St. Louis neighborhoods turn to nuisance property law to target blight

Hear more from Ryan Krull on the city’s plans for derelict properties on The 314 Podcast.

St. Louis has an abandoned property problem, and neighborhood associations are tackling it … one house at a time. That work is happening at an increasingly rapid clip, thanks to a little-publicized Missouri law allowing neighbors of “deteriorated property” to file a lawsuit asking a judge to force the offending property owner to clean it up. 

A derelict house in the city’s Marine Villa neighborhood is just one recent example. Last month, Marine Villa Neighborhood Association sued its owner, asking a judge to force him to fix broken windows, replace missing doors, abate a rat infestation and secure the place from being occupied by the homeless. 

Owner James Ragland, who lives in Hazelwood, has yet to respond to the lawsuit. If the property remains in disrepair, Ragland could be ordered by a judge to make repairs and even potentially lose the house to a receiver. In some nuisance suits, a judge may also impose attorneys fees or award monetary damages to the neighbors who brought the suit. 

“Nuisance is a wonderful tool,” says attorney Tara Rocque, who has filed similar suits on behalf of other South City neighborhood associations. “You are doing something that impacts me and reduces my quality of life—and that can include hurting my own property values or creating a threat to my safety—and I have a right to relief.”

The Neighborhood Advocacy program of the nonprofit Legal Services of Eastern Missouri has been using the law to chip away at the problem properties in the city for the past six years. Managing attorney Peter Hoffman says every year the organization files about 40 to 50 suits like the one in Marine Villa (they represent the neighborhood association). They get around $150,000 in annual funding from the city for their efforts—about one-fifth of what a similar program got from the Kansas City government when Hoffman worked there. The funding hole is plugged in large part by private donations as well as attorneys being loaned out from big law firms to handle nuisance cases on an ad-hoc basis.  

Attorneys working directly for the City of St. Louis are also going on the offense. Earlier this year, the city filed a bombshell suit against notorious South City slumlord Dara Daugherty. The City Counselor’s Office accused Daugherty of renting out condemned properties across several neighborhoods, enriching herself while her dilapidated properties cratered the property values—not to mention the quality of life—of anyone unlucky enough to live near them. 

At the time of that suit, Daugherty was already on the radar of the Neighborhood Advocacy program. In 2020, its attorney Anna Carlsson filed a lawsuit against an LLC associated with Daugherty, which ultimately wrested control of a house on Indiana Avenue out of Daugherty’s hands and into those of a responsible owner. The results, pictured above, speak for themselves. 

Government work. In theory, the work of cleaning up these sort of problem properties would always be handled by police officers and building inspectors. But, Rocque says, the city has so many properties that qualify as nuisances, the best government employees can do is “play Whac-a-Mole.”

No vacancies. Hoffman says that it is hard to know for sure how many problem properties there are in the city, however, the number of privately owned vacant buildings in St. Louis stands at around 7,800. The city owns another 1,300 or so.

Neighborhood business. The state’s nuisance laws are designed to empower either people living in close proximity to a problem property or the neighborhood association in which the property resides. “Getting the neighbor organized in a legal sense [into a neighborhood association] is sometimes a first step to getting them able to use these legal tools,” Hoffman says. 

Proof of concept. There have been recent high-profile uses of the state’s nuisance property law, most notably the successful effort spearheaded by former Governor Jay Nixon (now a partner at Dowd Bennett) earlier this year to shut down the so-called “Murder Shell” gas station on Tucker Boulevard downtown. Nixon was more aware of the law than most attorneys, given that his signature put it on the books in 2005.