August 8, 2023 — Meeting Transcript

Good evening, everybody. Mayor, do you want to say a few words

on Zoom? No, I'm just welcome, everybody. Sorry, I'm not there. And Bridget is going to take over and just be great. Thank you,

Bridget. So we're just going to start at the six o'clock hour. We're going to have a discussion and a presentation on the comprehensive plan.

Got it for me. All right. Hi, everyone. My name is Catherine Hamaker. I am an urban planner at PGAV. So as you all know, we have been engaged to lead the comprehensive plan process for the city of Clayton. So you may have met me or another staff member at a past meeting, steering committee meeting or presentation or public meeting open house last week. I am here to give you kind of an interim update. I'll do this a few times throughout the process. Some of you have seen some of this information before. Some of it might be all new to you. So feel free to ask questions throughout, but we're going to try to bust through all this information. And I should have said at the beginning, this is sort of a update based on all of the information we've collected. There's tons more. There's a really thick report that'll be sent to you that you're welcome to read if you've got a lot of time. So this is just sort of the top line information. Happy to answer any questions throughout. There we go. All right, so this is what I'm going to talk to you about tonight. I'm going to review kind of the process and the timeline for the comprehensive plan. Overall, we're going to go through some of the existing conditions information we have gathered, and then I'm going to give you a little tidbit of the community feedback and then some next steps moving forward.

Oh, that went backwards. Okay.

Okay, so here is a bit of an overview of the process. So where we are right now is at the end of phase one and we're about to head into phase two. So phase one was really gathering all that baseline information about the city of Clayton. So what's happening on the ground in terms of the population and land use and economic development and all those things. important things that make your community great. So we're really looking to see kind of as we show up in 2023, what does it look like? As you all know, it's been a while since you've done a comprehensive plan. So getting all that baseline information to be able to plan from is really important. So that's what I'm going to talk to you about tonight is that phase one information. Well, then we'll move into phase two, which is really a lot of concentrated public engagement. We've done a little bit of that already with some meetings and one public event but lots more of that is to come. And then phase three is really thinking about land use in your community and what are your priorities moving forward so we'll do some kind of intensive exercises to think about different kinds of land uses in the community, what might be changing, what might be to come. And then ultimately that'll wrap up into a final plan. So you'll have a plan document, a comprehensive plan to adopt and move forward. All right, so the existing conditions review so as I mentioned, this is a big document that you're welcome to lead your way through. it's got all kinds of information from demographics to residential land use to how much green space, you have and. kind of everything in between so again we'll follow up with the link to that in the next couple of weeks and then that'll also be provided to the public if they're interested in seeing that as well. So what that includes is all kinds of things, but it begins with a review of your past plans. So City of Clayton has done a lot of planning over the years. You have a 1958 master plan, which was Really early planning document, not a lot of communities were doing a ton of planning back then so it's great that the city has a kind of a history of a lot of planning. You've done some intense planning for the central business district for the downtown area in particular so that's been updated a couple of times you've done some topic specific planning like housing studies or parking studies things like that. And then the strategic plan in 2020. And so what we did is reviewed all of those plans and kind of learned, you know, what were the themes throughout? What did you say you wanted to do? What did you actually do? What kinds of priorities maybe are still relevant today? Maybe what isn't relevant? Thinking about if there was engagement as part of those plans, kind of all of that just to make sure that we've taken advantage of the work you all have done already.

Can I ask a question? Sure. I don't know that I know about the strategic economic development plan in 20, like, can you fill me in on that? Or do I know it by another name or?

No, it's just economic strategies. I can forward that over to you. Okay. I'll resend it to the board.

And did we do it pre-COVID or post-COVID? Yeah, it was

pre-COVID and adopted by the time I got here in February 2020.

Oh, okay. So it was like very early 2020. Okay. That's what I was kind of very confused about the timing of that. Thank you. Yeah.

