wife and kids in Holly Hills.) Rather, he’s a facilitator employed by the eds and meds to help residents and developers near campus agree on how to build up their communities. He has spent the past eight years doing this in the 17th and 19th wards, during which time those two wards (which include the Central West End, Forest Park Southeast, and Midtown) had roughly 40 percent of the value of all permitted construction in the city. Though he hasn’t been involved in every project, or even in all the biggest ones, he’s helped get many across the finish line—and prevented others from gaining traction.
“He’s a pretty low-key guy, but he’s been very effective,” says Stephen Acree of the community development nonprofit Rise. Goedeker plays a “catalyst role,” Acree says, that cannot be filled by an alderman or a volunteer. It must be a full-time professional: “There’s gotta be someone getting up every day and asking, ‘How do we move the ball forward?’”
Absent such a person, says Michael Hamburg of Pier Property Group, some projects that ultimately benefit a community would never come to fruition. “He’s a bridge between private developers and the public side,” Hamburg says. “Without that bridge, it’d be tough to get over the water.”
Justin Barr
Goedeker, age 41, is described by those who know him as “optimistic,” “thoughtful,” “organized,” “patient,” and “professional as f—k.” He’s a deep listener. He locks in faces and names. He always lets people finish talking, doesn’t curse, constantly uses the construction We’re gonna go ahead and [verb]. (The only times he might flash some anger, he says, is while playing in his South City corkball league or coaching kids’ sports.)
On the afternoon he drives me around Midtown, he’s wearing khakis and a royal blue button-down, the same sort of business casual he had to wear in the ’90s at St. Louis University High School. Members of Goedeker’s extended family owned what was then Goedeker’s Superstore; his Uncle Steve became locally known for the tagline of his commercials: “Give us a chance, any day but Sunday!” But Brooks himself grew up the son of a young single mom, Karen Goedeker, in Dutchtown. He still remembers the unpaved alleys, vacant buildings, crime, racial tensions. He took two buses to get to high school and then worked there after hours to defray his tuition. He considered joining his uncle’s business, but by the time he’d earned a degree from Knox College; interned at Jefferson Elementary School, on the North Side; and earned his master of social work degree from SLU, he knew his calling: community development.
Now he’s overseeing the changes afoot in the 400-acre redevelopment area. The establishing ordinance gives the SLMRC that Goedeker leads the authority to grant tax abatement, which freezes pre-development real estate taxes for a specified period. The ordinance does not, however, grant SLMRC the power of eminent domain. Any builders in the footprint seeking the potentially much larger incentive of tax increment financing—better known as TIF, in which future tax revenue is diverted to finance construction on the front end—still must go through the normal TIF process. Which can mean facing skeptical citizens.
That’s what it meant on April 15, when the city’s TIF commission held a Zoom hearing about the Iron Hill proposal for the lot at Grand and Chouteau. The developer, Cullinan, was seeking a TIF worth $60.6 million. The project would be dense: 850,000 square feet of retail, office, and hotel space, plus structured parking, all in a walkable design spread over 14 acres. After a series of presentations, the public weighed in. One attendee recommended that the commission deny the proposal unless it included affordable housing. Another asked how Iron Hill would help St. Louis’ “racial equity score.”
Goedeker explained to the attendees that he’d spoken directly to nearby residents about Iron Hill. Many, he found, were excited—so many, in fact, that he told some not to bother writing additional letters of support. “But one of the things they have said,” Goedeker reported, “is ‘Will there be business owners that look like ourselves there?’” So, Goedeker explained, he’d urged Cullinan to meet with Habitat for Neighborhood Business, an incubator of about 40 African-American entrepreneurs, and consider signing some as retail tenants. Such a move might require Cullinan to subsidize their rent, Goedeker said, “and then there’s also some additional funding that we’ve located that could help fill in those gaps.” But no deal was set in stone.
Was this just an empty promise, in a city with a history of development promises that didn’t come true? It might have been easier to think so if not for Goedeker’s moves in the Gate District West.
