New Partners for Smart Growth
February 2-4, 2017 • St. Louis, Missouri
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
  • About
    • 2017 Conference Highlights
    • About the Event
    • Conference Organizers
    • A Greener Conference
    • 2016 Conference Highlights
  • Sponsors
    • Sponsors
    • Promotional Partners
    • Important Thank Yous
  • Program
    • Dynamic Plenaries
    • Schedule at a Glance
    • Sessions by Time
    • Sessions by Track
    • Tours
    • Continuing Education
    • Presentations
  • Special Features
    • Local Day Activities
    • Help Support St. Louis Youth
    • Pre-Conference Activities
    • Interactive Features
    • Networking Activities
    • Infinite Earth Lab
    • SPAN Innovation Awards
  • Registration
    • Rates & Policies
    • Scholarships
  • Plan Your Trip
    • Hotel Accommodations & Rates
    • Travel & Transportation
    • St. Louis Area Attractions
  • News and Resources
    • Get Email Updates
    • For Media Only
    • Promotional Materials
    • Past Conferences
    • Infinite Earth Podcast
    • Other Events

Tours

Home Tours
Exciting tours of model projects and neighborhoods from throughout the greater St. Louis region and surrounding communities will be included as part of the 2017 New Partners for Smart Growth Conference. Tours will be scheduled on the afternoons of Thursday – February 2, Friday – February 3, and on the morning of Sunday – February 5. All tours will have some portion taking place outdoors. Please plan to dress according to St. Louis weather in February. Participants should plan to wear comfortable walking shoes as well as jackets/hats/gloves as needed.
Thanks to the generous sponsorship of the Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District (MSD), Project Clear, we have been able to slash the cost for nearly all of the conference tours!

This very important sponsorship will cover all bus and transportation costs for the tours, which has allowed us to offer these fantastic local tours at a substantially discounted rate. The opportunity to get out and see St. Louis through the lens of smart growth just got MORE enticing!

Project Clear

Thursday, February 2, 2017 • 1:30 PM – 5:30 PM

Tour 1

City of Champions: A Tour of Smart-Growth Projects in East St. Louis

Transportation: Metrolink and Charter Bus. Light refreshments will be provided.
Cost: $32 $15

East St. Louis, IL, located directly across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Mo., is known as The City of Champions. In 1917, East St. Louis had a strong industrial economy that elevated it to an All-American City in 1959. Along with many other cities, East St. Louis suffered from mid-century deindustrialization and railroad restructuring. This tour will focus on resilience and on-the-ground projects working to overcome a decrease in jobs, lack of access to technology, and financial constraints on school districts. The tour will include a short ride on the Metrolink to and from the Emerson Park Metro Station, from which a bus will drive through East St. Louis and make several stops. The first stop will be Jazz at Walter Circle, a sustainable mixed-use apartment complex (made possible by an innovative financing structure) that offers post-workforce housing to seniors with reduced incomes. The second stop is the Katherine Dunham Museum. Lastly, the bus will stop at New Life Community Church, where a panel of local community leaders will share how they are using smart-growth principles to make East St. Louis a City of Champions once again.

Tour 2

Financing Revitalization – Best Practices and Techniques for Urban Renewal

Transportation: Walking and Charter Bus.
Cost: $32 $15

Members from the Garden District Commission and UIC (Urban Improvement Construction) will host a walking tour of the Botanical Heights neighborhood. We will provide you with a map of our route, along with key information unique to the the neighborhood. The tour will incorporate previous photos of the former properties accompanied by the specific financing tools we used to achieve success. New construction, renovation and the activation of green space have contributed to the revitalization of the Botanical Heights neighborhood.

Tour 3

Supporting Arts, Building Community

Transportation: Walking and Charter Bus. Light refreshments will be provided.
Cost: $38 $18

This tour will explore the Grand Center Arts District, a metropolitan cultural hub, and Cherokee Street, a revitalizing commercial corridor where creative practices are building community. You will visit venues and hear from key leaders in arts-driven placemaking.