Yeah, that's an important thing to note is that lots of things have changed since 1958 but then lots of very important things have changed since the 2020 strategic plan and so thinking about what parts of the plans are still relevant and do still provide really good guidance for the city, and then which ones are maybe not accurate and from anymore or maybe are not the direction you want to go. So some of the themes that came out of that 60 plus years of planning is the importance of the residential character of Clayton, you know that one really came up again and again since that 1958 plan it's something. Clayton residents are very proud of. It's also something that makes you all unique. The focus on the regional location as an asset. So being so close to the city of St. Louis, being a central, easy-to-access municipality among many is a real asset for Clayton. And it's something that came up again and again when people were talking about your residential market, your retail market, your office space. population, all of those things were all really coming back to that regional location. There was also a desire for a robust mix of uses in downtown. So since you all started really intensely planning for the downtown area, that's been a consistent theme is thinking about what that mix of uses might be now, what it's the use of mix of uses has been recommended. That's kind of varied over the years. You know, for a while there was a real focus on office versus retail. And so that has changed, but the idea that a mix is important has been consistent. And then lastly, those city services and community assets, you know, the green spaces, the services provided by the city of Clayton, those kinds of things are an important reason why people decide to live here. So I'm going to see if I can scoot this up. There we go. Um, some demographics. So you all might be familiar with this stuff or this might be new to you, but your 2020 population was just over 17,000, which is, um, uh, 7.7% increase since 2010. So it's a pretty substantial population increase, particularly as it's compared to the five County region. And when I talk about the five County region in this report, there's several other geographies that will compare your community to depending on what we're comparing. So if we're comparing residential, sometimes it's two adjacent, more similar municipalities. But the five-county region that we looked at are the five counties that directly surround the city of Clayton. So St. Louis City, St. Louis County, and then the three to the west and south. We chose those as a geography that was sort of manageable. You know, using the 15-county MSA is a really large geography. And so the population stats, for example, become pretty skewed when you're 17,000 of 3 million, you know? And so when I talk about the region, that's the five-countY region we'll be talking about. Anyway, so you all have gained about 1,200 residents in that 10-year period. Over half of these residents were added to the downtown area, which may not be surprising to you given the additional units in downtown, but interesting nonetheless. And then that jail population is important to note. So these are U.S. census numbers. So the U.S. Census counts people where they live at that time. So this would count the jail population at the time. It would also count the student population at the time, so if people are living on WashU's campus that falls in the city of Clayton, those would also be counted here as well. So that's an important thing to think about when we think about all kinds of statistics. Age, for example, race, income, all of those things are going to be a little bit skewed by the fact that you're counting those different populations in the census data. So when you're looking at age of residence, for example, you can see here the breakdown by kind of generations. And you'll see Clayton's in the green. The five-county region is in the gray. And so you can see that Clayton has a lower amount of representation for all of those demographics except for millennials. So right now those people are about 27 to 42 years old. And that represents a really big portion of the city of Clayton. You know the student population makes up a portion of this so that's something to keep in mind, but as we get through the rest of these kind of demographic stats you'll start to see that there are some other relationships to this age piece that might be important to know when we start to think about land use. So household structure, for example, 37% of residents are living in one person households. That's a pretty high number. And so when you think about, you know, those could be students living alone. But it also is a lot of older people that might be living alone. It could be young professionals living in some of the units in downtown. The household structure piece is particularly important when we think about residential land use and the kind of units, the kind of housing that you might need moving forward, depending on what your population is now and then what you might like your population to be in the future. The families with children is another interesting stat. You can see a little snippet there of a map showing the four census tracts that fall in the city of Clayton. So you can see that the families with children are most likely found in those two that are more blue and less likely found in the one all the way to the east and then kind of central Clayton. When you look at racial and ethnic diversity, I think this is really interesting. You all have a pretty consistent breakdown of minority race or ethnicity as it relates to the five county region. So 27% in Clayton versus 30% in the region. So pretty consistent. However, how that breaks down is really interesting. you have a far smaller percentage of black or African-American residents than the region does, but you have a far greater percentage of Asian residents Again, that's just something to think about when we're thinking about what population we're planning for. In terms of income, you know, you have a significant student population so those people are likely making little to no income so that explains part of that $10,000 or less population because that's really where students that maybe have a work-study job or maybe don't work at all would fall. But 40% of your residents have a household income of $150,000 or more, which is quite a bit higher than the five-county region average. Some other demographic stats that are interesting and kind of, I thought, worth noting is that 12% of Clayton residents are foreign-born. That is more than twice the average for that five-county peer communities. More than 8% of residents speak an Asian or Pacific Islander language at home. So again, I think that's a really unique piece of the city of Clayton that's worth thinking about in terms of your population. 6.4% of residents or about 1,000 people are living with a disability of some kind. So that could be a physical disability that might inhibit their choice of place to live. It could also be something like a cognitive disability that might make them unable to live by themselves. So That spectrum of disability ranges pretty wildly, but it is also something to keep in mind when you think about the kind of housing that someone like that might need. Just over 7,000 residents make up your working population over 16. So that's a 54% labor participation rate, which is relatively low compared to some communities. It means only 54% of people that are eligible or above working age work here. And nearly 80% of residents over 25 have a bachelor's degree or higher. So 80% of those residents are very well educated. Only 54% of those people are actually working. So the next big section of the existing conditions report looks into land use. So as I mentioned, I'm an urban planner. So I think of things in a geographic way. That's what a comprehensive plan is really to think about your community comprehensively in terms of how things are used where. And so what you can see here is a land use map. This reflects... what's going on on the ground and on land throughout the city of Clayton, so I know this is a lot but we're going to kind of pull it apart the different types of land uses. So you can see that so 46% of your land is used for residential purposes 8% is commercial 1% mixed use 15% institutional. Parks and Rec takes up about 6% of land, and then right-of-way is about 23%. The 23% does seem kind of shocking to people that don't know, but that is relatively standard for most communities. So it's roadways, it's all the public easement, Metrolink, all of that. And the residential is an interesting piece because 46% doesn't feel like a ton, but it's just really about how land is used. So it doesn't count any residential that might go up For example, a hundred unit building that would go up would use maybe the same amount of land as a few single family homes. So just something to keep in mind on that. Do we do the raise hand thing? Okay.

Hello, it's me. Hi, Mayor Harris. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I just wanted to ask you, where are you putting condos? Is that single family or multifamily?

They fall in multifamily from a land use perspective. And I will, maybe I can

go to the next one. That's from a land use. I'm sorry. It looked like a low percentage of multifamily, but that's land, not number of units. Okay. That's good. Okay. No problem. Thank you.

