As First Alert 4 reported, Carter Maier said outside a Missouri courtroom on September 22, 2026, "It's still a big dark cloud hanging over our heads." He and his wife Roxanne run a dance and chiropractic studio on Manchester Road in Brentwood, one of the businesses at the center of a legal fight that has been running since December 2023 and just reached the state's appellate court.
The dispute is over a single word: blighted. In 2023, the city of Brentwood applied that designation to a stretch of Manchester Road between South Hanley Road and Brentwood Boulevard, clearing the legal path for a $436 million redevelopment. A blight finding under Missouri's TIF statute does two things at once. It opens the door to tax increment financing, and it opens the door to eminent domain under Missouri's eminent-domain law. For a business owner on that stretch of road, or for anyone weighing whether to buy near it, those two doors matter more than any median price or school rating.
A Word That Does Legal Work
In everyday use, blight describes a place in visible decline. In Missouri redevelopment law, it describes something narrower and more procedural: a legislative finding that a city council can make about an area, which then unlocks specific tools. Once a corridor is blighted, the city can offer a developer public incentives to invest there, and it can use eminent domain to acquire holdout properties rather than relying on willing sellers.
That second power exists because of a 2006 Missouri law passed in direct response to the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 Kelo v. New London decision, which triggered a nationwide backlash against using eminent domain purely for economic development. Missouri, like 42 other states, tightened its rules afterward. As Fox News reported, cities can no longer take private property and hand it to a developer simply because the new use would generate more tax revenue.
That is the mechanism running underneath Manchester Road. Brentwood's Board of Aldermen approved the redevelopment ordinance in July 2023, and the courts have since had to decide whether the blight finding itself was legitimate or whether it was a workaround for a taking the city couldn't otherwise justify.
The Corridor Has Been Called Blighted Before
One detail from the case record is easy to miss and worth sitting with. This is not the first time this stretch of Manchester Road has carried the label. Roxanne Maier has said the area was deemed blighted back in 2018, largely tied to recurring flooding from Deer Creek, which runs behind her studio. That earlier designation eventually expired.
The corridor then went through a period of substantial public investment. Brentwood and the Missouri Department of Transportation spent, by different accounts in the record, somewhere between $80 million and $120 million on flood mitigation work along Manchester Road, work Mayor David Dimmitt himself called successful when it wrapped up. Then, in 2023, the city applied the blight label a second time, this time as the legal predicate for a private redevelopment deal rather than a flood project.
The same corridor has now carried two separate blight findings, years apart, each tied to a different public goal. A blight finding is a legal status defined by statute and adopted by a city council.
What the Designation Unlocks
The current plan calls for replacing existing storefronts along roughly 40 acres of Manchester Road with a mix of new construction: a hotel, condominiums, several hundred apartment units, and new retail space. To make that happen, Brentwood approved an incentive package worth $88.4 million for the project's developer, according to KSDK's reporting on the case.
That is the trade the blight finding makes possible. The city gets a denser, higher-revenue corridor. The developer gets public money. The roughly 75 properties inside the boundary, spanning about eight blocks, include a mix of vacant lots and operating small businesses. The city's original blight study noted that 26 of those parcels were vacant and 48 showed some sign of physical wear, like cracked pavement or a need for paint. Whether that adds up to blight in the way a court should recognize it is exactly what the case has been about.
The Developer Changed. The Legal Question Didn't.
Green Street, the firm Brentwood originally selected in September 2022, ran into financial trouble and effectively exited the project. A new firm, Halo Real Estate Ventures, formed by former Green Street staff, has taken over as the developer moving the Manchester Road plan forward. Green Street remains a consultant on some of Halo's other work but has no role in this particular project, according to a Halo representative who spoke with St. Louis Magazine.
That change in developer produced an argument that Ben Field, the attorney representing the business owners at the Institute for Justice, made directly to the appeals court last month. Halo has already closed on properties inside the redevelopment footprint, buying willingly from sellers rather than waiting for eminent domain. Field's point is straightforward: if a private buyer is voluntarily purchasing property in this corridor at a price both sides agree to, that undercuts the premise that the area is too deteriorated to function as ordinary real estate.
A St. Louis County circuit judge, Kristine Allen Kerr, had already ruled in the city's favor in September 2025, applying what's called the "fairly debatable" standard, as Reason reported. Under that standard, a court doesn't ask whether the blight finding was correct. It asks only whether reasonable people could disagree about it. If they could, the city's judgment stands. That is a low bar for a city to clear and a high one for a property owner to overcome, which is part of why the case is now in front of the Missouri Court of Appeals rather than settled.
The Freeze Underneath the Fight
There is a second-order effect worth understanding if you're looking at property anywhere near this corridor. Amy Stanford, who has run the meal-prep business Time for Dinner on Manchester Road for more than two decades, has said the uncertainty itself has been the problem. For over two years, the threat of eminent domain has made it harder for businesses in the area to invest in their own storefronts or expand, and she's noted that several new businesses that applied to open there were not approved by the city.
The business owners' view is that a corridor waiting on a legal outcome can see less reinvestment in its storefronts while it waits. The city's position, as its spokeswoman has described it, is that the plan is an economic development and flood management effort that was debated in public meetings over two years. The litigation was filed in December 2023 and is now approaching three years old, and the appeals court heard the case on September 22, 2026.
What This Actually Means If You're Looking in Brentwood
If you're evaluating a home or investment property near this stretch of Manchester Road, the single most useful thing you can do is find out whether the specific parcel sits inside the redevelopment boundary approved by the Board of Aldermen in 2023, and understand that the legal status of that boundary is not yet final. The Missouri Court of Appeals has the case now, and there's no public timeline for a ruling.
If the city's position holds, the corridor gets a hotel, new housing, and retail, built with an $88.4 million public assist, which could raise the profile and eventual value of nearby residential blocks the same way infrastructure and amenity investment typically does.
Either way, a buyer weighing property adjacent to or inside this corridor is pricing in a legal outcome, not just a location. That's a different kind of due diligence than checking comparable sales or school attendance zones, and it's specific to this stretch of road rather than to Brentwood as a whole.
A Few Questions Worth Asking Directly
Does the blight designation apply to residential streets in Brentwood, or just this stretch of Manchester Road? The designation and the redevelopment plan apply specifically to the commercial corridor between South Hanley Road and Brentwood Boulevard. It does not extend to Brentwood's residential neighborhoods outside that footprint.
If the appeals court sides with the business owners, does the redevelopment plan end? The record doesn't say what happens next in that scenario, only that the city's ability to use eminent domain within this footprint has been the exact question under review since the case began.
How can I find out if a property I'm considering sits inside the redevelopment boundary? The boundary was set by the ordinance the Board of Aldermen approved in July 2023, and its scope has been described in detail in court filings covered by outlets including KSDK and the Institute for Justice, which represents the business owners in the case. A local attorney or title company can confirm whether a specific address falls inside it.
If you're weighing a property near Manchester Road, or anywhere else in Brentwood, and want a clear-eyed read on what the address in front of you is actually worth right now, The Warner Hall Group can walk through it with you directly. Request a private consultation.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
