St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative will eliminate all paid staff as city grant ends

The nonprofit St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative, a coalition “committed to reducing vacant property in St. Louis,” is shedding its three paid staff members at the end of the year and going back to a volunteer and contractor-run model.

Its board chair, Peter Hoffman, says those changes come at the “natural end of the grant cycle” between the group and the Community Development Administration (CDA), the branch of St. Louis in charge of administering federal grant funds. 

“We’re not going away; we’re not closing our doors,” he says. “We’re going back to our roots.” 

In 2022, the CDA put out a request for proposals for an organization to come up with a “vacancy strategy” for St. Louis. That $500,000 contract went in February 2023 to the Vacancy Collaborative, an offshoot of the St. Louis Association Of Community Organizations, which operates as a hub for neighborhood associations across the city. CDA spokesman Tom Nagel said it was funded for a two-year period, although work continues beyond that point. 

The STL Vacancy Collaborative obtained 501c3 tax status in 2024, making it new enough that tax returns are not yet publicly available. Its website shows an executive director, project manager, and communications manager, all of whom are seeing their positions eliminated. (The executive director, Torrey Park, referred questions to Hoffman.)

Vacancy is a persistent issue cited by government agencies, homeowners, and people trying to redevelop less dense parts of the city. A slideshow from the Vacancy Collaborative dated April 2025 said that there were 9,000 vacant buildings in the city, and 15,000 vacant lots, making up 18 percent of city land parcels and taking up 6.6 square miles in the just over 60 square-mile footprint of St. Louis city. Those cost the city $21 million in upkeep fees, that report said. 

Among the work the nonprofit has done to catalog that problem are the map tools it hosts on its website, including ones that track investments and demolitions. Nagel says he and the former leader of the CDA, Nahuel Fefer, often referenced that tool in their city development work. He also praised the quarterly convenings the collaborative held, saying it helped citizens feel excited and less “powerless” over the issue of city vacancy.

Nagel says he’s seen portions of the report the Vacancy Collaborative will deliver CDA later this month, the final deliverable for their grant-funded project, and said that information will be “huge” for groups that push for vacancy reduction and subsidized development in disinvested parts of St. Louis.

“They knocked it out,” Nagel says. “I’ve seen some drafts of it, it’s major.” He said it will be “super helpful for how folks will engage with the city,” and expressed satisfaction for the past two and a half years of work the Vacancy Collaborative put into studying the issue. Nagel adds that the grant allowed the organization to have more than one paid staffer for the first time in its history.

The high rate of vacant properties will remain front-of-mind for Hoffman and other stakeholders, he says, but the decision came because wanted to be more cautious with its funding, especially as nonprofits see a tightening landscape for grants.

“We’ve just got to be more sensitive that maybe some of the funding landscapes are shifting, nationally,” Hoffman says, saying its return to a scaled-back way of doing business will allow for better stewardship of some of the other funding it gets.

Hoffman, who is also managing attorney of neighborhood advocacy for Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, says the Vacancy Collaborative has seen success getting public entities, private entities, and people to come together and address vacancy, but said more work needed to be done to address vacancy at a larger scale.

“Where I think we’ve probably come up short is expanding that success citywide,” Hoffman says, adding that the city needs to be the driver of bigger solutions for vacancy.