ST. CHARLES 鈥� City officials here on Tuesday gave a tentative greenlight to developer Lux Living and its plan to build apartments and a hotel near the Ameristar Casino.
The St. Charles City Council approved a preliminary development plan that calls for 280 apartments, a 125-room hotel, restaurants, a rooftop bar and 604-vehicle parking garage at 1406 and 1410 South Fifth Street, just north of Interstate 70, in an area of land officials call the 鈥淗eart of St. Charles.鈥�
St. Louis-based Lux Living will still need to file a site plan with officials before it can move forward with construction. The developer gave no indication at Tuesday鈥檚 council meeting of when that would happen. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lux Living, led by brothers Victor Alston and Sid Chakraverty, has been a prolific apartment builder in the city of St. Louis. But it has turned its focus to surrounding communities in St. Louis County and St. Charles after generating controversy over its business practices in the city, including tenant complaints of property mismanagement and efforts to stall a competing development. It also caught the ire of city officials over public safety issues at a downtown condominium building of whose board the company controls.
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Lux still desires to do business in St. Louis city: It won approval to redevelop the Engineers鈥� Club building on Lindell Boulevard, though an effort to raze a row of long-vacant buildings along Kingshighway, just south of Forest Park, has been continuously denied.
In St. Charles, discussion around Lux Living鈥檚 plan centered on concerns around parking and whether its tenants would take the parking at the adjacent Crestview Apartments. A Crestview owner, Tom Schlitt, said Tuesday that it鈥檚 hard to determine what impact Lux Living鈥檚 project would have until the company released how many bedrooms it planned to build, but said he was otherwise in favor of the project.
Chakraverty told the council that its average units range from 625 square feet to 725 square feet for studio and one bedroom apartments, but did not state whether that was what Lux Living had planned in St. Charles.
He said that Lux Living projects attract affluent tenants who drive expensive cars and would prefer to park them in a secured garage.
A selection of photos from 2022 by David Carson a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer for the Post-Dispatch. In 22 years on staff he鈥檚 covered everything from war in Iraq and Afghanistan鈥� to pet of the week in St. Charles. He appreciates his family who puts up with his love for chasing news at all hours. See more of his photographs from 2022.
