Attorney Peter Hoffman is doing as much as anyone in St. Louis to combat the problem of vacant properties in the city—and there is no doubt that vacancies are indeed a problem. Hoffman calls it “existential.”
”The population for the region is stagnant,” he says. If we don’t stem the tide of property abandonment and sprawl, “At some point, we could just disappear.”
The roughly 9,000 vacant buildings in the city exist because of decades of people leaving, of course. But those vacant properties end up driving more people out of the city, leading to more vacancies that in turn drive more people away. It’s a vicious cycle…