I want to take a little time to discuss small scale buildings, including ones in St. Louis, and how important they are to our built environment. Here’s a few examples from around Downtown and Downtown West:

We pay more attention to larger buildings when it comes to DT (think Jefferson Hotel, Railway Exchange Building, etc). Their footprint is much more significant & impactful. So we tend not to notice the little ones as much. They’re often nondescript & blend in the background.

However, they play a critical part in our urban ecosystem. They offer smaller-scale, affordable spaces that larger buildings & investors may not be willing or able to provide. And so we see a lot of unique, home grown mom & pop businesses fill them in:

Smaller buildings also make for a much more economically resilient downtown. One vacant small building goes pretty unnoticed & is easy to fill in. A block of small buildings might see 1/10 vacant at any given time, and still have a lively street.

By contrast, larger buildings are much harder to fill & can have a catastrophic effect on the DT economy if emptied out. We saw this happen firsthand when AT&T left their skyscraper in 2018, killing off street life on a whole block. Smaller buildings diversify the DT portfolio.

Smaller buildings are also much harder to construct nowadays, thanks to continued consolidation of land + zoning requirements downtown. The financial realities of economies of scale mean building smaller structures often is just not in the interest of developers either.

This is why the loss of 1900 Olive Street is such an issue. This type of fine-grained urban fabric is already rare, and getting rarer by the day. It’s a critical part of our city and we’ve whittled away so much of it; we can’t be losing more!!

Small buildings democratize the downtown economy and land ownership, and they make downtown affordable and accessible for everyone, not just a few rich players and some chains. They’re a critical part of making our downtown a resilient place that’s responsive to the community.

If we want downtown to be successful, we have to celebrate and emphasize our small buildings. This means we have to:

1) Stop demolishing them. ESPECIALLY for parking

2) Remove development restrictions (EG parking/setback requirements)

3) Incentivize smaller developments & lots

There’s a lot of successful small-scale buildings downtown, including the ones pictured above. There’s also quite a few more that would make great investment opportunities, here. They’re ripe for the picking!!

These types of buildings are key to an equitable and economically healthy future for downtown. Which is why we need to keep them around, rather than throw them away! @MLS4theLou @LydaKrewson @STLCityGov #nomoreparking

There’s a lot of interesting literature on the topic ( @StrongTowns in particular has a lot of good pieces about small-scale urbanism). For further in-depth reading, start there, or at this link here:

https://forum.savingplaces.org/HigherLogic/System/DownloadDocumentFile.ashx?DocumentFileKey=4219579b-fd10-8cea-1fd1-c8763bb07d81&forceDialog=0

(Here’s a favorite article of mine that addresses “granular urbanism”, as it’s called): https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/10/31/fine-grained-vs-coarse-grained-urbanism