ST. LOUIS — Even before the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s 2016 announcement that the federal spy agency would relocate its western headquarters from Soulard to a $1.7 billion new campus in north St. Louis, city officials were making promises about what the decision meant for an area that had long been ignored by developers.
The chance to revitalize one of the city’s most impoverished areas, just north of downtown, was a key selling point in the city’s bid to keep the NGA, which collects, distributes and analyzes geospatial information for the Department of Defense and the U.S. intelligence community. To present the most competitive bid possible to the federal government, the city spent many millions of dollars — and diverted future earnings tax proceeds from the NGA workers — in efforts to acquire and prepare hundreds of properties on 100 acres just north of the site where the infamous federal housing development Pruitt-Igoe had been demolished in 1972.
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