Overview • Dean's Message • A Piece of the Pie Urban Issues • April 14: A HIPAA Retrospective Faculty Perspective: Public-Use Limitations and Natural Property Rights

Urban Issues

By Stefanie Ellis

It's a humid St. Louis afternoon in July, and three men are standing on the corner of Olive and Sarah, looking out at a new community in its final stages of development. Their view of the neighborhood is obscured by several towering bulldozers, scooping up large mounds of dirt on the same stretch of road that was once home to a bevy of jazz clubs, bars and restaurants. A large billboard sits just to the left of the site, advertising the elegant and spacious town homes, row houses and single-family dwellings that will soon breathe some life back into the vacant lots that have characterized this, the historical Gaslight Square area, since the late 1960s.

This time, of course, that breath will undoubtedly be a bit different. And for many newly developed or revitalized communities, different can be good. It can also be expensive, often making it an unattainable dream for many in the surrounding community. While developers often believe what's old can be new again, many affordable housing advocates believe that what's new should also be affordable. One of those advocates, Saint Louis University School of Law Professor Peter Salsich, has spent the better part of his career trying to make this concept more of a rule rather than an exception.

And by virtue of the passion he has for this area of the law, he teaches his students to do the same. Kent Boswell, '05, is one such student. Though impressed by the transformation of neighborhoods such as Gaslight Square, Boswell is concerned by its elaborate pricing structure. That's part of the reason he and a group of five other students drafted a proposal in last year's Urban Issues Symposium, a course Salsich helped institute, about the potential for affordable housing just east of this burgeoning community.

"In St. Louis, there is a need for affordable, newly constructed housing, as well as the establishment of mixed-income communities," Boswell says. "With the momentum of gentrification in full force, many individuals and families are displaced and are no longer able to live near their workplace. The project I helped put together for the Symposium sought to address that problem."

The Gaslight homes stand out in contrast to their surroundings, he says. Prices range from $250,000 to $400,000, making ownership accessible only to those who fall within a certain income bracket. "In this case," Boswell notes, "the Central West End is slowly displacing a large group of people who can no longer afford to live in these areas."

Though Boswell only worked on his project for a semester, it afforded him the opportunity to more closely study the possibility that affordable housing is a viable option for communities - even those slated to undergo dramatic revitalization like Gaslight Square. That is just one of the many things the Urban Issues Symposium at Saint Louis University School of Law seeks to examine. Held every fall, the Symposium brings together not only law students from Saint Louis University, but students from the University's Schools of Social Service and Public Policy, and architecture students from Washington University.

Thirteen years after the program's inception, Salsich is still amazed by its continued growth and success, as well as its practical use for students who will be entering fields where they will encounter many of the issues addressed by the Symposium. Having begun as a spontaneous, one-time meeting between law students conducting research under Salsich's supervision and a group of students conducting a design exploration project for Washington University School of Architecture Professor Tom Thomson's class, the Symposium now boasts over thirty students and five professors from four different disciplines.

"The way this program got its start is really unique," admits Salsich. "At the time, students from Professor Thomson's class had been asked to prepare hypothetical site plans for a subsidized housing development on a vacant, four-acre tract of land in a suburb of St. Louis. Over the course of several weeks, teams of two architecture students each reviewed the site, spoke with a developer to get representative cost estimates and spoke with city officials to review standards for receiving Community Development Block Grant funds and Section 8 subsidies. At the same time, two law students conducting directed research under my supervision were reviewing the land use regulations of several suburban communities in the St. Louis area."

"When we began this project, we weren't fully aware of the kinds of restrictions we would encounter," remembers Thomson. "We were looking at this not only from a design standpoint, but also from an economic one, which ultimately proved to be a challenge, given the additional factors left to consider. Someone referred me to Professor Salsich, and I asked him if he and his students could review the zoning ordinances for the area where we were planning our development."

Salsich and Thomson decided to bring their students together to engage in dialogue about the project's challenges, and, ultimately, the factors contingent upon its success.

"All the architecture student teams proposed the same number of units on the four-acre tract, 24, in different design configurations," says Salsich. "The law students, however, said the proposals would not be approved because the maximum number of units permitted on the site by the Kirkwood zoning ordinance was 22. They assured the architecture students, though, that they could solve the problem by seeking a zoning amendment or a variance to permit the 24-unit plans to be implemented. They were confident they could persuade the Kirkwood Planning Commission and City Council that the land use regulations should be modified because of unusual geographic features of the site and the merits of the proposals. The architecture students, however, responded with dismay over the delay and cost they would incur if they retained the law students for this purpose."

"From these strikingly different reactions to a hypothetical land use problem, the interdisciplinary Urban/Housing Issues Symposium was born," recalls Salsich. "Students from both disciplines expressed satisfaction with their opportunity to interact, once they got over the shock of their different perspectives, and recommended that similar opportunities be given to other students."

Today, Professors Salsich and Thomson are joined by Saint Louis University Professors John Ammann (School of Law), Dr. Mary Domahidy (School of Public Policy) and Dr. Jack Stretch (School of Social Work), though the program has seen the contributions of many other faculty members from the four disciplines throughout the years.

No longer hypothetically based, the Symposium offers students a field-based approach to learning, and does so by way of the many requests for proposals (RFPs) received directly from neighborhood organizations and persons working with those entities. This allows students to respond to actual problems being experienced by neighborhood organizations and affordable housing advocates in the St. Louis area.

John Ammann, Director of the Legal Clinics at Saint Louis University, is pleased to see students from different disciplines immerse themselves in work that benefits not just their professional development, but also their communities.