The Grand Center Arts District in midtown St. Louis is home to many of the St. Louis region’s leading cultural institutions, as well as a growing number of smaller arts groups, media organizations, schools, businesses and residents. Redevelopment of the area has been fostered over four decades by the nonprofit Grand Center, Inc., through civic leadership and a wide range of real-estate and facilitation tools.

Cherokee Street brings together art, culture, social enterprise and entrepreneurship, all within a historic district in south St. Louis. Recent growth is supported by a loose vision led by residents, small business owners, property owners and creative practitioners. Fueled by a DIY ethos, the development of Cherokee Street is rooted in the cultural and social needs of the collective community.

Tour 9

Community Resilience through Green Building and Industrial Site Redevelopment

Transportation: Charter Bus. Light refreshments will be provided.
Cost: $38 $15
This tour was previously scheduled on Friday, February 4.

This tour will visit four contrasting green buildings that illustrate creative adaptive reuses of industrial, commercial and residential buildings, a key to resiliency for the core of older industrial cities. In the Botanical Heights neighborhood, we will view a green rehab of a school; architectural firm UIC’s infill green homes, which feature geothermal; and nationally acclaimed restaurant spaces in a former gas station and residence. Participants will tour the educational and community facilities of Sheet Metal Workers Local 36, a 96,000 square-foot space mostly repurposed and reconstructed from a vacant industrial building. St. Louis BWorks recycles bicycles and computers by teaching disadvantaged youth to repair them; their building in the Soulard neighborhood is a net-zero electricity retrofit. Finally, the bus will travel to the William A. Kerr Foundation along the Mississippi Riverfront north of downtown, where a $2 million investment in a small rundown industrial building has been recycled into a Platinum LEED building that serves as a sustainability demonstration, nonprofit event space and foundation headquarters.

Tour 5

TOD, Innovation and Revitalization through Public-Private Partnerships

Transportation: Metrolink and Walking. Refreshments at Venture Cafe provided.
Cost: $15

Cortex is a 200-acre “innovation community” created in 2002 through an initial investment of $29 million from Washington University, BJC HealthCare, the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Saint Louis University and the Missouri Botanical Garden. The concept of an innovation community (or “knowledge community”) is spreading across the globe as cities view it as an economic development tool that can help bring higher-wage jobs back into the urban core.

Cortex is a mixed-use district planned to include residential, retail and office space, along with green common areas and public transportation. A multi-million dollar MetroLink station near the Boyle Avenue and Sarah Street intersection serves as the linchpin project for the district, and several companies that are moving into Cortex cite convenient public transit as a major reason for locating there.

We will tour some new and planned developments in the Cortex district, with a focus on how public-private partnerships can be successfully leveraged for innovative developments and revitalization. The tour will include a look at the future MetroLink station site, key multi-modal aspects surrounding the project, and plan updates on the station. We will end up at Venture Cafe – a free weekly event where innovators and entrepreneurs are invited to find one another and collaborate to bring their dreams to reality through discussion sessions, workshops, storytelling and simply sharing the same space.

Tour 6

Scaling Up Local Food in St. Louis

Transportation: Walking and Charter Bus. Light refreshments will be provided.
Cost: $38 $15

This tour will highlight numerous facets of the St. Louis food system, from seed to table. You will visit the region’s first food hub, converted from a hospital kitchen to an aggregation-and-production center that processes 60,000 pounds of local food a year. It also serves as a community-kitchen business incubator for local entrepreneurs, one of whom will be on hand to share their story and some samples. Our next stop is the GROW exhibit at the St. Louis Science Center – a permanent installation finished in 2016 – that highlights food’s journey from farm to fork through 40 interactive exhibits, demonstrations and events. The first permanent exhibit of this size in the U.S. focused solely on agriculture, GROW helps visitors gain a deeper understanding of the food supply. The final stop on the tour will be at EarthDance Farms in Ferguson, MO, site of the oldest organic farm west of the Mississippi. EarthDance sustainably grows food, farmers and community – one small farm at a time – through hands-on education and delicious experiences.

