The Corner of Main and Main: on Paul McKee’s never-ending sales pitch

With a nod to Jeff Wattrick’s naming of bridge-owning Matty Moroun as the Mr. Burns of Detroit, and in light of Tim Logan’s summary of land-banking Paul McKee’s salesmanship of his “vision” versus his actual record on following through with development, I have an observation to make.

Paul McKee is the Monorail Guy of Metro St. Louis, and he’s coming to make a presentation to a municipal council or lender near you!

I’ll admit it’s not a perfect metaphor. Even the Monorail Guy followed through on his promise to build what he pitched, and to create a couple of short-term jobs.

Sing it with me now: Monoraaail, monoraaaaail, monoraaaaaaail!

TIF’ed

Paul McKee’s $398,000,000 $390,000,000 TIF passed unanimously at the hearing Wednesday. Let me pause for a moment so you can pretend to be surprised.

I’m still trying to collect my thoughts on the hearing, and on the numerous egregious attempts made that evening to foil residents’ attempts to present their opinions to a TIF Commission that had long since made up its mind. I don’t think that residents even had a chance to change the minds, let alone the votes of the Commissioners. So what they were fighting for, what they were so hell bent on stopping us from doing, was simply the dignity of getting to say one’s tiny 2-minute piece. I felt like shit that I was denied the opportunity to give oral testimony (Those sign up sheets were NOT out there until the specified 7pm, I don’t care what they claim. A friend said she saw them yanked at 6:20, and this is in light of many of us being in line outside a long time after that.)…. But I felt even worse for those who were not able bodied enough to withstand the hours of bullshit we were all put through at City Hall. And for what? Not even for the opportunity to be heard and considered, just for the simple dignity of having the formality of getting to speak. Hell, for the simple dignity of having the relevant laws and procedures followed. What would be so terrifying about that, with the decks stacked so completely against any possibility of a decision in our favor? We know that you will get what you want, and you know it, so why such fervor to dehumanize hundreds of people in the process?

Tom Duda, as always, has excellent analysis: Something Doesn’t Add Up: Why $400 Million for McKee Does Not Equal A Job For Me.

In the mean time, those of you who actually receive city services should start planning for which ones you would like to give up for McKee’s giant TIF. I already do not receive trash service from the city* and my landlady had to install our sidewalk herself and let’s not even talk about the time the 911 operator told me that the street I live on doesn’t exist in the City of St. Louis…. sooo… uhhh…. I guess those of you who don’t live in the fifth ward should pick some city services you get, and we’ll try to think of any we even have and get back to you.

As for working for the city, well…. Word around town suggests that firefighter and police furloughs are likely. We are bleeding schools, with the threats of more closures ever present. I’ve also heard there were big lay-offs in the license collector’s office. And this was pre-TIF. With this massive TIF passed, well…. We’re well on our way to this.

McKee’s financial woes (last paragraph here for more detail) meant no one would lend to him unless he got this TIF, but now we have rescued him. Our public money for his private gain, since he spread himself much too thin rather than sticking to a number of properties he could manage with the money he had. This project seemed deliberately designed for a bailout from the get-go. Our city government, and in turn all of us as residents and taxpayers, are now the ones singing “Brother, can you spare a dime?”

* My block has not received trash removal from the City of St. Louis the entire time I have lived here and yes, it does suck. No dumpster, no rollaways, no nothing.

McKee TIF Hearing Tonight: Event info, & thoughts

Tonight is the big TIF hearing at City Hall. The TIF Commission will have a hearing at 6pm TODAY, Wednesday September 23 at City Hall, 1200 Market Street.

The TIF Commission will decide whether developer Paul McKee, who has spent five years blockbusting in North St. Louis, gets $398,000,000 from our cash-strapped city. He wants the city to back the bonds, meaning we are on the hook if his project fails. In the past, when the city has backed the bonds, we’ve ended up holding the bag.

