Cortex neighborhood planning & development financing

Client: Cortex Innovation District Category: Urban Design, Community Planning, Economic Development, Visual Analysis

The Cortex Innovation Community is a vibrant, 200-acre hub of business, innovation, and technology integrated into St. Louis’ historic Central West End and Forest Park Southeast neighborhoods. Cortex is surrounded by nationally ranked universities and medical centers, and abundant cultural and recreational assets. PGAV has been engaged with Cortex leadership as a trusted advisor with respect to neighborhood development planning and development finance initiatives.

For the past five years, PGAV has helped advise Cortex leadership on development finance initiatives and land use patterns. To do this, we maintain a database tracking projections, revenues, businesses, and parcels that is updated quarterly as new information is released. From this data, we create dynamic and easy to understand visuals showing progress towards bond repayment that allow for analysis by redevelopment area, time period, revenue type, and other factors, with the goal of creating materials that are useful, intuitive, and promote constructive dialog among project stakeholders. As changes in the corridor occur, we help evaluate future goals and impacts. The goals are to take advantage of current opportunities, to continue to build a diversity of uses (including residential and retail uses), to build needed infrastructure, and to develop a diverse, high-functioning neighborhood that encourages connections between businesses, entrepreneurs and residents.