New mortgages signal hope for north St. Louis neighborhood

ST. LOUIS — In June, a family bought the house across from the old St. James United Church of Christ, a 1911 brick converted two-family, for $300,000.

In most St. Louis-area neighborhoods, the sale would be unremarkable, perhaps noted among Zillow junkies as a good deal for its size.

But in far north St. Louis, where population decline, vacancy and the ensuing problems of drugs and violence have kept an unrelenting weight on a functioning housing market, the sale was unusual, particularly because the buyers were able to take out a mortgage on the College Hill neighborhood home.

Cole Hines, a U.S. Coast Guardsman transferred here more than a year ago from Duluth, Minnesota, said the price for the recently remodeled home of more than 4,000 square feet was hard to pass up. He and his wife needed plenty of space for their five children. They knew finding comparable sales for the house might be a challenge. But once the appraiser saw the house and the workmanship, he didn’t need any coaxing.

“We didn’t have any troubles getting it appraised,” Hines said. “We thought we would, but we did not.”

The man who rehabbed the home, Johnel Langerston, is one of Hines’ new neighbors.

For Langerston, 60, the sale and mortgage represent a triumph after years of work in what was long regarded as one of the roughest neighborhoods in north St. Louis.

A resident of the neighborhood since 2012, Langerston’s work rehabbing several houses there has helped build on past investments, giving the northern end of College Hill, just a few hundred feet from O’Fallon Park, a far more intact feel than the streets closer to the historic water towers that serve as the neighborhood’s landmarks.

Along College Avenue, there’s the Mount Grace Convent of cloistered “Pink Sister” nuns and their well-maintained campus. There’s the mansion at the corner of Conde Street built 20 years ago by Eddie and Carmen Gamble and the smattering of new homes constructed over the past decade by a nonprofit arm of the Lutheran Church.

It wasn’t Langerston’s plan to become a rehabber and real estate investor. He wanted to run a basketball camp for kids, which he still does out of the gymnasium of the old St. James church where he lives with his wife. Langerston, an ex-con who did a stint in prison for drug trafficking, came to St. Louis from Oakland, California, after, his story goes, he searched online for the “worst place to live.” Langerston still runs a marketing company in California and used the proceeds to buy the old church.

He garnered a few headlines early on for his work running the basketball camp and its associated academic program. He says it has been a hit among kids and families in the surrounding neighborhoods.

“My focus is children,” Langerston said. “I stumbled into this.”

The real estate work started because of the house where the Hines live now. It was “drug-infested” when Langerston moved into the neighborhood, he said. A man who stayed there would try and hawk his product to mothers dropping off their kids at the church for basketball. Langerston confronted him one day, but the dealer told him that because he didn’t own the property, he could get lost.

“So I found the owners, and I bought it,” Langerston said. “I can’t tell you to move if I don’t own it.”

That was in 2015. He didn’t know much about home remodeling then.

Now, he sounds like a Realtor, showing off closet space and discussing how his interior home layouts “play” with natural…