Friday, February 3, 2017 • 1:30 PM – 5:30 PM

Tour 7

From EnergyStar to EcoDistricts: Evolution of Sustainable Affordable Housing

Transportation: Walking and Charter Bus. Light refreshments will be provided.
Cost: $38 $18

Since 2006, several sustainable communities have been planned and/or developed in St. Louis’ impoverished North Side. Three of these – Renaissance Place at Grand (a HOPE VI project), North Sarah Apartments (a HOPE VI project) and the planned Near North Side (a Choice Planning Community) – present living examples of the evolution of approaches to sustainable affordable housing. This tour will explore all three from the point of view of multiple public-private-community partners, including a resident, a local politician, the developer and an investor. The tour starts with the LEED-ND-certified (Pilot) Renaissance Place, built with new-urbanist and smart-growth principles but very few “green” features. In the intervening years, solar panels and a less-than-successful rainwater reuse system were added. An Enterprise Green Community, North Sarah Apartments includes adaptive “live/work” spaces in anticipation of a change in the market. The Near North Side is still in the planning stage and expands sustainability and equity even further as an EcoDistrict. The successes and pitfalls experienced by each community and how the lessons learned from earlier communities were integrated into the plans for subsequent communities will be discussed.

Tour 8

Challenges and Successes with Implementing a Comprehensive, Community-Driven Revitalization, including Historic Rehab in Old North St. Louis

Transportation: Walking and Charter Bus. Light refreshments will be provided.
Cost: $38 $18

This tour will visit the Old North St. Louis neighborhood that exemplifies a comprehensive approach to community development, not simply real-estate development, and a strong community role in setting the agenda. Old North was selected for EPA’s 2011 Overall Excellence in Smart Growth Achievement Award and has grown a more robust mix of businesses and organizations since then.

The bus tour to the neighborhood north of downtown will begin with an orientation and showing of the EPA award video. Participants will walk down N. 14th Street at Crown Square, where a complete-streets approach to the sidewalks and streets was among the first in the city. Here 27 buildings have been recycled and repurposed from crumbling shells to a mixed-use “town center” with mixed-income apartments, businesses and community-serving nonprofits.

Members of the Crown Square development team will point out key elements of the project, which was recognized with a National Trust for Historic Preservation/HUD Secretary’s Award for Excellence in Historic Preservation in 2010. After decades of abandonment and disinvestment, the community banded together and rallied to save the buildings, turning them into a mix of affordable and market-rate housing, and neighborhood retail. The tour of this site will include an examination of how this was accomplished, the many challenges faced, the intricacies of a public-private partnership, and the challenges of transforming old building stock into modern, energy-efficient housing while adhering to the demands of historic tax credits.

Along North 14th Street, in the heart of Crown Square, participants will visit UrbArts, a platform for poetry slams and the spoken word; Building Futures, which teaches design and building skills to school-age youth; Central Print, which teaches the art of printmaking; and Zuka Arts Guild, which presents live blues and jazz. Participants also will visit a new, single-family home and learn about the many rehabbed homes, especially those transformed from rubble and updated with geothermal or solar.

Tour 4

Missing Middle Housing Walking and Documentation Tour

Transportation: Metrolink. Light refreshments will be provided.
Cost: $18
This tour was previously scheduled on Thursday, February 3.

Is providing housing choices or compatible non-single family housing a discussion in your community? If so, put on your walking shoes and come join us on a walking tour of the Lafayette Square Neighborhood of St. Louis which has a diverse range of housing choices in a compact, walkable context. These include housing types such as duplexes, fourplexes, townhouses, and mansion apartments that are compatible in scale with single-family homes even though they represent a broad range of densities. On this tour we will discuss and document this range of housing types commonly referred to as “missing middle” housing. While we explore these house-scale, multi-unit buildings we will document characteristics such as lot sizes, densities, unit sizes, how buildings sit on the lot, relationship to other types on the same block, etc. To wrap up we will find a local coffee shop and discuss strategies for effectively regulating and planning for this range of types and how to make them an effective part of your compatibility and affordability toolboxes.

Tour 10

Shifting the Dialogue: Transportation Equity and Community-Driven Planning

Transportation: Reserved Metro Bus.
Cost: $15

For decades, segregation, residential filtering and economic decline have increased concentrations of lower-income minority households across North County. The result is, in part, a mismatch between jobs and workers across the region, and between households and transportation infrastructure within North County.