It used to look quite different, observes longtime resident Evelyn Gillespie. “It was full with houses and people,” she says. “Then, for some reason, I don’t know how it all began, the university started purchasing houses.” Under the tenure of the Reverend Lawrence Biondi, the former SLU president, the university landbanked 48 parcels in the residential section north of Park for future development. By 2017, SLU still had no plans for these parcels and aimed to return them to the market. Goedeker joined SLMRC in April 2017 and persuaded SLU to let the neighbors themselves control that process. He began showing up to their meetings at Crave Coffee House. He urged them to form a development committee. They did so and invited about eight developers to pitch designs.
“Brooks facilitated those meetings,” says committee member Shawn Wade. She and her neighbors huddled with Goedeker beforehand to sharpen their questions for the developers. “I know he’s a neutral party,” says Wade, “but at least for me, he’s on our team in terms of information—he’d know to ask something we wouldn’t know to ask.” In the end, the committee chose five developers, including one who’d grown up right there in the neighborhood. Four of them would build a combined 33 homes and 12 condos, all market rate, with brick and stone façades. SLU sold the parcels to the developers at a loss to get things started.
In addition, the committee wanted to see seven affordable homes, so SLU sold seven lots to Habitat for Humanity for that purpose. SLU plans to use the proceeds of those sales to help 32 longtime homeowners with home repairs if needed. SLU is furthermore in talks with the residents about the possibility of turning the empty 4-acre lot at Park and Compton into mixed-income housing.
“It sounds good on the surface, and it sounds different,” says Davarian Baldwin, a professor at Trinity College with a new book, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. He says he’d need more details to evaluate SLU’s program, but in general, he argues that universities are exempt from taxes because they provide public goods, so public goods (such as affordable housing) should not be optional in their real estate dealings. All the taxes they don’t pay, he laments, “are the people’s money, and they’re giving it back at their own discretion and leisure.”
In many American cities, there’s a stark contrast between the eds and meds, which are engines of wealth, and neighborhoods that surround them. Those neighborhoods are in many cases home to median- to low-income people of color who’ve hung on through disinvestment and white flight, only to now face stiff competition: As their giant neighbors flourish, private developers want to build near them, and young professionals want to live near them. The danger is that the longtime residents will be priced out. In response, some eds and meds have waded into neighborhood revitalization to influence this process.
The cynical view is that anytime an eds and meds institution tries to stabilize or rejuvenate a neighborhood, its true goal is to secure its border or burnish its brand. When SLU hired Goedeker, it signaled a loftier aim: It said that, in accordance with its “Catholic, Jesuit mission,” it aspires to be “a leader in just land use and responsible urban design.” These motives are not mutually exclusive. But in any event, if the Gateway District West residents were to see real and lasting benefits, would SLU’s motives even matter?
Gillespie says she’s glad the vacant lots are filling up. “We’ll have to get used to new neighbors,” she says, “and there will be disagreements.” But she calls the improvements “palpable” and “much needed.” As for Goedeker, she says: “Brooks has been an intriguing individual. He might not think so, but he’s making a rewarding contribution to this neighborhood.”
We’ve stopped cruising around, and Goedeker has parked his Explorer on the edge of the neighborhood. He looks out his windshield. “This honestly was the reason I wanted to come work over here,” he says, “because [SLU] said they wanted to do it right.” He drives west on Park and points to 1500 S. Grand, where another developer plans a $7.7 million gut rehab for new apartments. “Yeah, we’ve got a lot going on,” he says, “and so much of this would stall out if nobody was hand-holding people through the process.”
Here’s how Patrice Willis recalls the afternoon in 2008 that she moved into her home on Arco, in Forest Park Southeast, the neighborhood just south of WUMC: She lugged in her boxes, plopped into her only chair to take a nap, woke up later, and realized that it was “pitch black” outside. The dope dealers had shot out the streetlamps.
“There are those who sit around and complain,” she says. “Then there are people who go to meetings, and that’s as far as they go. Then there are people like me.”
She’d seen yard signs about the monthly meeting of the neighborhood’s safety and security committee, so she drove several blocks south to attend it. Goedeker, then in his late twenties, was present. He’d been the community development manager for the Washington University Medical Center Redevelopment Corporation since 2005 and helped run those meetings. He urged Willis to chair the committee. She agreed.
