For example, there’s City Garden Montessori, which was featured in the South Side Journal:

Any parent can stop by during the course of the day and they often do as most live nearby, said Michelle Marshall, the school’s family support coordinator.

The school has a preference for neighborhood students written into its charter. It seeks children living between Interstate 64 and Magnolia Avenue and Grand and Kingshighway boulevards in the Botanical Heights, Forest Park Southeast, Shaw, Southwest Garden and Tiffany neighborhoods.

Here’s a charter that wants to draw children from the surrounding area, like most public schools do, but that is innovative in other ways. City Garden offers a Montessori curriculum in both its preschool (which was established several years ago) and its new elementary school. I’m impressed, because many schools drop the Montessori focus by first or second grade, when it’s harder to put into practice.

The Post-Dispatch and Suburban Journals are doing a great job of profiling the area’s charter schools and illustrating what’s unique about each one. Stay tuned as new charters open!

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As it turns out, the city — and especially the Land Clearance Redevelopment Authority (LCRA) — didn’t much care for the criticism. The government cited Roos for illegally displaying a sign without a permit. Even though his right to free speech means that the city had no proper authority to require Roos to seek their permission to express his opinion about eminent domain, Roos complied with the city’s directive and applied for a permit. The LCRA persuaded the city’s Building and Inspection (B&I) Division to deny the permit, because Roos had not first gotten the LCRA’s permission to file the application. When Roos then sought the LCRA’s permission to pursue a sign permit, the LCRA denied his request. With the help of the Institute for Justice, Roos sued to enforce his constitutional rights to free speech.

When the city saw that the lawsuit sought to hold the LCRA accountable for its role in denying Roos’ constitutional freedoms, officials argued that the court should not hold the LCRA accountable because it had no authority to deny the permit in the first place. In other words, the city argued (and, remarkably, the trial court agreed!) that Roos was not entitled to a judgment that the LCRA had acted unlawfully because … well … the LCRA had acted unlawfully.

It is important for all of us that the Eighth Circuit reverses the lower court’s decision. If judges refuse to punish (or even recognize) constitutional violations resulting from improper assertions of governmental authority, agencies such as the LCRA will be able to continue intimidating people without fear of reprisal. These agencies already bully too many people just by using the powers already given them under the law — they surely should not be allowed to get away with making up new rules in order to exercise even more control over our lives.

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It’s certainly true that qualitative judgments can differ, often widely, especially when it comes to examining an area’s quality of life. Mayor Slay’s chief of staff took issue with Tim’s claim that McRee Town was improving before eminent domain, and cited news reports and police officers pointing out the area’s negative qualities to bolster his contention. It’s important to point out that Tim explicitly acknowledged that the area was unpleasant. But a look at conditions at one point in time doesn’t tell us anything about a long-term trend. Saying that conditions were bad doesn’t, in itself, support the argument that conditions were getting worse.

It’s possible that there are police officers who would say the area was getting worse, but those would amount to opinions. Jim Roos, however, a McRee Town property owner, is able to provide actual data about quality of life in the area. In the buildings he managed, from the mid-1990s through 2000, vacancies dropped and rents rose. This is an economic signal of greater demand, even in the face of higher housing prices. When an increasing number of people want to move into a neighborhood even as the area’s rents rise, it tells us in real, measurable, concrete terms that the area is improving.

That kind of data isn’t a matter of opinion.

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As part of the discussion, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay’s chief of staff, Jeff Rainford, claimed the study had two factual errors. (We are not going to even get into his contention that this is an opinion piece, rather than a study. Go read it and decide for yourself.) Rainford erroneously stated that Tim Lee, a co-author of the study, wrote that eminent domain was used in Gaslight Square in order to increase sales taxes. Having rechecked the study, I found absolutely no mention of sales taxes anywhere in the Gaslight Square section (pages 21-22). While Dr. Erondu in Gaslight Square is mentioned as part of a discussion of tax revenues on page 19, the study never states that the Gaslight Square eminent domain program was used for the purpose of sales taxes. Dr. Erondu was included because he, like Dr. Tourkakis in Arnold, is a dentist, and Dr. Tourkakis was most certainly targeted in Arnold because his office did not produce sales tax dollars. We look forward to Rainford’s forthcoming correction.

Rainford also claimed the study made a "factual error" concerning its assessment of the McRee Town neighborhood. While people’s opinions may differ on this issue, two callers to the show backed up Tim’s contention that McRee Town was improving before the use of eminent domain. This can hardly be termed a "factual error."

Tim Lee has written a great study on eminent domain abuse throughout Missouri, and we encourage you all to take a look at it.

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The story is a “he said, she said” story in which city officials’ trumped-up allegations against Roos are reported alongside Roos’s responses. Since most readers don’t know any of the parties and aren’t going to do research for themselves, this gives the (erroneous, in my view) impression that there must be something shady about Roos or the Post wouldn’t have published such a critical article. Here’s an example:
 

Roos’ properties have drawn complaints for graffiti and trash buildup. This year alone, city inspectors cited Roos’ properties for several infractions, including broken or missing window panes, a collapsed fence, a collapsed porch, a partly collapsed wall and improper display of address numbers.

Even the “End Eminent Domain Abuse” mural, which can be seen heading north where Gravois Avenue becomes Tucker Boulevard, has been cited. Last month, the Department of Public Safety issued Roos a notice for having an “illegal sign” and ordered it removed.