The City of St. Louis is currently considering firefighter and police furloughs, and has laid off people in the License Collector’s office. My own block currently does not receive trash removal service. The spin is that it’s a “pension crisis,” but yet the city keeps giving out TIFs, to say nothing of this one. We simply do not have the funds to bail out Mr. McKee, who admitted on video Monday that he would not be able to afford to continue the project without this TIF. Well-informed word is that he can’t get any more loans from banks without the TIF. In a city already failing to provide services to many citizens, this is not okay. If I may quote Tom Duda‘s twitter, “Really, please tell me what #STL City services you are willing to give up for Paul McKee.”

After four years of experiencing and witnessing and hearing about McKee’s despicable, manipulative treatment of North Siders, I find myself tired and short on words. I don’t know how to construct a rational response to something so impossible. Two days ago, an older black longtime homeowner from St. Louis Place who came to one of our North Side CBA meetings kept repeating and repeating: “I feel like I’ve been dreaming ever since they told me about it. It can’t be real. Would somebody please pinch me?”

Do not be fooled by this hateful man who calls himself a developer. Do not be fooled by his urbanist-washing of the situation, his silly Powerpoint that he will hastily zoom out from and cry “It’s a vision, not a plan” the very second a St. Louis Place resident starts to ask him why their house and street have both been erased. I have seen many smart folks get distracted by the wind turbines and alleged job creation centers McKee shows in his little song-n-dance, but I have seen nothing to convince me he has any intention of ever delivering on these promises. (To the contrary: He wants condemnation rights to a number of operating, healthy local businesses as a part of this TIF app. Places that have jobs that employ people. My own beloved neighborhood hardware store operator recently complained that McKee’s deliberate emptying-out of our ward has “eviscerated my customer base.” The hardware store survived the Great Depression, but they don’t know if they’ll make it through Paul McKee’s garbage.)

McKee’s so-called vision, at meeting after non-public meeting, seems to change based on what he perceives the audience wants to hear. The pretty pretty Powerpoint is to shoo off the urbanists, who were some of his earliest critics. In private, so-called “community meetings,” he’ll say any damn thing, up to and including agreeing to put in a Sports Authority because someone said they would really like one here.

The only thing on McKee’s TIF app that has a timeline on it is Downtown. He wants to start building there right away. He also has stated that he wants to do all the demolition up here in the 5th ward area by the end of 2010. So, he wants to wipe most of our area off the map right away, but has no idea when he will ever build here. This TIF is not about benefiting us or even the ground upon which our homes stand. We are just a pitiable face, a largely minority face, that he can paste on this request for public money so that he can get his money for Downtown. 

After years of “No, I am not Blairmont” why do we believe anything this guy says? Why would we entrust him with $398 million of our dollars? Doug Duckworth captured a very uncomfortable McKee on tape at a meeting about his development in Old North St. Louis on Monday. I was there, and I heard so much bullshit out of McKee. (Only 10-15 of his buildings have been wrecked? Yeah, maybe on the 1900 block of Wright alone!) He thinks that our memories are that short, that no one will catch him in his lies (hence his worries about Duckworth’s camera, to the point of physically rushing him).

Rather than buying over 1,000 properties, McKee could have kept his assets to a number he could maintain and successfully develop. But no, my impression is that he intentionally structured things this way because he was counting on the bailout of the TIF (and the subsequent DALATC bailout from the state, if he gets the TIF and the steps are set in motion).

We can do better than this. Don’t let anybody tell you that bailing out Paul McKee is the only way development will ever happen again in North St. Louis. We need a process that builds on our strengths, not one that obliterates them. The North Side needs help, but giving $398,000,000 to its longtime abuser to continue the destruction is not the first step of the healing process.

Things you can do to help North St. Louis tonight:

1. Come out.
2. Consider saying a few words. Or just standing up and saying that you support us.
3. Wear white to show your solidarity.
4. Bear witness. Bring a camera, bring a recording device, bring your Twitter-enabled cell and don’t let anybody you’re not allowed to record. It’s a public hearing.

What we mean when we talk about Paul McKee’s tactics

I want to spotlight these two comments left on my previous post by neighbors, to make sure they get read. They are important.