They had plenty of work to do. The 43 Gibson Posse gang and dealers from other areas had set up open-air drug markets on certain corners, using I-64 and I-44 as quick getaway routes. Willis would hear gunshots and pounding music, see young men outside her home throwing dice, streaming in and out of vacants, leaving trash. She’s only 5 feet tall, she says, but spoke up to them and complained to the police. Not all of her neighbors, however, felt so secure. Some feared that if they called the authorities, officers might respond to their homes, thereby placing targets on their backs. A trust gap thus existed between residents and law enforcement.
Goedeker tried to bridge it. A year earlier, he’d asked the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department patrol officer assigned to Forest Park Southeast, Charles “Rob” Betts, for suggestions. Betts floated the idea of having off-duty officers patrol on mountain bikes. Goedeker said WUMCRC would offer a contract to such a company, so Betts launched The City’s Finest in 2007. Bike patrols were soon rolling around the neighborhood, sometimes a half dozen at once. “They were present all the time,” recalls Willis. “You felt good seeing them.”
The dealers caught on and had lookouts send back alerts whenever patrols arrived. Goedeker, however, had a confidential network of residents who trusted him and fed him tips on the dealers and their hidden drug stashes. He relayed that info to City’s Finest, who in turn relayed it to the SLMPD and, in some cases, federal agents. He also fed them maps and charts, created by Wash U interns, showing patterns in the time and location of 911 calls, allowing City’s Finest to target hot spots. “Brooks cared a lot,” Betts recalls. “I would call him at 11 o’clock at night, and he’d still answer.” City’s Finest made scores of arrests, Betts estimates, and the SLMPD executed scores of search warrants. By 2010, crime was half that in 2000.
Goedeker was a street-level implementer of a broader revitalization effort that had been underway for years. Since the mid-1990s, WUMCRC, led by executive director Brian Phillips, had been buying land in Forest Park Southeast. It had fostered the creation of about 400 units of affordable housing, banked other parcels for that purpose, and subsidized rehabs. “They acquired a lot of properties, which resulted in some people having to move out,” observes Stephen Acree of Rise, which developed some of the affordable housing. “But in planning the redevelopment, they very consciously and all along said, ‘We want this to be a mixed approach, where market-rate and affordable housing coexist.’” They also did a lot of human services work: Goedeker’s duties at the time included coordinating job-training by MERS Goodwill and home repair for people with low incomes and disabilities.
But Goedeker’s highest-profile achievements in those years occurred in The Grove, the commercial district on Manchester that bisects the neighborhood. In the mid-2000s, it was mostly vacant. A nightlife scene gathered strength on the eastern edge with Novak’s, Attitudes, and Atomic Cowboy—and then the 2008 recession struck. Goedeker felt that the district should signal that The Grove would be open for business as soon as the economy rebounded. He spearheaded the effort to put The Grove’s logo on 24-foot-wide neon signs and hang them across Manchester on each end of the strip. “They were a huge hit,” recalls Joe Roddy, the 17th Ward Alderman who steered federal funds to the project. “Brooks gets the credit for that one.”
Goedeker also catalyzed a raft of murals. “Part of Brooks’ idea,” says local artist Grace McCammond, “was that if we make this area where people want to see the murals, all of a sudden they’re out of their cars and walking around, and that’ll make it feel safer.” Goedeker found willing property owners, then brainstormed with McCammond for ideas; thus was born the evolution-of-the-bicycle mural, as well as the giant puma prowling a two-story wall. He found grant money to commission four murals that McCammond created with neighborhood kids. One was the Wall of Fame that honors famous Black St. Louisans, from Scott Joplin to Nelly; the kids researched and chose the celebrities themselves. McCammond called Goedeker “the driving force” on these projects. “Lots of people can have ideas,” she says, “but then to figure out the logistics of how to get the neighborhood on board and find the artist and funding—all of that, and then make it happen, is pretty impressive.”
