Almost no members of the public showed up to the Dardenne Prairie Planning & Zoning Commission’s work session on the evening of Feb. 11. It wasn’t a trivial discussion, though. The half-dozen commissioners, seated horseshoe-style in a quiet municipal-government room, pored over printed maps of their community there in booming west St. Charles County. Their goal: think about how local laws might be adjusted to halt further construction of multifamily housing.
“If we are going to narrow the scope of where these [projects] go,” said chairman Michael Wooldridge, “how are we going to do it? Through location? Density requirements? Height? Parking requirements? Architectural?”
Home to an estimated 13,500 residents just southeast of Lake St. Louis, Dardenne Prairie was once a quiet, almost rural suburb with open fields and creeks—“country living in the city,” as one alderman put it. Yet it has since watched numerous apartment complexes and commercial centers rise up not only inside its borders but also along I-64 and I-70, all while tens of thousands of residents have poured into nearby cities such as St. Peters and Wentzville. Unlike neighboring O’Fallon and Cottleville, however, Dardenne Prairie has gone further than merely discussing a halt on new multifamily construction. It instituted a year-long moratorium last May. Its commission was tasked with studying the issue and appears to be preparing to send to the Board of Aldermen zoning-change recommendations that would limit multifamily in the long term. “We’re starting to run out of time,” Wooldridge said at the work session.
The stakes are bigger here than just the residents’ concerns, which involve potential impacts on schools, traffic, property values, crime, open spaces, and public infrastructure. A zoning change could also mean that on Dardenne Prairie’s relatively few undeveloped plots of land, it will be harder, if not impossible, to build the kind of small rental units that less-wealthy families have historically used across the U.S. to gain footholds in more prosperous areas and, thus, climb up the economic ladder. And such climbing has already occurred in Dardenne Prairie: According to the Harvard University–based nonprofit Opportunity Insights, low-income children who were born in the early 1980s and spent their childhood in a certain Dardenne Prairie census tract grew up to earn nearly double their parents’ income, in real terms, by their mid-thirties—a leap that put them in the 96th percentile of their demographic. (School districts play a role in upward mobility, and Dardenne Prairie overlaps with three; it’s also home to the high-performing John Weldon Elementary, which is part of Francis Howell R-III.)
Over the past century, American cities have used zoning to prioritize single-family homes over multifamily ones. Emily Hamilton, the senior research fellow and director of the Urbanity Project at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, says that while she has seen municipalities institute “growth caps” by limiting the total number of building permits, a moratorium specifically on multifamily seems unusual. Asked whether it should be seen as part of the broader conflict between housing restrictionists (a.k.a. the “not-in-my-backyard,” or NIMBY, camp) and housing expansionists, she says: “I think there are certainly understandable reasons why people like their community the way it is and might have concerns about infrastructure or schools or any number of services that could be affected by growth. But I think it’s hard to say that a growth moratorium or a multifamily moratorium is not a NIMBY policy.”
Michelle Woods, executive director of Habitat for Humanity of St. Charles County, acknowledges that new multifamily housing can cause problems such as traffic congestion, but she adds that they’re supposed to be addressed or obviated by a city’s planning and zoning process, rather than by being blocked outright. “I think it’s great we want to build and grow in a thoughtful way,” says Woods. “I just think we need to include everyone in that process. I don’t want us to exclude people based on how much they can pay for housing.”
Yet the situation in Dardenne Prairie is complicated by several realities. One is the fact that some of the most vocal opposition to multifamily construction has been directed not at low-income apartments but rather high-end ones. At an October hearing, resident Cheryl Bratton spoke of “the long-lasting disgust” felt by some neighbors of the Prairie Encore complex, whose website describes its planned 190 units as “luxury.” Bratton suggested that the treeline between the complex and nearby homes has proved a “pitiful” buffer.
Another wrinkle is that, according to City Administrator Cathy Pratt, about 25 percent of housing units in Dardenne Prairie are already multifamily—a proportion she considers a bit above “standard.” (Indeed, a trade publication’s online data tool shows that the share of multifamily across the St. Louis metro area is 22.6 percent, and in the Kansas City metro area, it’s 23.5 percent.) She adds that, in contrast to other corners of St. Charles County, the number and size of available parcels in Dardenne Prairie have dwindled. Since property taxes are low—a $450,000 house would owe $70 annually in property tax, she says—the municipality relies heavily on sales tax. “Our focus is more on retail/commercial that we can generate sales tax with, to support the budget and provide services that citizens need most,” says Pratt. “It’s about having a good mix.”
A good mix, in Pratt’s view, includes not only multifamily but also starter homes, second-step homes, and expensive homes. She says she hasn’t yet done a granular study of the starter-home stock or housing affordability in general.
Woods, for her part, says that from what she has observed at Habitat for Humanity, St. Charles County as a whole suffers from a shortage of ways for people to move from renting to owning. She has six homes coming available, she says, but has already received 45 applications and expects 60. “I want our community to have opportunities for people who want their kids in good schools and to be a positive part of the community—people who really want more for their family and are working super hard,” says Woods. “And it’s just getting so much further away for so many people.”
It’s not entirely clear what Dardenne Prairie’s populace thinks about multifamily. During the Feb. 11 work session, one commissioner asked about a questionnaire the city had sent out to various stakeholders. Pratt said that in her recollection, only one response had come back: The fire department acknowledged that multifamily might increase traffic but did not appear concerned about servicing such buildings.
But plenty of residents do complain about the apartments, said Commissioner Paul Neske. “I’ve been out here 27 years,” he said. “It might just be the circles I run in….[but with] everybody—whether it’s work, family, whatever—it’s always the biggest complaint.”
Alderman Blake Nay, one of the few who attended the session, told me afterward that he agrees: Apartments are not what Dardenne Prairie needs. His fellow residents, he said, “don’t like the people who are impermanent; they like the people who stay.” He himself had started out in an apartment as a young adult, he said, then moved on to a house, but he concurred with Pratt’s points about the city’s need for sales tax revenue and the already high percentage of apartments. He also said folks had a “bad taste” in their mouth about the Town Square Apartments complex, which is nestled between a shopping center and a highway. He says it wasn’t proposed as a project that would allow Section 8 housing-voucher holders as tenants—in Missouri, landlords need not accept federal subsidies as a form of payment—but it ended up doing so. “If you ask the county police of Dardenne Prairie,” Nay said, “the majority of our calls come from that apartment complex.”
That turns out not to be the case, according to St. Charles County Police data: In 2025, a spokesman says, Towne Square Apartments accounted for 1.9 percent of all calls for service in Dardenne Prairie, and 1.2 percent of reports written in Dardenne Prairie.
But the rent there is, in fact, income-based, Towne Square residents said—and they’re grateful for it. On a recent afternoon, a 25-year-old single mom who declined to give her name stood in a breezeway and explained, over the din of the freeway, what she liked about the complex. “Something that’s also really neat about this building is you can actually finish school without burning a hole in your pocket and going into more debt [in order] to be more successful.” She said that, as a full-time memory-care technician, she makes $20 an hour, pays about $700 in monthly rent, and forks over even more for childcare. She said she’s living paycheck to paycheck, and that it’s “shitty” that some in her community want to halt the construction of more apartments. “I just feel like these buildings help people,” she said.
