The Tortuous Road from St. Thomas to River Garden

Abstract

Chapter 4 follows the tortuous course that led St. Thomas to its redevelopment, revealing the machinations of a governance constellation centered on the prerogatives of the Big Developer. Starting in the late 1980s, the struggling housing project had multiple suitors eager to launch a transformation. The redevelopment effort faced a long series of false starts and endured multiple lawsuits and setbacks. Eventually, championed by maverick developer Pres Kabacoff, this yielded the mixed-income community of River Garden, completed in phases between 2001 and 2009. Although the initial HOPE VI application had proposed a majority of low-income housing on the site, subsequent proposals shifted to plans emphasizing market-rate and tax-credit housing plus a Walmart supercenter, with additional scattered-site public housing for large families promised but never constructed. Eventually, however, market conditions soured and the actual development that got built has far less market-rate housing than this midcourse correction had sought to deliver.