Jim Roos has a briefcase covered in bumper stickers and a box full of buttons featuring his signature issue — fighting eminent domain.
He's a nonstop activist: organizing protests at City Hall, testifying in Jefferson City and commissioning a two-story mural condemning the seizure of private property.
But Roos is also a property owner and real estate manager, and his own buildings — some cited for broken windows and crumbling porches — have been a target for the very thing he crusades against.
Critics say landlords such as Roos are part of the problem, the reason eminent domain is needed to revive struggling sections of the city. Yet those who have been threatened by eminent domain call him a relentless advocate for property rights. Advertisement
Either way, Roos, 63, a seminary graduate, fights eminent domain with religious zeal, becoming a visible figure in one of the state's most contentious issues.
Questions have been raised over whether Roos' stance is for the greater good or to protect his own self-interests. It could be a little of both, he suggests.
"I don't like to get pummeled myself," he said, "but I hate to see someone else get pummeled."
Roos grew up on a farm in southwestern Minnesota and came to St. Louis to attend Concordia Seminary. Instead of becoming a minister, Roos formed a "housing ministry" — Neighborhood Enterprises Inc. — which today manages or owns about 200 moderately priced apartments in the city, most of them on the near south side.
He can be found on most days in his office in the Gate District — it's the building with the anti-eminent domain signs in the window — or in his pickup with his dog, Indy, in the back.
Roos represents something of a gray area in the heated fight over eminent domain.
Although the battle lines have been drawn along high-profile cases — such as the proposed condemnation of prime land in downtown Clayton that last week was sent to the state Supreme Court — eminent domain is often used to help urban areas on the verge of a comeback. Those are the kinds of areas in which Roos operates, where a handful of properties potentially stand in the way of larger development.
For Roos, using eminent domain for any private development is an "injustice." Let the free market do its job, he says.
"What eminent domain is is absolute power," Roos said. "You have the powerful joining the powerful — the developers and the politicians."
But St. Louis officials, working to restore a city with old housing stock and vast amounts of abandoned properties, think limited eminent domain is a key tool for redevelopment.
That's why Mayor Francis Slay's office has campaigned to keep eminent domain, telling a state task force in 2005 that "we can't let one owner stop a project that is wanted and needed by the rest of the city."
This is complete and utter BS from the Mayor. It isn't as if they are putting in huge industrial complexes that require hundreds of acres of unadulterated land in order to build anything. No, the point is to remove poor (or poorer) people from residential areas period. The problem with poorer folks, in the city's view, is they don't pay the same amount of taxes that wealthier people pay. Also, we are not talking about "abandoned" properties, we are talking about removing affordable housing stock that people are living in today.
Roos had been battling eminent domain long before it reached the national stage, making it an issue in his unsuccessful run for alderman in 1987.
It wasn't until about 15 years later that Roos was the subject of eminent domain himself. A city-backed commission, led by the Missouri Botanical Garden, used eminent domain to acquire nearly two dozen buildings Roos owned or managed in the McRee Town neighborhood.
That's when Roos said he first became a "victim." To hear him tell it, McRee Town, left alone, would have been the next Soulard.
Not so, says veteran Alderman Joe Roddy.
"It was a neighborhood in a free fall," said Roddy, who cited the area's high crime rate.
Today, the neighborhood is home to a suburban-style subdivision — Botanical Heights, with homes listing for more than $300,000 — which Roddy points to as evidence that eminent domain can work.
Roddy is full of shit, and is simply proving that he is in the pocket of the big money developers. Areas that have "anchors" such as the Botanical Gardens are prime places for traditional gentrification. It is an area adjacent to one of the most beautiful parks in the nation and there was no way it could have been brought back?? That is simply garbage. The problem, from Roddy's perspective, was that the area had a lot of apartments and duplexes, the sorts of things that would be the homes to people on the lower end of the pay scales. (For those who don't know, $300,000 is a lot of money for a home in St. Louis compared to most other urban areas.) Once again you have an effort to move people away from prime real estate (i.e. next to a landmark park) and give it to wealthy people.
The real problem, Roddy claims, is property owners such as Roos, who, Roddy says, "manages property so poorly that it becomes detrimental to the neighborhood."
"He is probably one of the best cases you can have for using eminent domain on occupied housing," Roddy said.
Indeed, Roos' properties have drawn complaints for graffiti and trash buildup. This year alone, city inspectors cited Roos' properties for several infractions, including broken or missing window panes, a collapsed fence, a collapsed porch, a partly collapsed wall and improper display of address numbers.
Even the "End Eminent Domain Abuse" mural, which can be seen heading north where Gravois Avenue becomes Tucker Boulevard, has been cited. Last month, the Department of Public Safety issued Roos a notice for having an "illegal sign" and ordered it removed.
Gee, hundred year old housing having trouble with window panes, that is a shocker. And improper display of address numbers !!! Call the cops!!!
If anything this looks like an illegal use of city offices to harass Roos in an attempt to intimidate and silence him.
Walk around Dogtown and you will see all of these "violations." Go and ask the owners if they have been cited by the city once.
What is so frustrating about this article is that the PD takes everything the city says at face value, and questions everything that the other side says. So much for standing up for the little guy.
One wonders if the Post-Dispatch is in the pockets of the big developers themselves, who have advertising dollars to spend at a big city daily.
A perfect example of the PD's lack of balance was allowing statements like these to go unchallenged.
"That's what's been so frustrating with people like Jim Roos," said Chris Goodson, who is bringing a grocery and a Walgreens to six vacant acres in the area. Goodson, president of the city Police Board, was also on the governor's Eminent Domain Task Force.
"I find it curious," Goodson added, "that where you find blighted areas in the city, you usually find Jim Roos' properties."
When the real answer to that question came earlier in the same article.
Roos says his rental units are "decent," though not glamorous.
"It's ordinary housing," Roos said. "But durable, safe."
Yes. He rents to poor and lower middle class people, so that is why his buildings are in the areas targeted by private eminent domain. That is where the war against poor people is being fought.
They are being blamed for existing where wealthy people do want them to exist.
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