"In work like this, the community really is our classroom," says Ammann. "Our students are able to make connections on a broader scale, thereby allowing them to better understand the type of work done by those in other disciplines. Often, as a result, they learn to speak a more universal language."

This understanding generally stems from the fact that students from each of the four disciplines represented in the Symposium - architecture, law, public policy and social work - work side-by-side. At the outset, the program's facilitators select the texts, outline core objectives, select course content, set up the roster of class speakers and choose the projects that students will be working on that semester. Then, representatives from the selected communities and neighborhoods speak to the class about the issues they would like to have addressed. Following the talks, the students are then able to choose the project on which they would prefer to work.

"We try to give them their first choices," says School of Social Work Professor Jack Stretch. "But obviously, that's not always possible since our first priority is ensuring that there is a student from each discipline represented in every group."

Once each of the groups is assigned, everyone takes a bus tour of the designated communities. Throughout the intense 15-week program, students become quite familiar with their assigned areas, often directly interacting with people in the community by attending local meetings, interviewing residents door-to-door and speaking with government representatives.

"We set up the contacts between the entities selected for the project and each of the student groups," says Stretch. "After that, it's left to the students to handle. They have to carry the ball."

And, according to the professors, most students carry more than their fair share of work while in the program. In addition to community fieldwork, groups meet outside of class to discuss the progress being made.

"About two-thirds of the way through the term, each group presents their work to the class for comment by faculty and other classmates," says Thomson. "And as a final project, they submit their completed work in the form of a proposal that will be presented to the entity or community for which they worked."

For many students, one of the most remarkable results of the course comes from the fact that they learn how to think differently and analyze an urban issue from more than one angle. This, of course, stems largely from the varied exposure they receive from the faculty and students in the other disciplines represented in the Symposium.

"Class meetings are rotated among the four departments within the two universities," says Thomson, "so that students learn to work with those from other disciplines in their actual environments."

All five professors reinforce the importance of multidisciplinary learning by being present at each class meeting. Throughout the semester, each professor provides an in-depth explanation of their particular field of study, often providing students with their first real glimpse into that subject area. Each semester also brings with it a variety of speakers, whose knowledge of the subject matter complements the work being done by the students. Past speakers have included Richard Baron of McCormack Baron Salazar, Deputy Mayor of St. Louis, Barbara Geisman and Chris Krehmeyer from Beyond Housing.

Topics covered in the Symposium vary each semester, and depend upon the types of RFPs submitted, but range from homelessness issues and transitional housing to neighborhood revitalization. Recent projects have included collaboration with Baron and his development corporation in a neighborhood near Grand Center in mid-town St. Louis, and a site development plan for the new Saint Louis University arena.

While many student proposals throughout the years have helped communities and local governments implement plans for improvement, one proposal, from students in the 1996 Symposium, has gone on to help the Saint Louis University community and, ultimately, the neighborhoods surrounding the campus. Though many people contributed to its development, The Hometown SLU Employer-Assisted Housing Program was benefited by the ideas and research of students in the Housing Issues Symposium.¹

Kathy Hagedorn, vice president of Human Resources at Saint Louis University, had been looking into the idea nearly a decade ago, when she was introduced to the director of the Regional office of Fannie Mae, a government-sponsored enterprise that creates affordable homeownership and housing opportunities across the United States. She also spoke with Professor Salsich, who asked his class to prepare a proposal for the University. Hagedorn met with the students, and they presented their proposal, which, she says, "offered constructive ideas for the University to consider, as well as research on other employers' programs."

By the fall of 2001, Hagedorn was ready to embark on a preliminary program, and with the assistance of Professors Salsich and Domahidy, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Public Policy Studies put together a written report which incorporated the work of the students from the 1996 Housing Issues Symposium as well as other data that had been collected since the program's inception. The President's Coordinating Council recommended the program to Father Biondi, and he approved it in 2002, for implementation in the spring of 2003.

"It wasn't one person, but many, who provided ideas for the structure of this program," says Hagedorn. "Although it was a collective effort, the program received significant assistance from Professors Salsich, Domahidy, and their students, who did much of the research that provided a foundation for this."

According to Symposium professors, many alumni have gone on to work in careers that focus on urban issues. Often a direct result of the work done in the Symposium, and often a passion for the work that was simply fueled by the Symposium, the jobs in which these graduates find themselves are benefited by the valuable experiences gained in the course.

The exact level of benefit is perhaps best expressed in a letter sent to Salsich by a graduate one year after she joined a major development firm: "The Housing Issues Symposium exposed me to the exercise of working with a group of professionals to achieve a realistic product...it forces students to immerse themselves in the city or county of St. Louis and understand first hand its politics, bureaucracy, leaders, organizations, etc...the fact that the end result of the Symposium can have a real impact on the St. Louis region is an important outcome of the course...this course taught me to think horizontally - incorporating all disciplines in an attempt to revitalize communities."

Similarly, Domahidy finds that the Symposium "allows students to get together to discuss different ideas that are new and see how they might actually work." There is no real risk in doing so, she says, and believes there is "a potential that students might actually change things and help others think about things they hadn't thought of before."

And Stretch adds to that by emphasizing the limited visibility students in a particular discipline often have, and how it can significantly affect their overall worldview.

"Students in social work sometimes don't think other disciplines have the same passion for social justice as they do," he says. "The Symposium helps them see the commonalities that they share with those from other professions. It helps them see some hope in the system."

¹According to Salsich, during the first several years, the program was called the Housing Issues Symposium because its focus was on affordable housing development. In 1998, however, the name was changed to the Urban/Housing Issues Symposium to account for the fact that neighborhood organizations and residents who requested Symposium participation were interested in comprehensive neighborhood development proposals, not just housing development.