This tour will introduce the history and current state of residential segregation across the St. Louis region, which in part led to the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. We will review the current status of challenges and the community-driven process that led to the creation of Metro’s North County Transit Center, which opened in Ferguson in March 2016. The tour will explore ways transit service can help solve, or exacerbate, disparate access to opportunity within the region.

The tour will also highlight the design of the North County Transit Center facility, which offers the highest level of customer amenities found in the Metro Transit System today, including an indoor waiting area, public restrooms, a café, 24/7 on-site security and MetroBus management personnel on-site. These amenities and the community-drive process have resulted in satisfied customers that feel safe, comfortable and valued.

Tour 11

Nimble Turtles: Speed and Patience in Revitalizing Commercial Districts

Transportation: Walking and Charter Bus. Light refreshments will be provided.
Cost: $38 $18

This workshop visits three highly successful central city or inner suburban business districts: South Grand, Historic Downtown Maplewood, and The Delmar Loop. One storefront at a time, determined leaders in each community have seized opportunities with lightning speed while patiently building layers of fun and vibrancy over the decades.

South Grand boasts restaurants and shops from 14 countries in six blocks, more diversity than Disney’s Epcot. No wonder its tagline is “A Flavor All Its Own.” See how Maplewood’s description of itself as somewhere between Mayberry and Metropolis captures its unique mix, and experience why The Delmar Loop was named “One of the 10 Greatest Streets in America” by the American Planning Association. Meet key leaders who have made it happen and take short walks through each business district to understand the dynamic.

Themes that will emerge include the role of business improvement districts, strong governmental champions, imaginative developers and merchants, focused management, branding, signature events, accidental and purposeful niches, purposeful recruitment of particular businesses, non-profit arts and cultural organizations as key anchors, infill development, and public investment.

Tour 12

Demographic Change/New Economy: Convergence and Transformation on Washington Avenue

Transportation: Walking.
Cost: $18

This tour will provide an in-depth look at the history, current economic/demographic transformation and future prospects of one of the nation’s most handsome and intact downtown streetscapes. Washington Avenue today is a compelling microcosm of all the major forces currently reshaping American cities. The tour will paint a precise, detailed portrait of the street’s story and give you an opportunity to see which of its strategies and outcomes might be transferable to other communities.

The tour will be in three parts, beginning with a brief overview of the basic features of downtown Washington Avenue before its transformation, followed by a discussion to identify counterpart neighborhood(s) in other cities that most closely mirror St. Louis’ former retail/wholesale/hotel and garment/shoe district.

The second feature will be the 2-1/2 hour tour itself, which will include presentations by key players in the street’s transformation, at the site that best reflects the presenter’s successful tool, strategy or feature. Finally, we will identify parallels and differences between Washington Avenue and the most comparable districts we identified earlier.

Sunday, February 5, 2017 • 8:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Tour 13 — CANCELLED

Achieving Equitable Revitalization: When Your New Neighbor’s a $1.75 Billion Spy Agency

Transportation: Charter Bus. Light refreshments will be provided.
Cost: $38 $18

St. Louis is steadily working to regenerate its north side, an area that has suffered from 60 years of disinvestment resulting from depopulation, including the former Pruitt Igoe. Committed to balancing economic growth with social and environmental justice, the City will leverage a catalytic federal investment – relocation of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s western headquarters and 3,100 jobs – to energize and strengthen surrounding neighborhoods.

Project Connect engages neighborhood residents, business owners, community organizations and redevelopment projects in an Action Plan that will guide future investment in streets, transit, stormwater infrastructure, bicycle facilities, public space, social services and amenities for neighborhoods near the 99-acre site.

Guided by city and community leaders, participants will experience the site and surrounding neighborhoods, and will gain understanding of the complex challenges involved in the City’s successful effort to retain residents and employment while positioning itself to strengthen neighborhoods. Discussions will include the City’s plans to improve quality of life for residents, address disruption of the street grid, coordinate multiple investments such as the City’s Promise Zone designation and the Northside Regeneration redevelopment plan, and integrate community-driven efforts such as a recent Choice Neighborhood/Byrne Criminal Justice award in the near north side.

