The number of vacant buildings in the city of St. Louis is slowly dwindling, based on an early look at a new report from the STL Vacancy Collaborative (STLVC).
The final report will be released this summer. But for now, officials on Wednesday invited the public to take a first look at the upcoming Vacancy Strategy Initiative Report, for which over a dozen city departments and hundreds of community members created a data-driven plan to help reduce vacant properties.
It’s part of a two-year collaborative effort between the city’s Community Development Administration and the STLVC aimed at addressing the issue of vacant and abandoned properties in St. Louis.
Researchers on Wednesday shared findings that vacant properties in the city decreased by 4% since 2018. And nearly 90% of properties that are vacant today were vacant in 2018.
Most properties had no change in status or ownership, while thousands of properties became occupied and nearly as many became vacant, officials said. The City of St. Louis loses millions of dollars in tax revenue due to vacant properties annually, according to STLVC Board President Peter Hoffman.
“The cost borne by taxpayers for things like board-ups and demolition and grass cutting, these are all really eye-popping figures,” Hoffman said. “Our city is starting to maybe turn the corner on this issue. Over the last seven years, there has been a reduction in vacancy overall. So that's encouraging. We need to do a lot more.”
Mayor Cara Spencer commended the collaborative efforts.
"Bringing together community voices, City departments, and experts in data analysis is imperative to creating an actionable roadmap to tackling vacancy,” Spencer said. “I am proud that our team will be able to put new tools, real-time data, and community insight into action as we work to turn vacancy into opportunity across St. Louis.”
Researchers found that there are currently over 24,000 vacant and abandoned parcels across St. Louis, including more than 9,000 vacant buildings and 15,000 vacant lots.
Of the vacant buildings, 1,198 are owned by the City’s Land Reutilization Authority, while 7,840 are privately owned.
Over the past several years, researchers also found that the land bank reduced its inventory of buildings by 62%, primarily through building demolition, while the overall number of privately owned vacant buildings increased by nearly 25%.
Officials said the properties not only strain public services, but they also drive down surrounding property values, reduce tax revenue and destabilize neighborhoods. The VSI has compiled data to calculate the total cost of vacancy — not just to taxpayers, but to the long-term health and equity of the city — and to develop a coordinated, community-informed strategy for reinvestment.
Laura Ginn, vacancy strategist at the St. Louis Development Corporation, said it takes time to undo the damage caused by vacant properties.
“It's so intertwined with our communities, with our neighborhoods, with the fabric of the city, that it takes all hands on deck to undo the decades of disinvestment that has led us here,” Ginn said. “The city cannot solve this alone. Neighborhood associations cannot solve this alone.”
Reducing vacancies requires engaging with residents and working with the city to find new innovative policies and programming, researchers found.
“We had a speaker earlier tonight talk about how the policy for a long time was just to demolish everything, and that creates a whole new set of problems that we've got to maintain a vacant lot,” Hoffman said. “So, how do we really start to, in a meaningful way, reverse this trend, start bringing investment back into neighborhoods that need it? We need people on the ground, people who are doing this work, day in and day out, to make that happen.”
Correction: The STL Vacancy Collaborative is the organization producing this report on vacant properties for the city. A previous version of this story stated its name incorrectly.
