Industry Update
March 4, 2026
Source: www.stlpr.org
The Federal Emergency Management Agency told St. Louis it will not pay for most building demolitions the city wanted covered.
In a February letter obtained by St. Louis Public Radio, the federal agency said it would not reimburse the city for demolishing several kinds of buildings that are common in the tornado’s path, including vacant properties condemned before the tornado and properties where the owner also owns other properties.
“If we look at the total amount of damaged properties that are likely needing demolition, we estimate that maybe 20% of it will be eligible under the interpretations of this letter,” St. Louis Chief Recovery Officer Julian Nicks told STLPR.
FEMA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The EF3 tornado ripped through north St. Louis on May 16, damaging an estimated 10,000 properties in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
The city’s correspondence with FEMA shows the city plans to demolish 1,000 buildings that were damaged by the tornado and are considered dangerous.
Mayor Cara Spencer and Nicks asked FEMA to expand eligibility to demolish vacant or condemned buildings in a Dec. 8 letter, arguing that the properties cause a public health and safety threat and therefore qualify for FEMA’s Private Property Debris Removal program.
In a response on Feb. 3, regional FEMA administrator Catherine R. Sanders said demolition of structures condemned before the major disaster would not be eligible for reimbursement, citing a FEMA guidance document that has been in place since the Biden administration.
Nicks would not give specific numbers of buildings that would not qualify but said the city would be releasing that information in the coming days. Without federal funding, Nicks said the city will have to tap either the $100 million of state funding or city funding.
“Every dollar that we don’t get covered by FEMA is a dollar that has to come from somewhere else that can’t be used for all those other purposes that we know are much needed in our recovery,” Nicks said.
A state bill passed not long after the tornado allocated roughly $100 million in funding toward recovery efforts in St. Louis, but the city has not used that money. Currently, legislators are considering allocating an additional $86 million as part of the state supplemental budget.
The February letter from FEMA also laid out other guidance that could disqualify large numbers of St. Louis properties for demolition reimbursement. The federal agency defines private residential properties as buildings with four or fewer units. It does not cover commercial structures and considers multiple structures owned by the same entity to be commercial, regardless of the number of units.
That would include landlords with multiple properties in the tornado area, or families living in multiple homes that are all owned by one person.
This policy is designed to require people with means to pay for their own repairs. But Nicks said it presents a specific challenge in north St. Louis for families that inherited their homes and act as a caretaker for more than one property.
Nicks said this new information would not change St. Louis’ timeline to start working on demolitions. The city still plans to start broader-scale demolitions in March and ramp them up over the next few months.
“From my standpoint, I don’t care what FEMA wants to fund, what FEMA doesn’t want to fund,” Nicks said. “What we care about is, what does a holistic recovery look like for people who are impacted by the tornado? For most of ours, that’s not demo and debris, it is repair.”
The FEMA Private Property Debris Removal program is being handled by Missouri, and the state is still selecting a company to do that work.
According to STL Recovers’ demolition dashboard, around 361 requested demolitions are being examined for their total scope of work. The state is contracting out around 96 demolitions and the city 55. Ten months after the tornado, the city has completed only 31 demolitions, Nicks told STLPR.
In total, the city received roughly 4,200 applications for a variety of different property assistance related to tornado damage. That can vary from demolitions and debris cleanup to repairs. However, the city’s repair program has also struggled to take flight as officials try to “build an airplane while it’s flying,” Nicks said.
Meanwhile, city residents complain that the pace of recovery in north city is slow. At recent town halls and committee meetings, residents appeared in force calling for St. Louis to do more for the tornado-impacted area, even calling for Spencer and the Board of Aldermen to tap into the roughly $280 million of Rams settlement money.
Nicks, Spencer and other members of the St. Louis Recovery Office say they understand work has been slow but are confident that in coming months the city will make progress in “visible” ways in the neighborhoods.
“If we want people to believe ‘my neighborhood has a future,’ they have to both believe that they can stay, they have to believe that the properties that are preservable in their area will come back and be populated, and they have to believe that the vacant properties won’t become eyesores the way that LRA properties and other vacant properties have been in a neighborhood,” Nicks said.
The vacant property problem
Vacant properties make up a good deal of the buildings that need to be knocked down. The recovery office estimates nearly half of the buildings that will need demolition were vacant before the tornado, which makes them almost all “universally ineligible” for demolition through FEMA funding.
Nicks said most of those buildings hadn’t been cared for structurally, meaning when the tornado hit they were more likely to be structurally compromised. But, he said that they were still damaged by the tornado in a way that he thought would make their demolition eligible for FEMA reimbursement.
“Condemnation doesn’t mean the building was unsafe before,” Nicks said. “It may have needed braces or investment that could have made it a structurally safe structure that now is a fully collapsed structure. So even then condemnation does not equal ‘it needed demolition pre-tornado.’”
Sanders, from FEMA, said in the Feb. 3 letter that vacant structures that weren’t previously condemned could qualify for FEMA demolition if the tornado made them an immediate health or safety threat.
Vacant properties have long been a thorn in the city’s side. The St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative estimates roughly 22,000 properties in the city are possibly vacant. The collaborative is confident that about 14,000 of those properties are definitely vacant.
In the neighborhoods impacted by the tornado, the collaborative’s data estimates at least 1,787 are vacant.
Tracking vacant properties is a challenge, as the city doesn’t compile the data itself. The collaborative scrapes city data from the building division, the assessor’s office, the Forestry division and the Citizens’ Service Bureau to determine if a property is vacant.
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