Tour 14

Regenerating North St. Louis: The Future of the Past

Transportation: Walking and Bike (Bikes and equipment provided). Light refreshments will be provided.
Cost: $18

On this walking tour, you will get a close look at the major reconstruction of part of north St. Louis around the site of the former Pruitt-Igoe housing project. Here, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and a private developer are working at a large scale, while historically the area developed through incremental speculative development. The area once was densely built but today has one of the city’s highest concentrations of vacancy. However, there were many steps along the way to the present. The tour will examine the contrasting scales of redevelopment, alongside the historic development patterns that shaped, sustained and depleted the neighborhoods. What can we learn from the past – urbanistically, ecologically, economically – as we make a future? At what scales do urban systems operate, and at what scales should they operate? Participants will learn about site history, examine site conditions and contemplate possible futures.

Tour 15

Renaissance of the Riverfront

Transportation: Walking. Light refreshments will be provided.
Cost: $15

This walking tour will cover the historical significance, connections to open spaces and redevelopment and programming opportunities in downtown St. Louis, on the Gateway Arch grounds, and along the Mississippi riverfront. You will explore some of the most historically significant and iconic areas in Downtown St. Louis. This tour will cover the phased development, including planning, design, construction and programming, of the Mississippi and Chouteau Greenways and their integration with other redevelopment projects in Downtown St. Louis.

Tour 16

Taking Sustainable Revitalization to Scale: Green Infrastructure as a Vacancy Strategy

Transportation: Charter Bus. Light refreshments will be provided.
Cost: $38 $18

Post-industrial economic trends and racial tensions led to massive population losses in many legacy cities. Now a city of 320,000 people, St. Louis is addressing the consequences of decades of vacancy, seizing an opportunity to create the sustainable environment of the future.

Aging combined stormwater and sewer infrastructure, deterioration of historic building stock and nearly 25,000 vacant lots and structures held by the private sector and the nation’s oldest land bank have left a landscape thirsty for revitalization. In partnership with community residents and stakeholders, the City of St. Louis has developed multi-scaled, green infrastructure strategies that offer solutions to restore social, environmental and economic justice across the city.

Guided by representatives from the City’s Planning and Urban Design Agency, the 100 Resilient Cities initiative and the Missouri Department of Conservation, participants will experience and follow the progression from innovative early single-site strategies, to a premier developer-led project at the city’s booming Cortex Innovation district and to the larger-scale efforts underway through the Urban Vitality and Ecology Initiative and 100 Resilient Cities public-private partnerships which will demonstrate green infrastructure as a catalyst for community development and illustrate the City’s triple bottom line approach to transform vacant land into a thriving community environment.

Tour 17

Downtown St. Louis Walk Audit with Walkability Guru Dan Burden

Transportation: Walking.
Cost: $18

Dan Burden has worked in more than 3,500 communities and led more than 4,000 walk audits throughout North America.  The inventor of walk audits and the “Johnny Appleseed” of spreading the virtues of walkability around the continent, he was named a “Transportation Champion of Change” by the White House last year. His work helps define the future of transportation, and is now exemplified by thousands of new innovations that give full support to walking, bicycling, transit, living in place, driving less, and enjoying life more. Named by Time magazine in 2001 as one of the world’s six most important civic innovators, Burden is currently Director of Innovation and Inspiration for Blue Zones, LLC, and was previously Director of Innovation and Inspiration at the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute, and co-founder of Walkable Communities, Inc. and the Bicycle Federation of America. This walk audit – also known as a “walking workshop” – will explore techniques and methods of discovery by foot, while trekking portions of St. Louis’ public realm. The group will discuss features of the built environment that matter most, such as streetscapes, urban development, urban infill, public space, parking and traffic management principles and practice. Light refreshments will be provided. Wear comfortable shoes and clothing suitable for a morning in the Gateway City.
Copyright © 2016 New Partners for Smart Growth