That's okay. That's a good lead in. So the first big section that we looked into was residential. And so in this case, we're inventorying what kind of residential you have. We're looking at how that residential performs in the market. We're thinking about how that might fit the needs of Clayton residents today and tomorrow. And so 46%, as I mentioned, of your land is used for residential. You can see it in yellow on the map. It represents a pretty significant portion of your community. And it's about 6,000 housing units. So that would include both single family and multifamily units. That 46% so 82% of that land of your residential land is occupied by single family housing. So, if you think about single family housing, usually it takes up more space than say a multifamily building and so that's how you get to that 82% number. The rest of that percentage would be multifamily or multi-unit buildings. 37% of residential buildings were built before 1939, and you can kind of imagine the city of Clayton as you go further west in the city and further from the city of St. Louis. Buildings tend to get newer and newer as the region developed. Clayton has a higher concentration of multi-unit So only 30, I know I'm throwing a lot of statistics at you here. I promise we'll send you the real report if you want to dig into it. Only 34% of housing units are single family detached units so they could, you know, the opposite of that would be multifamily units or attached single family structure something like a condo would fit into that. And then you have a kind of a mix of owner-occupied housing and renter-occupied housing. In our report, we do a lot of analysis to compare your multifamily market to other nearby communities. You know, Clayton's unique because your peer communities for your single family markets are pretty different than your peer communities for multi-family markets. You all have a pretty good mix. And while your single family is pretty expensive and on relatively large lots comparatively, your multifamily units create kind of a different experience than say the multifamily units in Ladue, for example. And so thinking about what are the right comparisons was a big part of this.

Can I ask a question back on that previous slide? Explain the distinction between the 82% number that you referenced and the 34% number that you reference.

Okay, so this is the amount of land versus the number of units. I know it's somewhat confusing. Yes.

If I wanted to buy a home in Clayton and there were 100 on the market, 34 would actually be single family homes and the other... 66 would be condos or apartments. Correct. And if

the city of Clayton was 100 acres big, 82 of those acres would be covered with single family housing. I know it's tricky.

Got it. Thank you.

No problem. I'm

going to ask the same question.

So the next things we looked into is housing affordability. And so again, your market is unique compared to the five county region. Nearly two thirds of homes in Clayton are valued at more than a half a million dollars compared to about 8% of homes in the five county region The median home value is $863,000 about 62% of owner occupied units have a mortgage so the rest of them would own their unit free and clear. The median rent so for a multifamily unit is $1,400 versus about $1,000 in the five county region so significantly more expensive. There's a lot of nuance to this related to amenities offered and even, you know, the environment, the reason someone would want to choose downtown Clayton versus an adjacent municipality for a multifamily unit. So the prices doesn't tell the full story, but it's an important piece of it. And then about 27% of residents are considered housing cost burdened, which means they spend more than 30% of income on housing. There's a lot of analysis about this in the report and it's relatively consistent with the five county region. And it's a little bit more complicated because housing is more expensive here. And sometimes people are willing to pay more money for a certain experience. And the argument could be made probably better in the city of Clayton that someone is paying more for a multifamily unit in downtown Clayton to be adjacent to their job or to amenities or something like that. that maybe they wouldn't be willing to pay more to stretch their budget for in another community. So again, there's lots of analysis of this because I know people are, this is a hot topic to think about. So the housing piece in particular has a lot of comparisons to nearby communities and thinking about what money kind of buys you in Clayton.

Spending on housing, is that taxes and mortgage or what goes into that?

Yes. So it's taxes, insurance, your mortgage or your rent in that case. What else would fall on that? Utilities, yes.

Thank you.

And it's a housing and urban development, you know, HUD term is cost burden that 30% comes from them.

I think you said though that that 27% is actually fairly consistent with what's in the five county region. Correct. points out, right, the homes are more expensive, but median incomes are higher also. Correct. Right?