“On September 22, 2009 at 12:11 pm ribkaw Said:
A local realtor called me last night about one of her clients who is a victim of Land Baron Paul McKee’s, land banking scheme. Evidently McKee entered into a purchase agreement w/this gent on a 6-plex located in the condemnation zone. McKee gave the gentleman a few thousand $$$$ upfront and was supposed to finalize the deal in 12 mos. The condition of the sale was that the property, that was fully occupied, had to vacated. The gentleman cleared his building of all tenants. Well, Mr. McKee ran out of money and couldn’t complete the sale. The gentlemen has a mortgage on the property, it is now stripped and in foreclosure. As soon as the building was emptied within weeks the scrap bandits had stripped the properties. The property owner is now in financial ruin and pissed to high heaven at McKee who will answer none of his calls. The property owner will be at the Save Our Communities Rally this evening; and, TIF Hearing. I’m sure there are many more McKee property owner victims out here. Hopefully once this gentleman comes forth others will follow suit.”

“On September 22, 2009 at 2:01 pm barbara_on_19th Said: |Edit This
Doing door-to-door outreach in the community to make sure everyone knows this is happening, I have run into several people holding open contracts, at least one of which did the same. Evicted their own tenants on the promise of a contract that then did not close. Roberta de Fiore, Bridget Calcaterra, Harvey Noble and khaki pants lady from last night — I predict they are all going to burn in some dusty old circle of hell reserved for the lackeys and toadies without whom fascism would fail.

On the finance side, McKee did admit to his dire straits last night. Graham Lane from the ONSLRG board asked him about selling his ONSL properties. He said “as soon as I get my tax credits I can maybe sell these off in the spring” (paraphrase). Graham said, what if you don’t get the tax credits? McKee said “well someone else will be here talking to you, not me” (paraphrase). I think that is as clear an admission that he is hanging by a thread that I have heard so far. The $14M he owes the FDIC for the failed Corn Belt Bank & Trust loans is going to bring him down if he does not get the loans brought up to “saleable loan” condition, if you know what I mean. FDIC can’t sell them, has been holding them since February, how much longer are we taxpayers going to wait on McKee’s aspirational DALATC money with the FDIC taking a beating every Bank Failure Friday.”

Blurry photos of Paul McKee “on the blogs”

I took some photos of scuzzy developer Paul McKee tonight, at his meeting at Ames School in Old North St. Louis. I wasn’t planning to post them here. I just wanted to take some photos of the man who has spent years intentionally decimating my community.

They’re not even very good photos. Most of them are blurry, and in many the light’s all wrong. I know my dinky camera doesn’t do that well capturing a subject in motion from that far away, and I had no desire whatsoever to get as close to Mr. McKee as I would’ve had to in order to get good photos of him.

But when I got my wee camera out and started taking photos, from my seat over on the side of the room, Paul McKee freaked out. He told me to stop taking photos. I told him calmly that it was a public meeting, in a public building. He told me again to stop. I repeated myself. He said that he doesn’t like it when his photo is taken, because it ends up “on the blogs.”

One of his employees then came over and tried to get me to stop. She asked me in a stern tone to stop. She was all up in my personal space.

I told her it was a public meeting, in a public building. Still she persisted, trying to intimidate me into stopping.

Only when my attorney intervened did she stop haranguing me verbally. She did however stand next to me for a while after that, in a quiet attempt to frighten me out of taking more photos.

Eventually, McKee’s tech savvy crew realized that Doug Duckworth was filming the meeting. They then set upon him (illustrated below).

The same McKee staffer gave Duckworth trouble. When that didn’t work, Alderwoman Marlene Davis went over and leaned over his chair and started trying to make him stop taking photos, acting as if she was McKee’s personal bouncer (illustrated below). After years of fighting this project, I’ve learned not to expect even rudimentary decency from McKee, but seeing this behavior from one of our elected officials who claimed aloud that she was acting on behalf of the community was still a shock. It was inappropriate and disgusting, to be blunt. 