In 2012, Goedeker organized the group effort that resulted in IndiHop, a festival in The Grove and on Cherokee Street in which patrons shuttle among the neighborhoods and sample local microbrews. Indihop sold all 700 tickets in its inaugural year; it’s now attended by thousands. Goedeker also approached Rick Dildine, then the head of Shakespeare Festival St. Louis, about bringing the second production of Shakespeare in the Streets to The Grove. Dildine recalls, “When I had the initial sit-down with him, he instantly saw the opportunities.” On the evening of September 19, 2013, hundreds of spectators gathered to lounge in the middle of a closed-off Manchester and watch the opening of the play Old Hearts Fresh, an adaptation of the Bard’s A Winter’s Tale. The cast included local residents and a drag queen. All this, just a few hundred feet from an intersection that was, six years earlier, an open-air drug market.
The safety and security committee that Willis had joined on moving into Forest Park Southeast stopped meeting as much. It wasn’t necessary. She served on several other committees, though, and she credits Goedeker for pushing her into it—and for keeping his composure whenever the meetings got rowdy. “Brooks has a very calm way of dealing with chaos,” she observes, and speaks to people as equals, without any hint of “white savior” complex: “That’s not how he thinks. That’s not him.”
Many of her new neighbors are indeed white, she observes, though that’s not her complaint: It’s that some don’t seem friendly, or they call in code violations on longtime residents. Says Willis: “Just because the neighborhood is getting nicer doesn’t necessarily mean the people are.” In addition, her property taxes have risen; she fears that older folks on a fixed income will have trouble paying it. But on the other hand, there are many more shops and amenities that she and her neighbors can walk to, and they no longer hear gunfire after dark.
“I’ll go for a stroll at 10:30 at night,” she says. “I never would’ve done that years ago.”
By the late 2000s, an inefficiency hampered the 17th Ward: three community development corporations—CDCs, or nonprofits that aim to build up a defined geographic area and those living inside it—were trying to operate with tiny staffs and budgets. So in 2009, they fused together under a new entity: Park Central Development. Goedeker left WUMCRC in 2013 to become Park Central’s executive director—and, in so doing, walked into a crisis.
Like most of the two dozen CDCs in the city, Park Central counted on federal block grant funds. In 2013, however, the city overhauled its handling of the money: It would now only fund projects, not groups. That tweak caused some CDCs to consolidate and others to wither. It stripped Park Central of about half its revenue. But once Goedeker took over, the budget didn’t shrink. It grew by 70 percent, and the staff swelled from a handful of people to 10, plus interns.
He achieved this, in part, by getting Park Central into the street party business. Soon, they were coordinating events ranging from Grovefest and the Bike Bash (the World Naked Bike Ride’s afterparty) to newer ones of Goedeker’s creation, such as IndiHop and Pour & Pair. He didn’t shirk the grunt work at these, says Hannah Curtin, hired by Park Central in August 2014 as project manager. Her first Grovefest was the following month. “I got there at 6 a.m., it was still dark out, and [Brooks] was out on the street weeding and picking up trash,” she says. “Other people were supposed to do this, but he’d go out there and do it.”
Park Central also started holding annual fundraising galas, at which Goedeker always gave a speech. “He was really straightforward and gracious,” says Curtin, “and he’d throw jokes in there, usually jokes that made him laugh more than everyone else.” Already WUMC, Cortex, and SLU would kick in more than $120,000 combined each year. Soon, SLU/SSM was contributing $25,000 and Goedeker persuaded Missouri Botanical Garden to do the same.
Yet Park Central’s most lucrative venture was offering admin services to special taxing districts, areas where property owners agree to levy or pay a small supplemental tax to spruce up their environs. (It’s not the sexiest legal entity, perhaps, but if you’ve ever arrived on Euclid or Manchester on a balmy evening, parked your bike at a bike rack, strolled along a sidewalk that’s weed-free and lit by new street lamps, glided past a planter overflowing with flowers, and crossed paths with a private security officer before ducking into a bar, you have a taxing district to thank for all those touches—and yourself, too, because you’ll chip in a few cents in buying a pint.)
