St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer announced Monday night she was shutting down an embattled city-run program designed to stabilize deteriorating properties.
The Stable Communities STL pilot program was allocated some $13 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding to make repairs to privately held properties and then bill the owners for the work. The program, however, ran into problems after St. Louis Magazine reported property owners had been billed for stabilization work that never happened.
The publication also raised concerns about firms tied to a city building inspector who had won work from the program.
“This building stabilization program was well-intentioned but, unfortunately, very poorly executed,” said Spencer in a statement. “Given the widespread and well-documented problems, we had no choice but to end this program and re-evaluate more effective ways of making much-needed investments in North St. Louis.”
The mayor’s office added that it's working with the assessor’s office and city counselor’s office to ensure any lien associated with the program is lifted.
Questions still remain about the status of the Stable Communities STL program, chiefly what will happen to the $5.4 million in ARPA funds still allocated to the stabilization of condemned buildings, said Laura Ginn, a vacancy strategist who works for the St. Louis Development Corporation.
“That has to be spent by the end of 2026,” she said. “So I’m hoping the next step is how to go all the way back to square one, do the process maps again, and figure out how we do this with the proper checks and balances.”
A spokesperson for Spencer could not answer what would happen to the allocated funding now that the program had been discontinued.
SLDC and other city departments helped provide administrative support to the Stable Communities STL program, but ultimately, the mechanics of procuring contractors and overseeing construction, inspections and payments were under the building division, Ginn said.
“This was stood up as a pilot, but then the pilot was never closed and evaluated,” Ginn said, adding she hopes the new mayoral administration will consider how to more effectively implement a program focused on stabilizing the thousands of derelict, privately owned buildings in the city.
The city has long had the ability to perform this kind of work and then bill owners for that work, she explained.
“This tool is needed,” Ginn said. “We have all these buildings deteriorating around us, privately owned, paying their taxes, and this power is in the books for the building division to step in.”
But she concedes the pilot program could have been structured differently, such as staying away from punitive code enforcement and instead opting to support rehab work that would bring buildings into compliance.
“We also went a little big with it,” Ginn said. “The average investment in the building was $125,000, but imagine if you have a building that needs just a $5,000 patch job on the roof, and that’s going to keep us from spending $20,000 in a decade demolishing it.”
