Downtown St. Louis has become a ghost town, with boarded-up buildings and plummeting skyscrapers.
Major cities like San Francisco have made headlines over concerns that their urban districts are in the grips of a vicious cycle, but a new report from the Wall Street Journal revealed that decaying downtown St. Louis faces an even worse crisis.
Take St. Louis’ largest office building, its 44-story AT&T tower. In 2006, this prime real estate property sold for $205 million.
But that same now-vacant skyscraper recently sold for about $3.5 million, a shocking 98 percent drop in value in less than two decades, the outlet reported.
The Railway Exchange Building, once the crown jewel of downtown St. Louis with its Famous Barr department store and spacious offices, is also now an empty relic with peeling paint.
Downtown St. Louis has become a ghost town, with boarded-up buildings and plummeting skyscrapers
One AT&T Center (taller building on the right) is a 44-story building in downtown St. Louis, Missouri, at 909 Chestnut Street in Gateway Mall.
The Railway Exchange building, once the crown jewel of downtown St. Louis with its Famous Barr department store and spacious offices, is also now an empty relic with peeling paint.
The staggering decline is almost hard to believe for a metropolitan area that was the fourth largest in the United States between 1861 and 1903.
Since 2012, the assessed value of a handful of the region’s largest office buildings has fallen nearly 24 percent, according to a 2022 analysis by The St. Louis Business Journal.
Local media has dubbed the trend in the Midwestern city as ‘real estate apocalypse‘ after 18 of the 25 largest office buildings lost $150 million.
The staggering drop is almost hard to believe for a metropolitan area that was the fourth largest in the United States between 1861 and 1903.
But modern-day St. Louis was hit hard by the pandemic, with its population plunging below 300,000 for the first time since the 19th century, according to New York Times. This compares to nearly 400,000 people living in St. Louis in 1990.
In fact, St. Louis has seen the worst recovery in foot traffic to its downtown of any other major U.S. city since just before the pandemic hit in 2019.
The University of Toronto’s School of Cities released data in October 2023 comparing the number of visits to major North American cities over a four-month period in 2019 with the same period in 2023.
St. Louis ranked last among 66 cities watched, while Las Vegas was the only city to actually increase its visitation from 2019.
Downtown St Louis from the Gateway Arch Overlook
St. Louis has seen the toughest takedown of COVID-19 in its downtown among 66 North American cities.
A person sits on a doorstep near downtown St. Louis on Thursday, May 20, 2021. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
Now that office buildings are emptying in St. Louis, the streets are also desolate and uninviting to visitors.
Additionally, empty streets end up attracting speeding drivers, making them more unsafe for people visiting them.
This scenario played out in 2023, when 17-year-old volleyball star Janae Edmondson was hit by a speeding vehicle while crossing an intersection. Edmondson lost both legs after the car that hit her crashed into another vehicle, leaving her trapped in the middle.
But downtown decline is not an entirely new phenomenon: The trend began with the closing of Macy’s in the Railway Exchange Building in 2013, when online shopping took off and a series of department stores closed across the United States.
Shortly after Macy’s left, the rest of the office space at Railway Exchange was emptied. This has had the subsequent effect of fewer customers for restaurants and shops in the city centre, causing many of them to close.
The companies that remain have to deal with frequent thefts and vandalism, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“It’s a classic chicken-and-egg deal,” Glenn MacDonald, an economics professor at the University of Washington, told the outlet. ‘People don’t go there because there is nothing to do. There is nothing to do because people don’t go there.
So far, efforts by local officials and non-governmental organizations to revitalize the city have been unsuccessful, despite low rents in St. Louis.
The city reportedly wants to convert office spaces into residential apartments, but those projects end up costing developers a lot of money.
The New York Times reported in December 2022 that conversions like these could cost up to $500 per usable square foot.
For example, the owners of Railway Exchange in 2017, four years after Macy’s closed, announced a plan to redevelop the historic building into apartments and retail space. The plan failed and the owners defaulted on the mortgage, the Wall Street Journal reported.