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WEBSTER GROVES — A $320 million redevelopment plan looks to tear out 15 acres of warehouses and small buildings just north of this old, leafy suburb’s central business district and replace them with hundreds of apartments and condominiums, plus restaurant, office and retail space.

It’s the most ambitious commercial development pitched here in recent memory, and could add more housing stock, residents and tax dollars to an in-demand suburb.

But it faces a wall of hurdles: The developers would have to buy about a dozen existing businesses, including an apartment complex, to make way for the project. They need approval for $35 million in tax incentives, plus an extra sales tax. And the project’s scope goes far beyond what city officials said they initially envisioned for the site years ago.

“We’ll be considering the preservation of what’s working there and the redevelopment of what’s not working,� Mayor Gerry Welch said.

Officials like Welch have to walk a careful line in the redevelopment of historic St. Louis suburbs, from Edwardsville to Ferguson to St. Charles. On one hand, many are growing slowly and struggling to build a tax base that isn’t reliant on residential properties. On the other hand, new development threatens to change the old, quaint feel of their communities.

“We’re not Clayton,� said resident Bob Peters, an accountant who owns an old brick office building at 49 North Gore Avenue, just outside the redevelopment. “I don’t want seven-story buildings here.�

A special tax-increment finance committee is set to consider incentives on Wednesday. On Tuesday, the Webster Plan Commission, during a special meeting, heard from dozens of residents, many of whom were concerned about increased traffic, the project’s density and design, and impact to Shady Creek.

“This project is going to change northwest Webster,� said resident Janet Noble. “It’s never going to be the same.�

But, if everything is approved, construction could start by next year, developers said.

‘Not our first rodeo’

SG Collaborative, a partnership between St. Louis-based developers Green Street Real Estate Ventures and Seneca Commercial Real Estate, wants to build as many as 700 apartments, 100 condominiums, and more than 100,000 square feet of retail and commercial space at the southwest corner of North Gore and West Kirkham avenues, an area the city is calling Old Webster North.

The developers would have to buy the existing businesses, including an apartment complex, to make way for the project. A historic Black church on West Kirkham, called the Old Community Baptist Church, would remain. The developers have asked the city for the power to use eminent domain to force property owners to sell, but said they are not considering it now.

“Our goal here is to strengthen the economic foundation of Webster,� said Phil Hulse of Green Street. “And by doing this, we’re going to make it more inclusive, more diverse.�

City officials pinpointed the site for redevelopment in 2006. ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ wanted residents living on the north side to feel more connected to Old Webster.

At Red LaMore Body Co., inside the development’s footprint, a photo of the business’s namesake hangs on the wall, as do the game animals Red LaMore stuffed years ago. His grandson Brad LaMore now runs the auto shop Red started in 1938.

LaMore declined to weigh in on the project. “This is not our first rodeo,� LaMore said. “But no one else has gotten to this point.�

Janine Block, executive director of St. Louis Gym Centre, a gymnastics club that sits in the project’s footprint, spoke out against the project during Tuesday’s meeting. She recently invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to expand the property and to upgrade the building’s HVAC system.

“Taking property from us would seriously jeopardize our facility,� Block said. “It’s very unlikely we’ll be able to find something affordable and functional in our proximity.�

Webster issued a request for proposals in January last year. The city picked SG Collaborative in February, and has since held at least a half-dozen meetings about the project. Developers are calling it Douglass Hill, after the former Douglass School, a segregated elementary school for African American students, built in North Webster in 1892.

“You can’t please everyone, but we did the best we could to touch on all the things that the community said was important to them and then also put on the table something that we believe would be feasible enough to actually pull off and develop,� said Seneca founder Larry Chapman.

The Douglass Hill project is the first time Green Street, known for its developments in The Grove neighborhood in St. Louis, and Seneca, which developed the food truck park 9 Mile Garden in south St. Louis County, have worked together.

Chapman, a Webster Groves resident, said he was initially reluctant to get involved because of what he said was the city’s “terrible history of flip-flopping around, attracting people and then running them out of town.� But Green Street’s experience in multifamily and mixed-use development, like its Hue and Chroma projects in The Grove, made the opportunity more alluring.

Adding residents

SG Collaborative owns one property on Kirkham Avenue and has another parcel under contract. But other property owners have told the firm they’re not ready to sell.

Chapman said the special sales tax and the tax-increment financing will help the firm cover real estate costs, sell bonds and finance demolition, roads, bridges and utilities. They peg infrastructure costs at $30 million to $40 million. In addition, the developers are looking to make 10% of the apartments workforce housing at below market-rate rents, so that “somebody who works in Webster can afford to live in Webster,� Chapman said.

The exact details of the workforce housing still need to be negotiated with the city, which is expected to take place during TIF Commission meetings, Chapman said.

Bob Lewis, a St. Louis University urban planning professor, questions the amount of retail space planned for the site because the city already has established commercial areas. The city also would have to consider the environmental impact and the project’s effect on Shady Creek, which flooded Kirkham Avenue on Monday, he said.

But the city would benefit from an influx of new residents, Lewis said. Webster is part of St. Louis County’s sales tax pool, where all participating cities and parts of the county’s unincorporated areas “pool� their sales tax revenue. That money is then doled out by population — the bigger the municipality is by number of residents, the bigger share of the pooled revenue it receives.

Mayor Welch promised to scrutinize SG’s plan.

“We’re like a small town in a big city,� Welch said. “What I would hope for is that the development is in alignment with the very factors that have made us so desirable.�

David Carson of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.