Yes. That's why it's kind of an interesting metric to think about because it's not necessarily an apples to apples to compare to a nearby community. because you have to take into account the amount of money people are making. And then if you're making a certain threshold of money, then spending more than 30% of your money still leaves you with enough money. You know what I mean? Versus if you have a limited amount of money and you're stretching your income over that 30%, leaving you with not enough to pay for those other essentials. So here's some of that comparison. Clayton's housing falls kind of in the middle and a bunch of different things. So in terms of the renter versus owner mix, the housing age, the number of units, you can see some different communities that we selected here to kind of compare you to. Some of them are adjacent communities and so you know, relevant to compare yourself to someone like U City because of that. But some of them have way more housing units, for example, than you all have. And so less of a good comparison in terms of the market. Similarly, you know, someone that's choosing to live in a condo in downtown Clayton is probably choosing that for a bunch of reasons that they may not be able to find in another community. So you'll see lots of this kind of stuff in the report. So this is some housing cost comparison. So looking at Clayton, compared to some peer communities, you know, you all are more expensive compared to some peer community when it comes to multifamily. Single family home prices also are higher than those adjacent communities. So you can see here on that multifamily chart on the left, we've compared you all to the Central West End in the city of St. Louis, Kirkwood, Richmond Heights, and University City. But those are slightly different for when we're thinking about single family homes, Clayton, Ladue, Richmond Heights, et cetera, that may have a more similar single family home stock to you all. So the next big bucket is commercial. So about 8% of your land is used for commercial purposes, you can see it really concentrated in that downtown area. It's about 133 acres. Again, a lot of your commercial land is on is in really dense environments and so you can imagine that the square footage just goes a little bit further when it comes to commercial because you don't need as much space as, for example, a single family home. So we looked at employment in Clayton. So the people coming to work in Clayton as a big piece of that economy. So in 2020, about 34,000 people worked in Clayton. This is pre-pandemic, about 34, 000 people. 98% of those workers came from outside Clayton. So they don't live in Clayton. They live somewhere else in the metro area, come to Clayton to work every day. In 2020, post pandemic foot traffic in downtown dropped by about 46%. And so that was a large increase decrease I'm sorry and employees and visitors and then actually, interestingly, a slight increase in residents and so it probably is because Clayton residents were stuck at their homes and walking in downtown Clayton and they had never had time for that before. In 2022 employee foot traffic was at about 68% of pre pandemic numbers so on your way up compared to that 46% drop but not yet back to that pre pandemic number. And then 44% of jobs are in the professional sector so looking at. What kind of jobs are in Clayton, you know, you all have a lot more professional jobs as opposed to the region as a whole but then you have a lot less of for example healthcare jobs than the region. So, just interesting to think about what industries have a lot of representation here versus other places.

How do you measure foot

traffic. So it's a little bit big brothery, but it's actually cell phone data. So we use cell phone data to track where people are moving, where they're coming from. That's how we know if they're coming from inside Clayton or outside or if they're visitors or employees. And you can track it for almost any period of time. So looking at pre-pandemic to now, one of the things we've worked with the city a lot on is answering this question of, you all have really high lease rates. Your buildings are leased, but they're not necessarily full. So businesses have chosen to rent the spaces. And you might think from the numbers from a building that you all are completely full, but then you see the number of 68% of pre-pandemia. And so thinking about who's coming back to work or how often they're coming back to work and what that might look like moving forward paints a little bit of a different picture than just simply lease rights.

I feel like before 2020, there was a 40-some thousand number of people coming into Clayton. So does that not necessarily include the people that are just coming in to... go to court dates or, I mean, is there, did you ever come across a higher number than that? Yeah.

So the 30

like visitors during the work week or something.

Yeah. So 34,000 people are, that's actually just employees coming to work in Clayton. So that would not count people coming to pay their traffic ticket or to view a public meeting that would not count any of those people. However, the foot traffic numbers do count those people because we were interested in knowing what did it do to visitor traffic? What did it do to residents moving around? And so let me maybe go to the next slide. We did a lot of analysis on this kind of foot traffic, who's moving where and how many people are going there in your business district. So we worked with the city to kind of define what these business districts are for the purpose of analyzing them. So the boundaries are a little bit arbitrary, but trying to group together your commercial businesses for the purpose of analysis. So then you'll see here how those different business districts break down in terms of their available space. So you can see the vast majority of it is in the central business district. And the vast majority of that is office space. Visitation varies wildly from certain business districts to others. And so 600,000 visitors per month to less than 20,000 and some other ones. We did an analysis of visitation pre-pandemic, visitation monthly since the pandemic, and then when the peaks are in terms of events, things like that, and then what we're at today. And so I just threw a couple of interesting ones up here. But the Demund neighborhood, for example, is at 96% of their pre-pandemic peak. And so they're almost back versus the Central Business District, which is at that 66% number. They vary kind of everything in between from in the 50s up to that 90 number. But interesting to think about which districts have performed better and why that might be. It's an interesting implication in terms of maybe the mix of land uses that's preferred, maybe the preference in terms of commercial or office spaces, that kind of thing.

Are the numbers... from you said 2022 so are there they literally are last year so like taken from a year from now or a year ago or is it even could we say 2023 at all yeah so we

actually went through june of 2023 okay and i think that it is accessible up to like two weeks prior to the moment um so things like the art fair you know that is going to happen after this analysis is done but that's something we'll look into because you know i would be curious what the art fair numbers were like in a sort of post pandemic several years later world and then how that relates to traffic overall. So we'll continue to use this tool throughout the process as we start to analyze different things that come up.

It just seems so much busier in June as it was like June of 2020. Totally,

yeah. So the commercial office market, I can move this a little further. We talked a little bit about this but you all have about 7 million square feet of office space in your city 61% of that is in class A buildings. And so that means you do have a good chunk of office space that's not in class A buildings and so as office becomes You know, something people are thinking about. They're thinking about what's worth going to the office for and what's not. You know, that's something to keep in mind. What's going to happen to those other buildings? We looked at the occupancy, the weighted average of occupancy in the 10 largest office buildings here, and it's about 81%, which is pretty good. You all have higher lease rates for office properties than the region overall by quite a bit. You can see that the trend for lease rates generally follows the region's trend line, but you are quite a bit higher at every point. You can see a similar analysis of the retail market, so about 335,000 square feet of retail exists in Clayton. It's a mix of small historic storefronts and ground floor space and big mixed use buildings. So it's kind of all over the board in terms of size and quality and rates and all kinds of things. But occupancy and lease rates are higher than the region. You can see here, Clayton has a little bit of less consistent trajectory. There's a little bit more ups and downs. A lot of that is just a function of the fact that you all are relatively small and we're comparing you to a much larger geography. And so when one business leaves the five county region, it makes much less of an impact than when one business leaves Clayton, for example. But good to know that you are generally following the trend and that you all remain higher on all those metrics.