Other than the mural, Roos says that the buildings cited by the city had the violations before he purchased them. Roos says his rental units are “decent,” though not glamorous.

“It’s ordinary housing,” Roos said. “But durable, safe.”

Is Roos is telling the truth that his citations are only for buildings he’s recently purchased? I’m willing to bet he is (which would be an effective rebuttal to Roddy’s insinuation that he’s a slumlord) but the reporter didn’t check, something I expect he could have done fairly easily. Instead, he just repeated Roddy’s allegations and left the reader with the impression that Roos is probably up to something shady.

The story also glosses over why Roos is running housing in slums in the first place. Like most cities, Saint Louis has a shortage of affordable housing. Low income people have difficulty finding housing that’s “durable, safe”—and affordable. Roos provides such housing. And having seen both his office and his home, I can say with confidence he’s not getting rich in the process.

So what does the city do to help out?
 

A city-backed commission, led by the Missouri Botanical Garden, used eminent domain to acquire nearly two dozen buildings Roos owned or managed in the McRee Town neighborhood.

That’s when Roos said he first became a “victim.” To hear him tell it, McRee Town, left alone, would have been the next Soulard.

Not so, says veteran Alderman Joe Roddy.

“It was a neighborhood in a free fall,” said Roddy, who cited the area’s high crime rate.

Today, the neighborhood is home to a suburban-style subdivision — Botanical Heights, with homes listing for more than $300,000 — which Roddy points to as evidence that eminent domain can work.

That sounds lovely except for one little detail: poor people can’t afford $300,000 homes. The city has “solved” the problem of poverty in McRee town by forcing the poor to move to a different neighborhood. I’m sure that counts as “progress” for Mr. Roddy, because now they’re probably out of his ward and no longer his problem. But it’s not progress for the city as a whole. In fact it’s the opposite of progress, because what affordable housing remains will be more expensive and more crowded than ever.

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On October 6, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch criticized two attempted eminent domain seizures in the suburban communities ofSt. Charles and Sunset Hills. The editorial board wrote movingly about the injustice of booting middle-class families out of their homes to make room for a shopping mall or luxury condo simply because it will bring in more tax revenue. But the Post-Dispatch insisted that eminent domain is needed for “clearing crime-ridden slums for replacement with better housing.” They cite the McRee Town redevelopment as an example of how eminent domain can be used for good.

It’s true that McRee Town was a neighborhood in distress. Some buildings had problems so serious that condemnation and demolition was the only option. But the use of eminent domain to seize and demolish entire city blocks was unfair, unnecessary, and wasteful. It destroyed badly needed affordable housing and uprooted dozens of poor people, most of whom were forced to start over in another bad neighborhood.

A better renovation plan for McRee Town would have focused on helping those already living and working in the neighborhood by expanding the stock of affordable housing. That’s what a housing ministry called Neighborhood Enterprises (NE) has been doing for a quarter century. NE managed 23 buildings in the McRee Town area demolished by the city. The story illustrates what’s wrong with “blight” condemnations, and suggests that state policymakers should be very reluctant to give city governments the power to condemn entire neighborhoods.

The properties renovated and managed by NE were nothing fancy, but they consistently passed city inspections and they provided decent, low-rent housing to people struggling to make ends meet. According to NE president Jim Roos, many other buildings in the demolition area needed repairs, but were structurally sound and could have been easily renovated. Instead, the city “clear cut” the old housing and replaced it with town homes starting at $130,000 and single-family homes starting at $180,000. That was simply out of reach for Roos’s McRee Town tenants, who paid $275 to $550 per month in rent.

It didn’t have to happen that way. For five years, Jim Roos, the president of Neighborhood Enterprises, pleaded with the Garden District Commission to employ a selective re-development plan that demolished the worst buildings but saved those that were structurally sound. Roos argued that he could help the city expand the stock of affordable housing at minimal cost to taxpayers.

Instead, Roos says, he and other property owners were ignored and excluded from the planning process. The GDC pressed ahead with their vision of the new McRee Town—a vision without much room for low-income residents. Because the Commission had sweeping eminent domain authority, there was nothing property owners and residents could do to stop the plan. When NE refused to sell their buildings, the GDC used the power of eminent domain to seize the property, relocate the tenants, and demolish their homes. Because the compensation NE received was about half of what they would need to acquire comparable property anywhere in the city, they have been forced to cut back on the number of units they offer to low-income residents. And no new affordable housing was built in the McRee Town neighborhood.

“Clearing” slums is easy. But it doesn’t solve the problems of the people who inhabit them. Affordable housing is scarce, and it gets scarcer every time more of it is condemned by the city. Instead of taking a bulldozer to distressed neighborhoods, we should find ways of rebuilding them in a way that gives a leg up to their current residents. But sadly, city officials seemed more interested in attending ribbon-cutting ceremonies for grandiose re-development plans than meeting the needs of actual residents. And because they have sweeping eminent domain powers, they had little reason to pay attention to the concerns of existing property owners or residents.

It’s certainly troubling when a city government seizes a middle-class person’s home in the suburbs to build a shopping center simply because the shopping center will generate more tax revenue. But how is it any better to demolish the homes of poor people in the city to build homes for middle-class people? Low-income Missourians, most of whom are already struggling to find safe, affordable housing, deserve better.

Timothy B. Lee is an editor at the Show-Me Institute.

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