Chris Krehmeyer

In this episode of The Rundown with Rene Knott, Rene sits down with Chris Krehmeyer, President and CEO of Beyond Housing, for a powerful conversation about community, equity, and what it really takes to create lasting change in St. Louis. 

Krehmeyer breaks down why solving issues like housing, education, health, and economic development can’t happen in isolation—and why real progress only comes when communities invest in all of it together. From building homes and grocery stores to supporting schools and creating opportunity, Beyond Housing is working to transform entire neighborhoods, not just individual lives.

The conversation also dives into the challenges of scale, the importance of trust, and why meaningful change is a marathon—not a quick fix. Krehmeyer shares what keeps him motivated, the realities of leading this work, and his vision for a stronger, more unified St. Louis.

At its core, this episode asks a bigger question: what would happen if we truly invested in every community—and refused to leave anyone behind?

Brought to you by I Got Dan, LLC and Midwest BankCentre.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

When you do get that money, when you do change your family's life, where's your heart? Does it just flutter?

SPEAKER_02 0:06

Yeah, yeah. But look, it this it's look, I don't wake up to say, oh, well, we got a hundred employees and twenty million dollar budget. No, I wake up because we're making a difference, right? And if I wear some beyond housing gear out in the community, invariably somebody will say something to me. That's cool. You helped me buy a house, you know, I used to live in one of your homes. You help you help my baby go go to college, right? Well, all those different kinds of things that we've been able to do as an organization over these years. And and clearly, look, that's the biggest driver. And again, for me personally, it's yes to the individual stories, but I want to create community change.

SPEAKER_03 0:54

Want to thank you for joining us for this episode of the Run Down with Runny Not. In this episode, we're gonna talk about something that is huge in St. Louis, community. Because it's all about all of us working together as one because we are indeed stronger together. Someone who knows a great deal about that is Chris Craymeyer with Beyond Housing. He is here for this episode, and we're gonna get right into it. Good to see you, my friend. Good to see you. Anything's going well? Yes, sir. Glad to hear that.

SPEAKER_02 1:19

Show up every day, man.

SPEAKER_03 1:20

Put your head down. That's all we can't do, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:22

Show up, show up, put your head down, go to work.

SPEAKER_03 1:25

Yeah, I um before we get started, asked you about Beyond Housing being beyond housing. In other words, it's a great play on words. How much more do you guys trying to bring to the community besides the issue of housing itself?

SPEAKER_02 1:37

Well, well, the the key underlying thing for us, Randy, is the understanding that everything in community is interlated and interconnected. There's not a housing solution, there's not an education solution, there's not a health solution, jobs, economic development. Healthy, vibrant communities, it all works together. And quite frankly, most people don't even think about it because that's why they live there. So for us in the communities that we serve, we know those things aren't working as well as the families who live there want them to be or they should be. So for us, yes, we own, we own housing on 800 units of affordable rental housing. We've built hundreds of new homes for home ownership. We own two senior buildings. We've rehabbed over 1,500 homes in our community, the boundaries of the Normandy Schools Collaborative, owner-occupied homes. You know, moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas lived there forever. Now the home's starting to show a little wear and tear. We helped them reinvest in that home and that bigger asset of their life. We have staff embedded in schools. Uh again, we do economic development work. We own a movie theater that we all that we also operate. We built a food hall so folks in the community have a place to sit down. We built a grocery store, we have a health facility. We just bought a church that's gonna turn into an arts facility. We work with all those little cities in St. Louis County. Everybody bemoans, like, why aren't they working together? Folks up in our community are working together. This past August, we had 17 municipalities. Let me say that again, Brandy. That wasn't two, three, or four. Seventeen working together, and and they passed a transportation development district. A new governmental body that's gonna bring$2 million a year to help them work on their on their streets, their curbs, and their sidewalks, right? Working together. What St. Louis is always bemoaned, it's happening in this community. For us, it's recognizing if we don't tackle all of this and see the interconnectivity between if you live in a stable housing situation, then your family can focus on being financially stronger and healthier. When you're in a stable housing situation, your kids can do better in school. When you have good schools, you're attracting other folks who want to be in your community. It all fits together. And it's not a St. Louis thing, it's it's nationally. We we fund it to be funded in silos.

SPEAKER_04 3:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:36

And what we're saying is this all fits together, and we need to invest in community and people live there in a comprehensive way.

SPEAKER_03 3:42

Having said all that, it sounds very easy as far as people buying into it. But what has been the obstacles that has kind of held you guys back from really reaching your full potential?

SPEAKER_02 3:52

Well, for us, Rennie, it's just the idea of scale, right? We're doing all the right kinds of things, but we're not at scale. We need to build more housing, we need to rehab more housing, we need to serve more families, we need to help the school district be successful, we need to work on the health and well-being of our community because we know asthma and diabetes and heart disease are terrible issues in this community that aren't being addressed in a real and significant way. And to do that, it's all about capital, right? It's not about charity per se, right? It's about capital. And then how do we get both the region and other state and federal resources to say, stop sprinkling money around, right? And then be then be frustrated that we don't have any community level change, right? My organization, the one you're running now, many others, have these great individual stories of success. Yay, right? But but we don't have community level change yet, right? When we think about St. Louis, we think about North City and North County, what's happened the last 30, 40, 50 years? All going the wrong direction, even though there have been some attempts. But again, if you don't understand the problem of the interlatedness, and if you don't invest in a significant way, we're not going to see real change. It's also a marathon, too.