Can I ask a quick question? A couple of slides ago, it had the Wydown Gateway, which I assume you're looking at where the restaurants and the businesses. Do you capture at all the numbers of people who come in to bike or walk Wydown Boulevard or the running groups that come and all that?

So that would not be captured in this analysis. Because how it works is that we set a timeframe, basically, that someone has to spend a certain amount of time within this catchment in order to be counted. So it wouldn't count people driving through downtown, for example. So those people would not be captured in this analysis. However, we did do a lot of analysis related to transportation and how people are moving through Clayton. So that is coming up.

Yeah, it's a little different than that. Something as we do our comprehensive planning, I think we all need to stay aware of what how valued that, that Y down corridor is to the broader community. Because I think we all know people who come in simply to meet their group in the morning and run or walk or bike residents and non-residents on that. So I just was sure we continue to keep that value in that as well as the business and the retail and the residential and

Absolutely. So I have a meeting actually tomorrow with the livable communities consultant who's doing the, the more sort of parks and rec oriented plan. And so we're going to coordinate on the data sources to make sure that we both get them because that it does fall a little bit more in their bucket but it is something that you're right we have to consider from a land use perspective so good

timing. The other piece

we looked into is the hotel market. And so you can see the similar trend on those charts as well that Clayton performs better in terms of occupancy and average daily rate than the five county region, but follows the same trajectory. That big dramatic drop is 2020, it's the pandemic. So that's what every chart looks like all around the country. Hotel rooms command about $15 a night more than the regional average and occupancy rates are about 4% higher. In June of 2023, Clayton's occupancy was 63% compared with 72 pre-pandemic. So you're not quite back to pre-pandemic numbers, but it is getting there. Okay, the next big section is we looked at green space and the environment. And so this includes all kinds of analysis related to how much green space you have and where your trees are located and how people have access to green space. This map up on the screen is just a snippet to show you, you know, we were interested in seeing if you live in the city of Clayton, where's your access to green space? Is it within five or 10 minutes? And you can see here on the map, almost every resident in Clayton lives within a five or 10 minute walk of a park. And a lot, I would say almost the majority of Clayton lives within five minute walk up a park. And so that's an important thing. One thing we did consider parks outside of the city of Clayton as well. That's an important piece of the analysis since you all are bound by other communities. So the next piece is, and I don't want to make it sound like we didn't look into a lot of green space in the environment things. We did. That stuff is all in the report, but I just, I'm trying to bust us through this. So the next one is institutional land. This is an important one in Clayton because you all do have quite a bit of land owned by different institutions. So 15%, you know, you can see up there in blue, it's WashU, it's Concordia, Fontbonne, the school district, government buildings, things like that would all be falling in that 238 acres. Again, it's something to consider, you know, both from a revenue standpoint from, you know, your taxes and thinking about that, but also thinking about how residents on, for example, the east side of all those institutions might relate to those that live on the west side, you know, things like that. They can be assets to the community. They also can be physical barriers, you know, just something to think about as we move forward from a land use perspective. And then transportation. So we looked a lot into how people are moving through Clayton, what kind of transportation assets you have, what that might look like moving forward. So you have about 9.5 million square feet of pavement. 72% of the pavement is maintained by the city of Clayton. So it's Clayton roads, things like that versus something that might be someone's a private road or a St. Louis County managed road, something like that. So when we think about how people move around Clayton, your relatively compact community, we were interested in understanding how people are getting to Clayton, where they're going after, how they're moving within the community. And what we discovered is that 43% of trips are traveling to Clayton, 44% are traveling from Clayton, and then 12% are traveling within Clayton. So that's something to think about is that there's not a lot of trips happening within Clayton. Living in Clayton and also going somewhere else in Clayton, you know those numbers are obviously things like work and we talked about how 98% of your workforce comes from out of the Community. But also things like amenities, you know people are going elsewhere for other things why that might be you know determining what those are is something to think about. In terms of mode of transportation, 83% of trips are taking place in a private automobile. 13.7% are walking, which is actually quite a high percentage for a community like yours. And then only 1.2% is taking public transit. So for a community that has good public transit access, that's something to keep in mind. 38.6% of all trips starting in Clayton are less than three miles. So that means people that are leaving where they live in Clayton, almost 40% of them are only going three miles to their destination. So it could be work. It could be a friend's house. It could be shopping. But that three miles is really a manageable length. It's something that you could consider a mode shift for, whether that is encouraging people to walk on those shorter trips, thinking about how your community could be more accessible to bicycles, encouraging transit use, those kinds of things. That three mile distance, anything over three miles, it's a hard sell to get people to think about a mode shift. But thinking that almost 40% of your trips fall in that is something to consider. There's a lot of analysis related to where people are going. So the purpose of their trips in the report to think about, is it more likely that you can convince people on these short trips if they're going to school, that they might be able to walk or if they're shopping or things like that. Again, it's also something to think about when you think what might be missing in Clayton, what are people leaving the community on those short trips to go do that you might be able to put here instead. I got another

hand. Yes. It's the mayor again. Go back to the previous slide for a sec. My little arrows. There we go. Okay. Yeah, I'm just curious on the trips to and from. It's pretty much equal trips to Clayton and trips from Clayton. Are those the same people just going in and out for work? Or do you have data on who that is? Yes. But you know what the purpose of those trips are?