The 17th Ward had three such entities by 2014: one community improvement district and two special business districts. Park Central set up a second CID and branched out to launch one in Bevo. These districts are labor-intensive: They require petitions, hearings, and legislation to get off the ground; boards and committees to meet and vote, thereby generating agendas, minutes, and resolutions; reports and budgets to be filed with the city and state. Most crucially, they collect money and spend it. “They’re mini-governments,” says Matt Green, whom Goedeker hired to staff them. Park Central not only did the districts’ paperwork but also suggested where to steer the money. (The Grove CID, for example, was spending about half a million dollars annually). By 2017, Park Central was administering five taxing districts, earning more than $200,000 in admin fees. “No other community-based development organization in the city understood the collective power of these special districts like Park Central under Brooks,” says Bryan T. Robinson, formerly of H3 Studio, an urban planning firm. “They were incredibly effective.”
The districts thrived because the 17th Ward was thriving. From 2014 through 2016, more than 40 percent of the value of all permitted construction in the city poured into that single ward—and Goedeker was shaping it. Not all of it, to be fair: If developers didn’t need much from City Hall, they would plow ahead. But if they did need something—say, a zoning change, variance, or tax incentive—Goedeker exerted influence. The reason: Over the years, Roddy had delegated decision-making on such matters to neighborhood committees, and the committees relied on the advice and mediating skills of Goedeker.
Says Roddy: “A lot of developers would come in and call me, but as time went on, I wouldn’t even get the calls. Park Central would get the calls.”
If the calls came from a builder eyeing the Central West End, Goedeker had an opening bid at the ready: the form-based code. This was a 135-page manual for how residents and business owners there wanted their walkable environment to look and feel, in granular detail, block by block. Goedeker’s predecessor at Park Central, Dan Krasnoff, had spent years gathering these preferences and persuading City Hall to adopt them as a zoning overlay district. If builders wished to deviate from it, then they needed the blessing of the neighborhood’s development committee. They couldn’t always get it. So sometimes Goedeker bridged the gap.
Case in point: Central West Enders had decided (via the code) to transform North Sarah between Forest Park and Lindell into a commercial strip. The ground floor of any new project, therefore, had to be retail (shops, restaurants, etc.) or office space. There was an ugly warehouse taking up half a block there. Developers bought it with plans for a much larger 206-unit apartment building, but the entrance would not be on Sarah. It would be on a cross street, rendering that stretch of Sarah an uninviting side wall with no retail—and they wanted 10 years' tax abatement to do it. The committee said no. The developers almost rented out the warehouse to an industrial user for 10 years until Goedeker brokered a deal: OK, we’ll support tax abatement and waive the retail requirement, but you must bring the entrance around to Sarah and use aluminum instead of vinyl for the windows. That’s how the West Pine Lofts came to be.
Without that deal, Goedeker argues, “everything else around it would have never happened.” He mentioned it while calling every developer he could think of, trying to sell them on his vision for 4101 Laclede, the trash-strewn lot roughly across the street. It had sat vacant for 40 years. Goedeker offered support for 10 years of tax abatement to anyone who’d create maximum density: for-sale housing, hidden parking, and ground-floor retail. Nobody would even entertain that idea, Goedeker says, except Austin Barzantny of Grove Properties. He cobbled together financing and put up a 55-condo building there in 2016. (The ground floor tenant is Juniper, chef John Perkins’ popular restaurant.) This deal drew fire from Glenn Burleigh, one of several city progressives who had begun attacking development incentives as a drain on municipal budgets. Writing on Facebook, Burleigh asserted (among other things) that the deal was “crappy” and unnecessary because the Central West End was “incredibly stable” and “an extremely safe investment.” Barzantny, however, says he couldn’t have made a profit without the tax abatement, so it was, in fact, necessary.
No such debate broke out when Roddy went to the Board of Aldermen with the bills seeking tax abatement. The board held hearings on both bills; both sailed through. Maybe the support was sincere. Or maybe nobody voted “nay” out of aldermanic courtesy—the custom by which alders don’t second-guess their colleagues’ moves inside their wards. Or perhaps they feared Roddy, who chaired the Housing, Urban Development, and Zoning committee; in theory, he could have prevented his colleagues’ bills from coming to a vote there, thus stalling their projects.
