America’s forgotten ‘doom loop’ city, where $205m skyscrapers are selling for under $4m and the decaying downtown has become a ghost town

Downtown St. Louis has become a ghost town, with boarded-up buildings and skyscrapers plummeting in value.

Major cities like San Francisco have made headlines over concerns that their urban districts are in the grip of a doomsday scenario – but a new report from the Wall Street Journal revealed that dilapidated downtown St. Louis is facing an even worse crisis.

Take, for example, St. Louis’ largest office building, the 44-story AT&T Tower. In 2006, this prime real estate 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 newspaper reported.

The Railway Exchange Building, once the crown jewel of downtown St. Louis with its famous Barr department store and sprawling offices, is now also an empty relic with peeling paint.

One AT&T Center (the taller building on the right) is a 44-story building in downtown St. Louis, Missouri, at 909 Chestnut Street in the Gateway Mall

The Railway Exchange Building, once the crown jewel of downtown St. Louis with its famous Barr department store and sprawling offices, is now also 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.

The assessed value of a collection of the region’s largest office buildings has fallen nearly 24 percent since 2012, according to a 2022 analysis by The St. Louis Business Journal.

Local media have called the trend in the Midwestern city a ‘real estate apocalypse‘ after 18 of the 25 largest office buildings lost $150 million.

The staggering decline is almost unbelievable for a metropolitan area the fourth largest in the United States between 1861 and 1903.

But modern-day St. Louis, along with its population, was hit hard by the pandemic dropped to below 300,000 for the first time since the 19th century, according to the New York Times. This compares to the nearly 400,000 people who lived in St. Louis in 1990.

In fact, St. Louis has seen the worst recovery in downtown pedestrian traffic 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 time frame in 2023.

St. Louis ranked last among the 66 cities observed, while Las Vegas was the only city to actually increase visits since 2019.

Downtown St. Louis from the Gateway Arch lookout

St. Louis has seen the worst COVID-19 epidemic disappear from its center among 66 North American cities

A person sits on a sidewalk near downtown St. Louis on Thursday, May 20, 2021. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)

As the office buildings in St. Louis empty, the streets are also deserted and unattractive to visitors.

Furthermore, empty streets ultimately attract drivers who drive too fast, making them less safe for the people who do visit.

This scenario took place in 2023, when 17-year-old volleyball player Janae Edmondson was hit by a speeding vehicle while crossing an intersection. Edmondson lost both of her legs after the car that hit her crashed into another vehicle, trapping her between them.

But downtown decline is not an entirely new phenomenon; the trend started with the closure of Macy’s in the Railway Exchange Building in 2013, as online shopping took off and a wave of department store closures across the US.

Shortly after Macy’s left, the rest of the office space in the Spoorwegbeurs became vacant. That has had the downstream effect of fewer customers for downtown restaurants and shops, causing large numbers to close.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the companies that do remain regularly experience burglaries and vandalism.

“It’s a classic chicken-and-egg deal,” said Glenn MacDonald, an economics professor at Washington University. ‘People don’t go there because there’s 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 St. Louis’ low rents.

The city reportedly wants to convert office space into residential apartments, but those projects ultimately cost developers a lot of money.

The New York Times reported in December 2022 that these types of conversions occur can cost up to $500 per usable square foot.

For example, in 2017 – four years after the Macy’s closed there – the owners of the Railroad Exchange 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.