Those would be different people. And we do. So in the report, actually all of the trips are broken down in terms of purpose. So if you are going to work or if you are going shopping or if you're going to school, you know, all of those different purposes are broken down because that, like I said, that's an interesting thing, you know, which ones are potentially things that you might be able to shift. You're probably unlikely to shift people's mode and place they're going to go for work, for example, because most of those trips are longer and they also have a job in a certain place versus shopping that you might be able to get people to shift to a different store or shift to a different mode of transit.

Okay, thanks. Okay,

so then this last piece is community feedback. This is a little bit of a taste of phase two where we're headed. So as I mentioned, phase one was that existing conditions report, which you all will get and can kind of dive into and let us know if you have any questions. And then phase two is where we move into really talking to residents. So we'll share some of this information. We'll talk to residents about what they'd like to see in the community moving forward. A comp plan is really something you would only do every 10-20 years and so it's an important time to stop and kind of ask the community, what do they love about this place? What would they love to see different in the future? Why did they choose to move here? You know, why did they decide when they returned from college that Clayton was the place they wanted to settle? So a couple of ways that people can do that is there's a survey online right now at engageclayton.com. So encourage all of your constituents to complete that. A lot of folks filled it out at the public meeting last week. We also got lots of feedback from people that came in person to complete the survey, to participate in activities, to share their thoughts. I put some sort of top line priorities that we heard from the community when we were there A lot of people appreciate the parks and open space. Those kinds of community assets were really I mean, we were at the center when we were doing it. So I think it was top of mind that people were feeling grateful for those kinds of assets. A lot of people made comments about wanting more small businesses and retail space downtown and in the community, in the neighborhoods. you know, vibrant commercial corridors in each neighborhood. When you looked at the business district map, they are pretty spread out throughout the city, but each of them looks really different. And so there was a lot of jealousy for the demand neighborhood and a lot of jealousy. Different parts of the community that people wished existed where they lived. And so thinking about what kind of land use decisions might be able to, to influence that a little bit. And then there was a lot what kind of residential you all have, and if that is or is not suitable for people that want to stay in the community as they age.

Okay, I'm going to stop for questions. I know you all asked a few throughout, but I'm ready.

I had one about, we talk a lot about, we know that we have student population. And I don't remember seeing a number here or at the open house that actually said the number or percentage of our population that is students.

Yes, so there's a few ways for us to determine that. So we can determine how many people live on those campuses in terms of the kind of geofencing to understand those geographies. We can also understand from the U.S. Census the population under 18 or the population under 25. That's about as far as we can go in determining exactly how many students live in the city of Clayton. Yeah, that's about as good as we can get.

So I heard at least two different ways to do it. Obviously, the location, if they're actually living on campus, that's relatively straightforward. Otherwise, looking at like 18 to 25, which certainly would not all be students, but could be largely. So did you actually like... do that I mean I'm just trying to figure out like is it um is it two percent or five percent is it a thousand or five thousand or five hundred like I have no

yeah so we didn't come up with a number of how many students live in the city of Clayton um but I haven't given up given up on that quest because I do think it's really important we've requested some information from the school district because I think that's also another piece of it and so that would be another way that we could kind of pull out the school district population from those 18 under 18 number or 18 to 25 number to try to again triangulate ourselves back to the student number. Um, Yeah.

Yeah. I think even just like, you know, um, like general scale would be helpful. Like what, what can you tell using those things? Um, cause we say it a lot, but I have no, and I'm ward one, I live over there. So that's like huge institutional use and students, but yeah.

The same consideration probably needs to be given to St. Louis County Jail that ends up in our census data as well. And when you look at the population number of individuals that are of working age that aren't actually working, you're going to have people that are falling into that category that are incarcerated. So we need to try to figure that out a little bit too.

Right. One of the tricky parts with doing a plan for a community the size of Clayton is that census data only gets so granular because it's anonymous. And so as you get closer and closer in terms of your geography, the information gets less and less specific. You know, when we look at the five county region, you can get a lot more information than you can about the city of Clayton.

There is one way to tell that I know of and it's experience of going to Schnucks. and Straub's and other grocery stores in our community is when WashU comes back, those stores are prepared. And they have the numbers of the inventory that they have to increase to service all those students coming in to get groceries and things like that and services. So there is a way to kind of tell an influx by even talking to Chinooks, honestly. I have the numbers.

I'm going to ask on the subject of hotels, you provided a lot of regional perspective.

Right.

I don't think on your slide there was any particular perspective on hotels. We have at various stages like three new hotels in Clayton. Of course, we already have a bunch of hotels. But I don't know whether comparisons are meaningful because there are very few real downtown areas in St. Louis County. So perhaps they're... Is there a perspective at this point on our hotels either existing or new coming online as to whether that's an appropriate number?