But what should Goedeker have done? More than half of property taxes go to the Saint Louis Public School District. Therefore, using tax abatement in a negotiation is, in essence, treating school funds as a bargaining chip without giving the school district a direct say. Pushing it through will immediately shortchange the district for years. On the other hand, not using it and letting a mediocre project produce mediocre taxes—or letting no project produce no extra taxes—could shortchange the district, in relative terms, for decades. Goedeker says he only used it sparingly in the CWE to get “transformational” projects over the finish line—that is, to tip them from unprofitable to at least a little profitable. “If the numbers don’t pencil, these developers will walk away,” he says. “No matter how badly they want to be in the city, they won’t do a charity project.”
In Forest Park Southeast, the situation was more fluid. The market was still finding its legs when Goedeker led Park Central, and the residents there were still finalizing their own form-based code. Park Central would recommend five- and 10-year tax abatement on projects large and small. The neighborhood’s development committee would approve it, typically in exchange for infrastructure add-ons such as gangway lights, exterior security cameras, planted trees, and new sidewalk slabs. But if a developer wished to build where a previous developer had already done such things, Park Central—to be consistent in its demands—would estimate the value of the new abatement request and ask for 20 percent back as a “developer contribution.” Park Central would then use that for infrastructure improvements elsewhere in the neighborhood. This practice, however, undercut the rationale for requesting the final 20 percent of abatement in the first place. By 2017, Park Central was routinely recommending five years or less. The builders always made the contribution when asked, Goedeker recalls.
“One of my jobs was to help recruit development,” he recalls, “and it’d be like, OK, thanks for coming in—oh, we also have this committee process. And we have this form-based code. And you should give 20 percent for this infrastructure improvement. So you’re walking a fine line, trying to be friends with everyone.”
And yet somehow, he managed just that while at Park Central, which he left in March 2017 to head to Midtown.
Residents relied on him, according to committee member Patrice Willis. “You do need somebody who understands both sides, and somebody that’s not playing both sides,” says Willis. “He shoots straight. Nothing gets lost in translation.”
Developers relied on him, too. Brian Pratt, who in those years worked for development firm Green Street, says he appreciated Goedeker’s bluntness about proposals that wouldn’t fly with residents. “Sometimes you hear from him things you don’t want to hear,” he says, “but I’d rather hear about that early on than hear about it later in a confrontational setting.” Goedeker’s street-level knowledge also helped his firm secure financing, Pratt adds. “The lender and investor are anticipating that I as a developer will put on a positive spin,” he says, “whereas being able to bring in Brooks—who is interacting with the neighborhood and accountable to them—that was really critical to our ability to attract capital.”
Whether or not you agree with Goedeker’s methods, the material benefits that he brought to these neighborhoods are irrefutable. Still, he deflects praise. Even in a neighborhood far outside the central corridor, he argues, other community development professionals like him could catalyze big changes if they enjoyed the same resources that the eds and meds have channeled his way.
But wouldn’t a funder—say, a private foundation—think it too risky to spend money on such a professional and such a neighborhood if they’re far from any anchor institution? Pratt says that the mere presence of a Goedeker-type figure—one who helps a community decide what it wants and how to achieve it—can, by itself, render that place much more attractive to builders. “If I’m looking for development opportunities,” Pratt says, “neighborhoods that have a plan in place and neighborhood-level leadership are the ones where I can feel confident we can work through the challenges of real estate development.”
If that’s how the industry feels, then Goedeker’s career shows how deeply someone like him could alter any neighborhood, given enough time and money—and it points to where philanthropists might consider spending theirs.
“None of these neighborhoods will progress if you don’t have somebody working behind the scenes on this stuff,” concludes Goedeker. “If it’s corporations or foundations or the Cardinals—can somebody please tell these folks that if they invested in community development, they would multiply so much of their other investments?”
They’d need a lot of patience, warns Stephen Acree. “You really have to have people within these philanthropic organizations who understand the process and know the difference between someone who’s just not producing and someone who’s actually doing good work but it’s taking time to see results,” he says.
Even so, to many observers, it’s just the right thing to do—particularly on the north side of the central corridor. Todd Swanstrom, a professor of public policy at the University of
Missouri–St. Louis, says: “One of my favorite quotes is ‘Change happens at the speed of trust.’ There’s a lot of trust that needs to be built. I don’t think we’re there yet, but Brooks is doing it.”
*Editor's Note: A previous version of this story inaccurately described Goedeker's contribution to the creation of Indihop. We regret the error.
