Crossroads Grand Opening April 2026
Pictured left to right: SLDC President and CEO Stephen Westbrooks; EverTrue President and CEO Adam Marles; Sean Spencer, Executive Director, Tower Grove CDC; Mayor Cara Spencer; and Jason Kempf, Board President, Tower Grove CDC.
Tower Grove Community Development Corporation is proud to share that EverTrue Crossroads at Bevo Mill has been honored as “Development of the Year” at the 2026 Mayor’s Celebration of Businesses, presented by the St. Louis Development Corporation (SLDC). The award recognizes projects that strengthen St. Louis neighborhoods and contribute to the region’s economy.
For everyone who has been part of this project, the recognition means a great deal. Crossroads did not happen quickly or easily. It took nearly 7 years of planning, financing, and neighborhood conversations to turn a corner of Gravois Avenue into a home for 64 households.
A Place to Grow Older Without Leaving Home
Crossroads was co-developed by EverTrue and Tower Grove CDC with a simple purpose: to give older adults who have spent their lives in Bevo Mill a high-quality, affordable way to stay in the neighborhood they love.
That idea has guided us from the start. Too often, longtime residents watch their neighborhoods improve just as rising costs or aging homes push them out. At Crossroads, people have the opportunity to stay in their neighborhood as they get older, close to their churches, their friends, their favorite restaurants, and the streets they know.
Located at 4900 Gravois Avenue, the building includes 64 apartments, 57 of them set aside for low- and very low-income seniors, along with community rooms and on-site management. The project is also the first in the area built to the design and development goals of the Bevo Great Streets Plan, a sign that the neighborhood’s long-term vision for Gravois is becoming real.
One Neighbor’s Story
A new tenant moved into Crossroads on September 30. A few months earlier, he was in a very different place.
After losing his wife, he also lost her income. He was facing funeral costs, roughly $45,000 in repairs on the family home (a failing sewer line, roof, and furnace, and a garage that was falling down), and a growing stack of bills. The city had begun citing the property, and fees were piling up. His monthly bills ran about $3,100, while Social Security and a part-time job brought in about $1,800. The worry was making him sick.
His banker, who had been helping him sort through his finances, brought him to see the new apartments at Crossroads. After talking it over with his son and daughter, who both travel for work and couldn’t be nearby to help, he applied and was approved.
Today, his rent, including utilities and cable, is $570 a month. Selling his house as-is let him pay off every outstanding bill, his car, and a credit card that was close to charging off, and still put money into savings. His debt-to-income ratio dropped from 174% to 31%.
More important than the numbers is how life feels now. He can buy groceries, add to the till at his church, and fill his gas tank without worry. He recently stopped by his bank with a thank-you card and a balloon and mentioned that he’d gone swing dancing the weekend before, and that he can now do laundry in his own in-unit washer and dryer.
As his banker put it: “This is what makes me happy about my job.”
Capital, Patience, Persistence and Partnerships
If we had to sum up what it took to build Crossroads, it would be four words: capital, patience, persistence and partnerships.
The financing alone required layering federal and state Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, HUD Section 202 support, Community Development Block Grant funding and Affordable Housing Trust Fund funding, a Missouri Housing Development Commission loan, and construction financing, each with its own requirements and timelines. Holding those pieces together through rising construction costs and shifting markets took years of steady work.
No single organization could have done it alone. We are deeply grateful to our co-developer EverTrue, whose experience in senior housing and HUD 202 made this possible; to Jerry Burka for his deal-making; to EM Harris Construction; to the National Equity Fund; to Midwest BankCentre; and to the City of St. Louis and SLDC. We also thank architect Rosemann & Associates, Better Bevo Now, the Newport Heights Neighborhood Association, the Bevo Community Improvement District. Neighbors showed up to meetings, asked hard questions, and made this a better project.
What This Award Says About St. Louis
Accepting the award, EverTrue President and CEO Adam Marles described the project as an example of what a community can achieve when it rallies around a shared vision, and credited nearly a decade of collaboration among mission-driven organizations, neighbors, and public-private partners.
We agree, and we think the lesson reaches beyond one building. Crossroads is a testament that the City and nonprofit stakeholders, with resources and partnerships, can accomplish complicated development projects together. That is where CDCs thrive in our city: taking on the projects that are too complex, too slow, or too mission-driven for the market to deliver on its own, and seeing them through.
Since welcoming residents at our grand opening on April 30, 2026, Crossroads has become what we hoped it would be: a home. This award belongs to the residents who live there, the neighbors who believed in it, and every partner who kept going when it would have been easier to stop.
Thank you, St. Louis. We’re just getting started.
2026 Mayor’s Celebration of Businesses- Tower Grove CDC and Evertrue Group Shot