Right. Yeah. So that is a good question. So hotel markets are interesting in that they do operate as a region and similar to multifamily, people are choosing to stay in the city of Clayton. for a hotel night for a particular reason. You know, you all aren't the most convenient to the airport and you're not in downtown St. Louis. And so they are picking Clayton for a certain reason. And so that does make the market a little bit more unique. You can't just look at straight numbers of performance. However, even looking at straight numbers of you all are performing a lot better. So you all are, you have higher average daily rates, you have higher occupancy. you know, usually the threshold for occupancy is 70%. 70% is kind of a successful hotel. You know, right now you're at 63%, but you were over that 70 pre-pandemic. And so as you can see, the trend overall is that recovery just hasn't quite happened yet from the pandemic.

You know, on that note too, with hotels, we've had, I don't know what the raw numbers are, but with additional hotels, opening up the actual hotel usage may be back to pre-pandemic. I don't know. Right.

Yes, you do have a bunch more rooms coming online. And we did try to kind of analyze what that might mean for the community. You know, they're already coming online. And so our commentary is purely forward looking because they're already happening. However, thinking through this process about if it makes sense to add more, you know, after what is already coming online, I think is something that will be important to think about both from a is this how you want to use your land perspective? But then also from a perspective of, is this going to be a successful economic development, you know, addition to your community?

I have a quick question

about the future community engagement. What are you, what are your plans for like, you know, that big chunk of like millennials, for example, that was like such a huge part of the population to get them engaged and all

Yeah. So we have a few, so the survey is live and then we have a few pop-up events coming up. So tomorrow we'll be at the parties in the park and we have these very cool engaged Clayton koozies. So everyone go to the parties in the targeted towards people that are working in the city of Clayton. So they may not live here, but we still want to know why, you know, how their experiences when they eat lunch here in Clayton every day, where they're parking, you know, all those kinds of questions. We've got one at the musical nights at Oakville park, and then we'll do one in demand at the pocket park there by call these kind of. And then that last one, we're toying with the idea of something, doing something more arts focused. And so we think we're going to pull up with the livable communities to try to do something bigger. So we've got those in addition to a whole bunch of stakeholder conversations and interviews with a wide variety of different kinds of folks that either work in Clayton or own businesses here or are residents or work for the Clayton Community Foundation or, you know, all of those things. Do

you have like a goal of how many people would like a threshold of engagement you're looking for to like? get accurate data for what people want?

Yeah, that's a good question. So it, I would say that it varies pretty significantly across municipalities. Ana, do you have a goal? Does the planning department have a goal

for how many people? Not a number. Okay. Well,

you know, for a community your size, like for example, we did a planning process in the city of Richmond Heights recently where and they engaged about 2,500 residents. So they felt like that was a really good number. You guys might think 2,500 is like a silly low number, and that doesn't matter at all. So it's a little bit up to the steering committee and you all to kind of think about what is a representative number of your community.

Well, and Kami, I think too, I think they're planning on having a table at the back to school bash. So I think that will help get

in the art

30s to early 40s, like students with parents with children and stuff like that.

I just want to make sure like, you know, whatever, like the largest population, are we getting a good chunk of that? And like, if we're not seeing that, will there be a way to pivot, you know, some of these engagements to kind of attack those kinds of groups and say, like, get involved?

I think that's the plan. And that's actually why we haven't put those next two pop-ups on here yet is because we're kind of still waiting to see how that first open house went, how the pop-ups go. You know, the survey has demographic information so we can judge who's filled out the survey and what kind of pieces of the population we're actually hearing from and who are not so that we can kind of adjust moving forward.

Chris, do you want to, I mean, you can, or the microphone if you want to come forward a little bit so we can all hear you.

Who doesn't want a microphone? So if I'm reading.

I were to write a persona, but the average resident of Clayton, I would say they are a millennial married couple

We think your mic went off. I'm sorry. Do you want to come stand up here for

a second? Sorry. Okay. Hi. So based on this data, would it be correct to assume if I were to write a persona of the average resident of Clayton, they would be a young millennial married couple living in a two bedroom or less multifamily building. That's based on all the averages, right? Because the average home family size is 2.2. The average size is two bedrooms and we over index in millennials. And by the way, aren't we all surprised that no one's cohabitating anymore? What happened to the 60s? So given that, right?

Each of those individual things are true, but I don't think that you can attach them all to one persona. For example, I think a big piece of that millennial population are those people living alone, living as one. So to say that the millennial population is all married with two kids living in that, like you can't make the connection between each of those data points, but each of those data is true.

Right. So again, I'm going back to my little marketing world and we would write a persona based on all those things coming together. It'd be very colorful. We'd have a drawing. It'd be great. But I guess the point I'm getting to is I think our perception is that Clayton is all about the wealthy people in single family houses. And that's what contributes to the economic engine of Clayton. Yet we know from data on a national basis that as a percentage of income, people in lower incomes spend more in their community. So are we going to track who really is the wealthiest or brings the most wealth to our city so that we plan for housing that attracts them? Does that make sense? Everybody's just staring.

