Legislative Entrepreneurship in Urban Real Estate Development:
A Framework for Policy-Driven Revitalization
A Case Study of 909 Chestnut Street, St. Louis
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Blevins-Blevins-msred-cre-2026-Thesis.pdf
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Author(s)
Blevins, Joshua David
Advisor(s)
Weintraub, Chip
Date Issued
February 2026
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
The American urban landscape is littered with the vestiges of decline: vacant office towers, abandoned factories, and hollowed-out downtowns that once anchored regional economies. Traditional real estate development theory, articulated in foundational texts such as Geltner and Miller’s Commercial Real Estate Analysis and Investments (2014), assumes functioning markets where price signals guide capital allocation toward highest-value uses. Yet in severely distressed urban cores, this fundamental mechanism breaks down. Construction costs remain relatively fixed while achievable rents and values plummet, creating structural gaps that render conventional development infeasible regardless of execution quality. This thesis examines this paradox through the lens of 909 Chestnut Street in St. Louis, Missouri —a 44-story, 1.4-million-square-foot tower that epitomizes the urban doom loop afflicting American cities. Built in 1986 as Southwestern Bell's world headquarters and once valued at $205 million, the building sold in 2024 for just $3.6 million—a 98% decline representing the near-total evaporation of value in what remains Missouri's largest office structure. Drawing on the author's direct experience as Managing Director of Development for the Goldman Group, which acquired the building, and as a principal drafter of the bill to create Missouri Innovation, Public Safety, and Accountability Act (“Missouri Acts”), this thesis develops a framework of “legislative entrepreneurship” to explain how developers in distressed markets can transcend their traditional role as policy recipients to become active designers of comprehensive policy reform. The theoretical foundation integrates John Kingdon's (1984) policy entrepreneurship framework with Clarence Stone's (1989) urban regime theory to explain how policy change occurs at the local level. Where Kingdon identified “policy windows” created by the alignment of problems, proposals, and politics, this thesis argues that real estate developers possess unique capabilities to exploit such windows—technical expertise in development economics, financial resources to sustain extended advocacy, and direct stakes that motivate persistent engagement. The resulting “legislative entrepreneurship” extends Stone's insight that effective urban governance requires coordinating public authority with private resources, showing how developers can function as architects of governing coalitions rather than merely participants in them. The empirical contribution traces the proposed development of Innovation Overlay Districts —a proposal the author puts forward in the draft Missouri Acts legislation—with bundled incentives tied to measurable community outcomes through a Master Scorecard system. This potential framework replaces fragmented, discretionary incentive processes with objective criteria, addressing the unpredictability that standard real estate finance texts identify as a major barrier to investment in distressed markets. The thesis argues that in severely distressed contexts, legislative entrepreneurship emerges as a necessary adaptation—one that challenges both conventional development practice and real estate education's traditional focus on responding to policy environments rather than shaping them.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Real Estate. Program in Real Estate Development.
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