Duckworth moved to the back of the room to film. McKee kept complaining about the filming, ultimately coming back to do a weird sort of action where he stood in front of Duckworth and then backed into him. McKee finally refused to say anything else unless Duckworth stopped taping, and started packing up his things as if he were a defeated third grader taking all his toys and going home.

Duckworth thankfully got it all on tape. You can watch McKee’s confrontation and read Doug’s summary of it here, and I recommend doing so. It’s pretty entertaining.

The question, of course, is why try so very hard to squash even the slightest documentation of the meeting? What could really come of a coupla blurry photos and some video? It seems that Paul McKee fears any media that he does not control.

Neighbors I’ve spoken with who attended McKee’s previous “community meetings” have been shocked at his willingness to throw out any claim, his seeming desire to want to tell neighbors whatever they wanted to hear. I know tonight McKee threw out a lot of claims he has been consistently unwilling to back up in any sort of legally binding writing. He referenced an “agreement,” but wouldn’t name what it was. He also said a lot of things that made me want to stand up and pull a Joe Wilson. This is a man who told my neighbors, who told the media, who told many people that he was not Blairmont until very recently. His record on truthfulness ain’t exactly sterling. 

Paul McKee’s previous “community meetings” have been at churches, so that they weren’t technically public meetings. His behavior has been even worse in these instances. Notably, one of my neighbors was made to leave the meeting at St. Stanislaus Kostka and was even followed after leaving. Not okay. If I may quote another neighbor’s tweet about this evening’s meeting, “If this is McEagle’s community engagement style, I actually want LESS.”

I also want to note that tonight Alderwoman April Ford Griffin answered many of McKee’s questions for him, in a defensive manner (illustrated below). Like Alderwoman Davis’s behavior, I found it highly inappropriate. Alderwoman Ford Griffin took her usual You don’t know how hard it is to be us! rambling tone. Alderwoman Ford Griffin, you are not my representative. 

My impression at this point is that due to McKee’s well-documented fiscal troubles (including foreclosure proceedings on a warehouse in Hazelwood that McKee built two years ago), he desperately needs public money in order to continue. I’m told he can’t get more loans until he gets this TIF. So, he’s slapped a North Side face on it, but his own TIF app sets no timetable whatsoever for rebuilding the North Side. He does, however, want to demolish everything he possibly can (except for about 60 buildings) by the end of 2010. So, we may not get development for years, if ever, but he wants to wipe our community off the face of the earth ASAP. Disgusting.

I honestly did not originally pick up my camera tonight with any intention of publishing photos here, but I do not appreciate being shushed or intimidated, especially in my own community.

A closing thought: If you put hundreds of people out of their homes, you hide your identity, and you want to wipe out whole neighborhoods, yeah we might want to take your picture.

Never before seen photo of Paul McKee!

Click here to see it.

Wheeeeeeeeeee

As I was finishing up that post on the Clemens Mansion chapel partial roof collapse, I heard a big ol’ round of fire sirens to the west and south of here. Biiiiig ol’ round of ‘em.

Uh, so anyone ever hear a resolution on what happened with those arsons, those eight Blairmont buildings and two collateral buildings that burned in four days? I’d like to know what happened.

I climbed up on my roof to see if I could tell what’s burning right now, to no avail. If I didn’t have to get up early tomorrow morning, I’m betting it wouldn’t be too tricky to figure out: If I were to walk out my front door and just go in a straight line, west along Hebert, I’d probably find it before I’d gone too many blocks.

This might be unrelated to those arsons, and it might not be a Blairmont-owned building that’s burning, but that’s exactly the trick: striking a nice, ongoing, lingering fear into the hearts of neighbors, so they’re never really quite sure if the trouble has disappeared. And hey, with so many forcefully, aggressively neglected buildings around, there’s plenty to worry about.

Methinks I’m going to conclude this blog entry now, because there’s not much I else I can say on the topic in my current state that doesn’t start with the letter “F.” Lots and lots and lots of capital-lettered words starting with the letter “F.” The word I’m thinking of has four letters, but it ain’t fire.