I think that's a great question.

Yeah,

I think that's a great question. And I think part of what this phase one piece was to get you to think about that. So when we start to think about from a land use perspective, how do you want your city to change or to be the same or to grow or alter in the future to think about those populations? statistics. And think about if you do want to encourage a certain type of spending in your community, what's the kind of people that might do that? Where would they be likely to spend their money? How can you kind of arrange the city of Clayton to support that moving forward? Right.

And then the other thing about speaking to a representative sample, we also know from national data that the people most likely represented in their voices and communities are old white ladies and men. So wouldn't we set about a goal of getting a rep sample by our demographic in different areas? So just, you know, yay, Richmond Heights had 1,200 people, but if those 1,200 were all, yeah, so wouldn't we have an established target for rep samples by our demographic?

I think that's a great idea.

Yeah, me too. Thanks.

Yeah, I do. I mean, Chris, I mean, I think it's so important for us to get, you know, across the population. So, I mean, otherwise it just seems silly in a way to come up with a plan if we're only asking such a small part of our population.

Totally. I have a question that might build

on that just a little bit in terms of data. Are you able to track transiency or term of duration of residence in Clayton? So right when houses are turned over or apartment units?

Yes. So that is a data point in the U S census is how long have you lived in the community? It's also a part of the survey. So there's a couple of ways that we can get that. And then in terms of the market, you know, we know when houses turned over. you know, when they sold, when their condo sold, that kind of thing. Connecting who is the person that sold the house, you know, that's not something we can do, but you can kind of triangulate your way into that by thinking about demographics over time and shifting that as residential shifts happen.

Can you talk a little bit about how the community engagement affects this overall process? And where I'm coming from is a survey gives you very specific data that responds to specific questions. In open house, you might get all kinds of feedback. And then targeted groups obviously will give you targeted response. So how does this varied feedback affect the process?

yeah so ultimately in the final comprehensive plan you'll have a series of objectives and key results strategies to get you towards where you'd like to be in your community. And those will be the sort of feature of one of the open houses, because we will work with the city and with you all, and with the planning Commission and the steering committee. to come up with what we, you know, we hear all this stuff from stakeholders, from individual interviews, from the community. You know, I want an ice cream shop. I want a frozen yogurt place. Get a lot of ice cream at the open house. But translating that into actual specific objectives and then tasks for the city to move forward, you know, whether it is... you know, increasing green space, which would direct the city to make choices about their public parks or, you know, if it's a new amenities somewhere that would direct the city's specific actions. And so deciding what those objectives and key results are going to be is going to be very important. The other key part of a comprehensive plan is the future land use map. So a future land use map is the basis for zoning. So future land use map really what you'd like your community to look like from a land use perspective in the future. And so that's another big thing that we will go back and forth with full city staff and you all in the public on determining so. You know your community doesn't have a ton of land that is waiting to be developed, you know they're you're a landlocked community that has already been developed but thinking about things areas that might be susceptible to change or. areas that maybe are in transition right now, thinking about what those future land uses are is going to be part of an exercise where we're gonna think about some different scenarios. What if we put a bunch of houses here? What if we put condo building here? What if you put a hotel here? What would that do both to the revenue of the city, to the population numbers, those kinds of numerical impacts, but then also what do people think? Is that what you wanna see in your community? And so all of that kind of has to feed back into both that future land use map and those objectives and steps that the city and you all are going to have to take to get there.

So just to be clear, I think I heard you say this. It is a bit of an iterative process.

Absolutely. Yes. And we'll, I'll come back to you many times at different phases of this process to tell you what the community said during all of that phase two engagement. It'll be up to you all to think about is, do you feel like that's representative of what you think, what you hear from your constituents, all of those things. And then ultimately when we move into that land use planning phase to think about how we can get what we heard from the community into that land use plan. And so if people did say that they'd like to see these kinds of different businesses or this kind of different residential housing type because they want to age in place, whatever that might be, how can we get that embedded into the future land use plan? Where could those things go?

Elizabeth, do you have a quick comment or question? Yes, please. First of all, thank

you. When you talk about lower income families here, they spend more money in the communities they live in. And well, we have no place for them to spend money at this point. We're losing a lot of our small businesses. We've lost a lot of our businesses. One of the best small businesses has been run out of town, and that is Wine Merchant is leaving this week. So we need to do more about getting and keeping small independent businesses into Clayton. That would mean that maybe more people of the Clayton residents of any income might spend more here in Clayton. I would. I don't like having to drive out of town to get my groceries. Then also the hotel market, I'm not sure about that, but I'm not fond of the idea of the hotels moving their way down west on Maryland. And I don't think that that's an appropriate use of our land being right there. But there are a whole bunch more things and I'll save them for the next time. Thank you.

Okay. I know I'm at the very last moment, so I'm going to wrap up. But if you all have any questions, you know how to reach me via Anna. Feel free to keep an eye out for that existing conditions report if you want to dig into it. There's also going to be an online dashboard with a bunch of data that you can look at as well. But you'll see me many more times during the process.

Thank you so much.

Just to clarify, the existing conditions report is not yet on the website, but we will be notified when it is. You will. Yes. Same with the dashboard. Great.

Okay. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you.