A planned development of 78 townhomes on The Hill won a key approval Wednesday night, with the city’s Planning Commission voting to send the project to the Board of Aldermen with a positive recommendation.
Developer McBride Homes wants to build the townhomes on Wilson Avenue, not far from its intersection with Hampton Avenue and just south of Highway 44. As of right now, those four acres of land are zoned for anything but residential. The site once held a school for special education. Last night’s approval was an important step in clearing the way for new home construction.
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“It’s a positive development,” said Alderman Matt Devoti, whose ward includes The Hill. “It provides much needed housing, both in the neighborhood and in South St. Louis.”
The primary pushback has been from residents worried that the housing would create traffic congestion.
Devoti acknowledges that the Hampton and Wilson intersection is a “problematic” one. It sits at an irregular angle and, in addition to servicing traffic getting on and off the highway, it is also at a point where a concrete median on Hampton disappears. “I think that intersection needs review, independent of any development that happens at 5700 Wilson,” he says. “So that is on my list of items to discuss with the traffic commissioner. It has been on my list for a long time.”
At that, a reporter joked that if we didn’t build next to somewhat problematic intersections in the city, we wouldn’t build anywhere. Devoti replied: “Where would it happen? Right?”
With the Planning Commission’s recommendation, the Board of Aldermen will vote on whether to approve what’s known as a planned unit development for the site.
City planning executive Miriam Keller calls that zoning a unique tool intended for large or complicated builds that don’t fit neatly into conventional standards. “It allows for some flexibility that’s not allowed in the underlying code,” she says. “The idea is, in trade for that flexibility, there’s a little bit more discussion and review along the way.”
The vote only needs to be a simple majority (two-thirds would have been required had the Planning Commission given the project a thumbs down).
“We thought, on balance, the importance of adding housing to the city and adding population really made this project worth supporting,” said Keller. She noted the neighborhood’s concerns about traffic, but added that concerns about a lack of parking had been largely ameriolated by McBride when they agreed to include 1.6 parking spaces in the development for every one unit of housing, well above what the city requires.
City planners and demographers have long argued that if the City of St. Louis is to stem its population loss, it needs to build housing that leans into the urban experience, which is defined by walkable access to a variety of amenities—something The Hill has no shortage of. Says Keller: “A lot of people want to live on The Hill.”
And the city wants to facilitate that desire.
“While there are understandable concerns among some neighbors, if we as a city can’t find a way to say yes when someone wants to build 78 townhomes on a long-vacant and challenging piece of land, we are going to have a hard time turning around 70 years of population decline,” said Rasmus Jorgenson, the mayor’s press secretary who also sits on the Planning Commission. “This project will bring more residents to St. Louis and help our community pay for infrastructure, trash collection, schools and public safety for years to come.”
Backers of the project are cheering that homes will be going on his site rather than a self-storage business, warehouse, or a vape shop. The site’s zoning as of right now allows for even a scrap yard or battery manufacturing facility, which a planning commission document notes is “heavily misaligned” with the city’s strategic land use plan.
A representative from McBride said at Wednesday’s meeting that if all goes according to plan, they hope to have the project completed by early 2027.
About five years ago, the east side of The Hill saw a construction boom, with a 225 apartment complex and about two dozen single-family homes being built near the neighborhood’s eastern edge abutting Kingshighway. The single-family homes were McBride builds. And city permits indicate that a $3.6 million single-family home is in the works nearby, on Hereford Street. The St. Louis Business Journalreports that the owner’s mailing address for that project is McBride’s Chesterfield headquarters.