Blairmont does pathetic “repairs” on Clemens Mansion; part of Clemens Mansion Chapel roof collapses.

Part of the roof of the chapel of the Blairmont-owned Clemens Mansion collapsed. (Thanks to Chris Naffziger for catching this.)

There’s information and video over at KSDK.

I went by to take a look:

From the east:

Up close:

Front and west facades:

Doesn’t seem to be an emergency condemn on it yet, but time will tell. It’s already condemned to be demolished according to Geo St. Louis, although I’m not sure a non-emergency condemn can go through on a building that’s got this level of historic status.

The big ha-ha funny punchline (once again, Blairmont’s joke is on the Near North Side) is that Blairmont was doing an absolute farce of “maintenance” just a couple of days prior, without a building permit and using the absolute wrong, brick-damagin’ kind of mortar to do the job. Can y’all say too little, too late?

Thank you so fucking much, Blairmont.

At this point, you can still save this house. You can sell, or you can at least do real, actual, legit mothballing and bracing work with serious contractors who know what they are doing. We know you have the money (Yes, you, McKee), so the question is: Do you respect us enough to preserve this building? I’ve got a pretty good idea what you think of me and my neighbors after I’ve spent recent nights agonizing over the sounds of your buildings going up in flames nearby, but I’m always willing to be positively, happily surprised.

You can still make this one right. The time to act is now.

More about Blairmont fires.

Well.

No sirens heard two nights ago, although I slept soundly enough that I could have missed em.

Then, I heard a big mess of fire engine sirens around 9:30 last night, to the south and west of my home. Headed over on foot to St. Louis Place and couldn’t find anything. Granted, I didn’t go that far west, but…. feet are not a car, and I couldn’t hear engines or smell smoke. So who knows. It only sounded like three or so engines, nothing like the six that were at the 2206 Hebert fire. Might have been a false alarm, might have been totally unrelated, might have been nothing. It was the kind of thing I wouldn’t have paid much attention to before this whole thing frayed my nerves. But hey, frayed nerves are what life in Blairmontland is allllll about.

And of course, I have no way of proving these fires have anything to do with Blairmont. But my neighbor Barbara Manzara has been compiling addresses of the fires, and eight out of ten are owned by Blairmont companies. Awful funny, no? Granted, if one randomly selected a bunch of vacant buildings in the target area, a good portion of them would be owned by Blairmont. But the thing is, not a single one of the ten buildings that burned was owned by the LRA (the city’s Land Reutilization Authority), and there are a lot of LRA properties in the fifth ward. In fact, I remember someone telling me that we’re #1 or #2 in the city for the number of LRA properties in our ward. So if this was really, truly a random selection of vacant buildings, why was not a single one of the buildings owned by the LRA? Save for the occasional “NO TRESPASSING NO LOITERING” sign, LRA and Blairmont buildings are often hard to distinguish from the street.

Besides the lack of LRA properties on the list, it’s just awful coincidental that this is happening so neatly within Blairmont’s project boundaries. There are plenty of other depopulated, high-vacancy areas in North City where an arsonist could burn buildings that don’t happen to coincide with somebody’s bulldozer-happy real estate project.

Even if there proves to be no direct Blairmont connection ultimately, I reiterate: Brick rustling was a minor problem in our area, something you heard about sometimes, before Blairmont descended. Now, it’s a plague. So, direct connection or not, we can still thank McKee for this latest ravaging of our community. Even if the fires have nothing to do with brick rustling, some of these buildings were occupied before Blairmont bought them, and certainly they were likely better secured if they were not. And the entire area was more populated, which in and of itself would have been a great deterrent. Blairmont deliberately created these conditions in our area. But that’s okay, none of us were using our human rights anyway, and who wants to feel secure on their own block? (argh, argh, argh….)

Barbara Manzara is compiling a Google map of Blairmont buildings that have burned, both in the past week and in the past couple of years. Here it is.

Blazes in Blairmontland

There have been a string of around ten fires, probable arsons, in Jeff Vander Lou and St. Louis Place over the past three days.

