In March, Tony Pitale bought a ramshackle building in North City and immediately set about fixing it up. A Shaw resident and software engineer by trade, Pitale had dreamt for years of creating a makerspace for cars, a community garage where people could work on their vehicles or even just learn basic skills. The long-vacant mechanic’s shop on Hodiamont seemed perfect. “I wanted a place so other people like me don’t have to install a lift in their garage and buy a million tools,” he says. “They could just come and rent space.”
That was before the city threw a wrench into his plans.
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Three months after Pitale closed on the building, the city sent him a bill for $109,010—work it had hired a contractor to do nearly a year before he bought the property. There was no lien or even notice of the city’s involvement in official records (they showed a new roof had been installed, but that the permit had been taken out by the homeowner).
Adding insult to injury, the contractor charged for work that never got done. They invoiced for debris being cleared; the place was still full of it. They invoiced for replacing a damaged stair and rebuilding a “damaged dormer/window”; the building had neither.
The repairs were made under the city’s Stable Communities program, a pilot project that uses federal American Rescue Plan Act dollars to hire contractors to repair vacant or neglected buildings and then bill the owners.
But that requires billing the actual owners, Pitale notes—not soaking the next guy who comes along.
“This is insane. You could buy a property anywhere in the city and then three months later, with no warning, get a bill from the city for more than the value of the property you purchased,” Pitale says. “That seems bonkers to me.”
But Jared Boyd, the mayor’s chief of staff, defends the program. “Mr. Pitale’s attorneys have indicated that he purchased the building as-is, which unfortunately has led to his current predicament,” he says. “Further, we realize it’s unfortunate that he was misled by the seller.” He notes that the city has reduced the cost of the bill to $25,000.
Pitale bought the building from a Delaware-based LLC, and the city has produced records showing that it notified the LLC of the work—and the bill it sent. But it can’t produce any notice of a lien or paperwork a title company could have found. Pitale’s attorney, Nancy Hawes, says the parties had a standard commercial sale contract; nothing in it suggests the buyer is responsible for paying bills accrued by the seller.
She says the city has told her that it now files liens to prevent building owners from benefiting from the work—and then swiftly selling and pocketing the profit. (Boyd was not able to confirm that change to the program when reached late in the day on Friday.)
Why It Matters: The city has endured a spate of bad headlines lately over ARPA spending supervised by the St. Louis Development Corporation. This program, a joint effort between that agency, the city’s building division, and the Problem Properties unit, has Hawes hopping mad. “They are misusing these funds left and right,” she says. “It’s wrong.”
As for Pitale, he credits the mayor for trying to do something about derelict buildings. “But this particular program just seems so misguided,” he says.
Boyd says that’s not the case, noting that everything would have worked fine if the building’s out-of-state owner had dealt with the bill or even disclosed it. He also touts the program’s overall success, saying the threat of a city-hired contractor was enough to compel 18 property owners to address derelict buildings. In another 51 buildings, the city’s contractor did the job (more than 40 are still underway). Neighbors have been relieved to see long-standing nuisances finally get addressed.
“It’s been fairly popular around the city with a few isolated instances,” he says—mainly property owners who are in over their heads.
What’s Next: One of the complications of the back-and-forth between Pitale’s lawyer and the city is that even if he owed the money, there seems to be little evidence the contractor did anywhere close to $100,000 worth of work.
The contractor, an LLC incorporated in Missouri in 2022, moved their principal place of business to North City in 2023, not long after they were hired for the program. Their listed address is a vacant building. Hawes says she can’t figure out how to contact them.
That may be one reason the city knocked the bill down to $25,000 after some back-and-forth with Hawes, but that has not resolved the matter to her satisfaction. “He is not going to pay it,” she says of Pitale.
Ironically, the first inkling Pitale got that the city had any involvement with the building was when, about a month after he purchased it, someone tacked up a sign on the exterior reading “Stronger STL: The City of St. Louis Stabilized This Property.” He took the sign down, and now it sits inside the building, a constant reminder of the bizarre circumstances that have held up his plans to develop it.
