There is a house on this block of Dodier Street, one block from North Grand Boulevard, that is almost impressively ugly. But the ugliness doesn’t come from neglect. It comes from a lousy rehab job by an out-of-state investment company—and unpermitted construction work the city has been trying to shut down, one house at a time.
The nicest thing that could be said about the investment company’s work is that it’s distinctive. “They painted the white stone burgundy,” says Alderwoman Laura Keys of the 120-year-old Classical Revival home on Dodier. “The columns on the front porch, burgundy. Everything, burgundy. They destroyed a beautiful historic home.”
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And while the city may be winning each battle—shutting down one of the company’s unlicensed work sites after another—they are not winning the war. You can see examples of the company’s handiwork from South Broadway to College Hill.
Many of the brick homes have been painted burgundy, but many others have what one person described as a “murdered-out” look: an all-black paint job with the company’s signature bright red door. Numerous neighbors have described the work as “criminal.”
On Dodier, about half the house’s windows are boarded up (with burgundy boards). What frames weren’t boarded had installed inside them too-small windows that look like they were chosen by virtue of being the cheapest available.
Keys says she’s upset on behalf of everyone else on the block. “Their houses are losing how many thousands of dollars for being close to that?” she says.
Indeed, other than this house, the block has largely resisted the hardship that has befallen much of the JeffVanderLou neighborhood. The house itself is listed on the application for the area to be considered historic, though much about it that was detailed in that application has now been either marred or erased completely. “It’s still a viable vision,” says Andrew Weil, executive director of the Landmarks Association of St. Louis, who assisted with the neighborhood’s application. “The neighborhood still has reasonable integrity. But this doesn’t help.”
Lighthouse Estates is responsible for the ugly rehab, having purchased the home last year. One of Lighthouse’s managing members is Van Barker, who is also a managing member of a company called Red Door Legacy. Since last fall, the related entities have bought about 45 properties in the city, most of which either sit in a state of despair or sport a rehab job equally hideous to the house on Dodier.
The city’s Building Division says that in the past year they started getting complaints about Lighthouse Estates and Red Door Legacy properties from neighbors and aldermen. Building inspectors found that work at many of their properties was being done without permits. They’ve hit several of the properties with stop-work orders—including a different one on Dodier Street, just three doors down from the newly all-burgundy abode, which the construction crew moved onto after wrapping up work on the burgundy house. The crew had already boarded up some windows and installed too-small frames when the city intervened.
The Building Division declined to make someone available to be interviewed for this story, so it’s not clear whether they have a bigger strategy to stop the company’s work in the city. It’s also impossible to say what first tipped them off to the companies’ work. But it’s possible it had something to do with the work being done in the middle of the night.
“They wouldn’t even have actual lights. They’d be, like, walking around with flashlights and stuff,” says Matt Fernandez of the crews working on a Red Door-owned property in Old North St. Louis.
Fernandez, who himself is in the construction business, is referring specifically to a four-family flat on Hebert Street. It’s all burgundy. Eight of its 12 windows are boarded up; the other four are comically undersized. Fernandez, who lives nearby, says that he saw photos of the interior posted on Facebook. “They had the entire back of the building, all the floor joists and back wall, out. That’s a big project, especially to try to do without permits and approved plans and in the dark,” he says. “I can’t imagine the actual quality of all that.”
Keys says that she’s heard much of the Dodier work was done at night, too. A neighbor of a Lighthouse Estates property on Green Lea Avenue says the same thing.
Of all the Lighthouse properties surveyed by SLM, the one on Green Lea was the only parcel blasted the color of moss. A neighbor says that the crews working on the house generally showed up around midnight or 1 a.m. and worked throughout the night. At one point, the neighbor heard a worker ask, “Why are we painting this house green?” The response: “The street’s called green.”
Just as the construction crews operate in darkness, the companies hiring them seem to avoid light.
City records list the owners’ address for many of the Lighthouse properties as 5720B Brown Avenue—although sometimes the street address is listed as being in Fort Knox, Kentucky, and other times it’s in Louisville. The Louisville address appears to correspond to the middle of an intersection on the east side of town, but no actual building. The Fort Knox one appears to be an address for military base housing at, yes, Fort Knox.
Earlier this year, about half a dozen local properties—including ones on Maffit, North 21st Street, Park Place and Lee—were transferred from Lighthouse to Red Door, according to paperwork from the city’s Recorder of Deeds. In some cases, Van Barker, as well as an individual named Ariel Barker (listed on some of the paperwork as Ariel Mermelshtayn), was on both sides of the transaction.
Five of the Lighthouse and Red Door properties are listed on the website of a rental company called StarPoint Holdings. (The company is registered in Kentucky and its registered agent is, you guessed, Van Laurence Barker.) That includes the house in Fernandez’s neighborhood (listed at $1,300 a month), as well as the ones on Green Lea and on Maffit (both $1,000 a month). The properties are described as “beautifully renovated,” friendly to Section 8 tenants, and “ready soon!”
StarPoint doesn’t conceal the black-and-red color scheme. “Painting them Black is so rewarding!! This St Louis home is a show stopper!” reads one post on its Facebook page from June 2024.
Responding to a different post, a commenter asked, “I just have a question? Is there a reason that all of the properties are painted black? Just curious.”
The company’s reply: “It’s classified.”
Reached by phone, a StarPoint representative named Rianne didn’t want to talk about work being done on the properties without the proper permits. “I would not answer that question, honestly,” she said. She did agree to pass a phone number along to ownership, but no one called back. In a subsequent call, someone who answered the phone said Van Barker wasn’t available.
The StarPoint website and Facebook page stresses the company’s openness to Section 8, suggesting those are renters they’re targeting.
“Are they just trying to do as cheap as possible rehabs and then get Section 8 tenants in there, who have minimal choices?” says Fernandez. “The payout is decent. I don’t have any way to prove that, but it wouldn’t be the first time people have done something like that.”
Keys points out that Section 8 housing, which is federally funded but administered at the local level, has tended to remain steady even amid turbulent economic times, offering a kind of financial insulation that market-rate rents don’t.
There is a playbook run by a certain type of developer and landlord centered on Section 8. The value of the rental vouchers given to recipients is pegged to the rent for the region, even though that varies wildly from one neighborhood to the next. In more rundown areas, then, the Section 8 money is likely to be higher than fair-market rents. As a bonus (from the property owner’s point of view), the sort of people renting with Section 8 assistance are often the least able to pack up and move when conditions in their rental deteriorate or they become disillusioned with their landlord.
The StarPoint Facebook page boasts of rehabbing rundown houses in areas that it claims no other developers will. “When we first went to St. Louis, an agent told us the ZIP codes we shouldn’t buy in,” reads one post. “We said, ‘Okay, let’s look in those ZIP codes.’”
It’s true that many Lighthouse properties were in rough shape when they purchased them. Their appraised value was rarely more than $25,000. The house on Dodier Street, for instance, had its windows broken out, its door boarded up. But there was nothing to indicate its bones weren’t solid.
The company’s work has made an already difficult scope of work even more complicated.
“Painting those buildings like that is damaging to the brick work, to the masonry, and will shorten the lifespan of the buildings,” says Weil, of the landmarks association. “It’s very difficult to reverse that without damaging the brick.”
If someone now were to come along and do a proper rehab, Fernandez says, it would be even harder because all the Lighthouse work would have to be undone.
“I would much rather have them never have touched it,” he says. “Before they bought it there was a lot wrong. But since they touched it, can you trust anything they did?”
