Bill Pulte, grandson of the late Pulte Group founder William Pulte, has teamed with Jack Dorsey, the St. Louis native and co-founder of Twitter, on a plan to knock down abandoned buildings in St. Louis. The effort is called the St. Louis Blight Authority and intends to completely clear and clean about 150 lots over the next 20 days in a four-block area in the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood in north St. Louis. “We don’t want trash on the ground, we don’t want one little receipt from CVS,” said Pulte. “That’s how you solve this blight problem, is you get rid of all the trash and debris and everything else. If you just go and knock down these structures, you don’t get rid of the cancer.” The St. Louis Post Dispatach reports.
Pulte, who describes himself as “Twitter’s #1 philanthropist” in his profile on the social media platform, is the grandson of the founder of home builder Pulte Group. He’s spent the last six years tackling the much larger vacancy problem in his hometown of Detroit and one of its neighboring suburbs, Pontiac, Michigan. There, he founded the Blight Authority, which has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and cleared hundreds of houses in Detroit and Pontiac.
Pulte and Dorsey are expected to formally outline their plans at a news conference Friday on Burd Avenue, near the intersection of Goodfellow Boulevard and Martin Luther King Drive. Alderman Jeffrey Boyd, who represents the neighborhood, said the new nonprofit is paying for the initial 16 demolitions through the weekend, but that Friday’s demolitions are only a “kickoff” of a larger partnership. The four-block area that’s being targeted for improvement is bounded by Clara, Maffitt, Belt and Cote Brilliante avenues.
“This is just the beginning is my understanding,” he said. The city’s massive vacancy and abandonment problem has been decades in the making as the city’s population slid from over 800,000 in the mid 20th century to just more than 300,000 people now — leaving St. Louis with some 7,000 vacant buildings, most beyond repair, and over 10,000 vacant lots. The city has estimated it would take around $40 million to demolish all of its abandoned structures.
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