Exciting Events and Activities in St. Louis
Crestwood Spent Nine Years Deciding What Its Empty Mall Was Worth. Its Housing Market Still Hasn't Settled.
Exciting Events and Activities in St. Louis
By Tuesday evening in late August 2022, cars were parked bumper to bumper in a small lot at Watson and Sappington roads, tailgate chairs unfolded, a dozen families settling in for the night. They were camping outside a sales trailer for a subdivision that didn't exist yet, on ground that had been an empty field for the better part of a decade. By 11 the next morning, 31 people were in line. McBride Homes moved its planned Saturday grand opening up to Wednesday and started writing contracts on the spot. By the end of the weekend, 52 of the 81 home sites at what would become The Villages at Crestwood Crossing were sold.
That scene is worth sitting with, because it's the moment the math finally worked on a piece of land that had defeated four separate development plans since Crestwood Mall closed for good in 2013. And it's also the moment that split "Crestwood" into two housing markets that don't behave the same way, even though they share a ZIP code and a school district line.
Crestwood Mall opened in 1957 as one of the region's first shopping centers with more than one department store. By the mid 2000s the anchors were leaving one by one. Dillard's closed in 2007, Macy's in 2009, Sears in 2012. The concourses shut in 2013, and demolition wrapped in 2017, leaving 47 acres of graded dirt along Route 66's old alignment.
Centrum Properties bought the mall in 2008 for $17.5 million and couldn't get a redevelopment deal past Crestwood's board of aldermen over tax incentive terms. UrbanStreet Group picked up the site in a 2014 online auction for $3.6 million, floated a $79 million mixed-use plan with $25 million in city incentives in 2016, then quietly seeded the lot with prairie grass while the project sat in limbo. A third suitor, Walpert Properties, walked away when the pandemic hit.
What finally closed the deal in 2022 was a different structure entirely. Instead of one developer trying to make an entertainment-and-office megaproject pencil out, the city split the site: Dierbergs took the commercial frontage along Watson Road, and McBride Homes took the back half for straight residential construction. Then-mayor Grant Mabie put it plainly when the groundbreaking finally happened that April: a project this size essentially required a public subsidy to move at all. Separating the grocery anchor from the housing let each half get priced on its own terms, which is exactly why the two products inside "Crestwood Crossing" don't look or price like each other, and don't price like the rest of Crestwood either.
When McBride announced pricing for The Villages at Crestwood Crossing in 2022, homes ran from the $320,000s to the $600,000s, split across three distinct product lines built on three different lot sizes:
| Village | Homes | Lot size | Product |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Estates | 16 | roughly 60' x 120' (7,200 sq ft) | McBride Oakwood Series |
| The Manors | 34 | roughly 50' x 120-125' (6,000-6,250 sq ft) | McBride Bayside Series |
| The Townes | 31 | roughly 30' x 110' (3,300 sq ft), alley-loaded | McBride Bellisimo, adapted from La Collina on The Hill |
That's new construction on lots as small as 3,300 square feet sitting inside a city best known for something else entirely. A letter to the editor in the St. Louis Call Newspapers made the point better than any market report could: Crestwood's identity was built on 1950s ranch homes in neighborhoods like Ridgewood and around Whitecliff Park, the kind with a finished basement that doubled the square footage and let a family age in place. Those ranches, the writer argued, are what make a drive through Crestwood recognizable as Crestwood.
Blend those two products into a single median price and you get a number that describes neither one accurately. A buyer or seller working from a citywide average is pricing against a mix of 70-year-old ranches and 4-year-old alley-loaded townhomes as though they're interchangeable comps. They aren't. Broad averages blur products that buyers price very differently once they're standing inside them, and a 3,300-square-foot lot with an alley garage and a 1950s ranch with a finished basement are two of the clearest examples in this market.
Dierbergs opened its 72,000-square-foot store on March 28, 2023, anchoring the commercial side of the site. What followed wasn't a finished shopping center so much as an ongoing lease-up. By September 2023, Dierbergs' director of real estate was telling the Crestwood Board of Aldermen about six more businesses under construction: Panera Bread, Club Pilates, Crumbl Cookies, Rooster Men's Grooming Center, and an eye care center.
The next phase turned toward sit-down dining. A high-end Mexican concept from the family behind Syberg's, Twisted Tree, and Helen Fitzgerald's broke ground alongside a new Katie's Pizza & Pasta Osteria location. The Mexican STL opened in September 2025, and Katie's followed in February 2026.
The build-out hasn't slowed since. As of this month, two more concepts are heading to Crestwood Crossing: The Brass Tap, an upscale beer bar opening its second St. Louis-area location, and JoJo's Biscuit Co., a Columbia-based breakfast and brunch concept making its first St. Louis appearance. Both are targeting an opening window between this December and spring 2027, though the owners describe that timeline as tentative. On the infrastructure side, the city has approved a Chase Bank branch with a drive-thru ATM and a QuikTrip gas station and convenience store, both slated to break ground this fall.
None of that is cosmetic. A buyer touring Crestwood Crossing today and a buyer touring it next spring will be looking at a materially different amenity base, which matters for anyone trying to compare this corridor to a static listing photo or a market report written even a few months ago.
There's a piece of local history that explains why Sunset Hills never ended up with anything resembling Crestwood Crossing. Famous-Barr once had plans to relocate out of Crestwood Mall into a new outdoor shopping center in Sunset Hills. That Sunset Hills project was canceled, and Famous-Barr stayed put at Crestwood instead. Had it gone the other way, Sunset Hills might be the city with the big-box retail corridor along Route 66 today, and Crestwood might look more like the quieter, larger-lot suburb Sunset Hills has remained.
That difference shows up in the numbers now. Sunset Hills' average home value stood at $629,425 as of the end of July 2026, up 4.9% over the prior year. A buyer paying that premium is largely paying for what Sunset Hills doesn't have: the drive-thru banks, the gas station canopies, the retail parking lots that come with being the corridor's commercial center. A buyer choosing new construction inside Crestwood Crossing is paying for the opposite trade, proximity to a corridor that's still actively adding restaurants and services, often at a price point below Sunset Hills' citywide average despite being brand new.
One more wrinkle worth knowing before you go looking at comps: because all 81 homes in The Villages at Crestwood Crossing sold within a single August 2022 weekend, almost every transaction there since has been a resale, not new construction. Pricing a home inside that subdivision means pulling comps from inside those 81 lots, not from the ranch streets a few blocks over and not from Sunset Hills at all.
Is Crestwood Crossing a finished project? No. The Chase Bank branch and QuikTrip are both anticipated to start construction this fall, and The Brass Tap and JoJo's Biscuit Co. are targeting openings between December 2026 and spring 2027, though that window is still described as tentative by the businesses involved.
How many homes are actually in the new subdivision, and how often do they turn over? All 81 homes across the three villages sold during a single grand opening weekend in August 2022. Because there's no ongoing new-construction pipeline inside the subdivision, almost every sale there since has been a resale of one of those original 81 homes.
If you're trying to figure out which version of Crestwood or Sunset Hills actually matches what you're picturing, whether that's a mid-century ranch with room to expand or a newer build inside a corridor that's still adding restaurants, Svoboda Shell can walk the comps with you street by street rather than by citywide average.