Up until tonight, they all happened within a four-block area bounded by St. Louis, Glasgow, Hebert, and Jefferson. Glasgow is the western boundary of Blairmont property ownership in that area, and it’s also the boundary of the Fifth Ward there.

Tonight, 2206 Hebert burned. It’s at the edge of St. Louis Place Park, nearly to North Florissant. It’s several blocks east of the other fires, but still well within the boundaries of the Blairmont project area. It is owned by N&G Ventures, a Blairmont company. It is not the only building owned by a Blairmont company on its block, and in fact the next couple of blocks west along Hebert have some pretty high concentrations of Blairmont owned properties.

I had heard about the other fires, and so it was a terrible, terrible thing to sit here in my living room this evening, on the verge of sleep, and find myself yanked out of my peaceful state by the clamoring of numerous fire engines, the wail of all those sirens and the unmistakable honking of engine horns. It was clear from the sounds that they were all stopping nearby, and that it was not a small fire.

I climbed up on my roof, not expecting to be able to discern anything, and was met instead with the sight of a tall, luminous cloud of smoke just three blocks west of here. To see so much smoke so close to home, to know what it meant, was a terrible, sick feeling.

I went to see the fire. Thankfully, the building was not a total loss, but it felt so, so debilitating nonetheless. After years of Blairmont’s pummelings, I stood there and wondered how this can happen, and felt like no one cares about us here at all (Melodramatic, yes, but you try watching a similar event and see how you feel). Watching those flames lick at those iconic Near North Side eyebrow lintels, three blocks from my house, I felt profoundly helpless. Three blocks is not that great of a distance. Will it be closer next time? Will it be this one, or that one that’s attached to the one that’s being rehabbed? Playing that “What’s going to burn around here next?” game is a quick and surefire way to make oneself very queasy very fast.

KSDK covered the blazes today. Neighbors are interviewed. One man is watching his sister’s house while she’s at church, because they are terrified that the vacant building next door will catch fire and spread to her house. Unfortunately, it’s a completely legitimate fear. It’s a terrible, terrible way to live, to have to worry like that for one’s own home and safety. As I sit here, wearily wide awake at 3AM, I wonder how many people a few blocks west of me are awake, too, trying to protect their homes. Sitting up all night, knowing that you’ve got to sleep some time, biting your nails, holding the phone in your hand, tensing at the sound of every siren…. It’s terrorism in the most literal sense of the word, creating deep and unceasing fear in the hearts of one’s targets.

The magic question: What is the involvement of Blairmont in this? I do not know, but they did own and neglect the building, and had it been occupied this would not have happened. One wonders how many of the other recently burned properties they own.

I will say that I find it rather interesting that the batch of arsons up until this point all falls squarely within the bounds of the Blairmont project area, stopping at the west at the very street that bounds the Blairmont area (Glasgow). And on the North Side, there are plenty of other concentrations of vacant buildings that an arsonist could easily burn which do not fall neatly inside someone’s real estate project boundaries (where the objective of the project seems to be widespread bulldozing, no less). These are areas that have seen some brick rustling, but that have yet to experience the levels of devastation achieved elsewhere within McKee’s project area.

If Blairmont did not cause these fires directly, their ongoing parasitic landbanking and aggressive neglect in our community over the past several years created the conditions that allowed them to happen.

Even if it really is just the brick rustlers to blame (Fire separates the brick from the wood handily, and makes the police less even likely to stop illegal demolition than they already are.), brick rustling was not such a problem around here until Blairmont ownership started to metastasize. They used to pick off a wall here or there, but they now erase entire blocks, due in no small part to Blairmont’s ongoing depopulation and forcible neglect of our area.

And speak of the devil–in the process of typing this, I heard not one but THREE distinct rounds of sirens to the west of here. Oh, no. Please, no.

I promise you that Paul McKee does not sit up at night, hearing rounds of sirens and wondering, nervously, nervously, what buildings near his home must be burning. I promise you he doesn’t live like this.