SPEAKER_03 5:01

I think a lot of folks would have come in and want to see the change fairly immediate. When that doesn't happen, they're like, ah, back out of this.

SPEAKER_02 5:08

You mean you mean our society wants things quick these days? I think you know how it is. Is that how it is?

SPEAKER_03 5:11

What it yesterday?

SPEAKER_02 5:12

Yeah, so again, the situation in where we work up in Normandy didn't get there overnight, so it's not going to turn around overnight. It's not going to turn in an election cycle, it's not going to turn in a in a funding cycle from a grand tour, right? It it is it is indeed a marathon, but in that marathon, you know, you're checking your times, right? Right? So in this kind of work, are are we making progress, right? So you can drive through the community we work in and you can see new homes, you can see rehabbed homes, you can see, again, the the proverbial green shoots of change, right? But if you don't keep investing, right, if you don't keep again supporting and nurturing the continued growth, then you're not going to be successful. A great example in our work, in our community, is the moment a family does better in our community, what's the first thing they do? They leave. Because it's not, the place is not there yet. The schools aren't good enough. It doesn't feel safe enough yet, right? I get that, right? So until the collective we make it good enough for people to say, you know what, I think I can stay here. Yeah, things are getting better. And people from the outside say, Man, there's some really good stuff happening over there. Maybe I can move in there. And it's not being gentrified, right? It's not about moving moving the poor folk out and bringing in the other world. No, it's about the people who live there. Make this better for you. You live here today. Let's make a place you call home everything you want it to be.

SPEAKER_03 6:29

You got to build the trust off. Get people to believe in your vision.

SPEAKER_02 6:33

Community building opens happens at the speed of trust. Yeah, right? And trust is, it's it's it's not the ribbon cuttings, it's not the groundbreakings, it's each and every day. Three yards in a cloud of dust, right? Get back up, do it again, do it again, do it again. And for us, when you make mistakes, which which we have, you you hold the hold your hand up and say, Admit to. Sorry about that. And what I tell people is what that means for us as an organization is we're willing to be vulnerable and a pod like that because we do care about this relationship. We care about I ain't gonna apologize. No, you know, we made some mistakes. So I've been in big crowds when I raised my hand and say, Yeah, we didn't do that the way you said. Did it right?

SPEAKER_01 7:14

Did do it right.

SPEAKER_02 7:15

I can promise you we're not gonna do that again. Now, we're not gonna be perfect moving forward. So you build that trust, and you also build that trust when people say, Boy, you know, we'd love to have some entertainment, and Beyond Housing works with you, talks to you, and boom, there's a movie theater in your community, right? People like, oh my god, there's a movie theater here. We never thought that happened. Well, you guys asked, you know, could we help you with that? And we did it. You said you want better housing, so we're rehabbing housing, building housing. So when people see your action and not the well-intended folk come in and say, hey, what do you want and how can we help? No, people weary of that, right? Because you come in, you have a grant, grant gets grant gets spent, and then you're gone. Now, where are you? So people are like, no, I don't have time for that. I need, I need, I need to have confidence that this is going to move forward. The way, the way we try to do is a methodology we call ask, align, and act. Ask people in the community, look, this is your home. Tell us what's working, what's not working. But more importantly, what are the solutions to the problems you see? Our job with you is to align the resources, right? Programmatically, organizationally, financially, to get that stuff done. And at the end, act. You know, people want to see some tangible results. They don't they don't want a bunch of lip service and fancy speeches, right? So true.

SPEAKER_03 8:26

They want to see the truth to get better. Well, one of the things you're doing would make people think that, oh, he must be a magician. Ta-da, ta-da! Making all these things happen. We talked about how this is a marathon. So, my question to you is how are you not tired? How are you not run down? Before you answer that, let me take a quick break.

SPEAKER_00 8:45

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SPEAKER_03 9:17

All right, it's time to continue that thought with Chris. So, how are you not tired? How are you not run down? What keeps you motivated, keeps you pushing?

SPEAKER_02 9:25

Well, it's it's the impact we have on the families that we serve every day. My office is in an old school building in Pine Lawn. Um, and I look out this window of the old principal's office in Garfield Elementary, and I see the kids walking to and from Barack Obama Elementary, which is you know two blocks down. And I know as adults, we're failing yet another generation of children. We're not giving them the equity of opportunity to live out their best lives. And I'm like, I'm I'm I'm unwilling to be a part of that, right? Right? I'm unwilling to say, nope, we got to do better. Um and I know what we're doing is impacting people's lives, just not as much in each circumstance, and it's not at scale relative to the community. So every look, every day we're helping thousands and thousands of people in St. Louis, whether you live in one of our units, whether again you go to the Norway schools and we help 85% of the kids every every school year in a significant kind of way, whether you're touching all the other programs that we have to offer, we know we're making a difference. So again, I you can't do this work if you get hung up on it's hard, if you get hung up on uh systems don't work, if you get hung up on, you know, it's not one straight line up, there's a whole bunch of two steps forward, one step back, two steps back, one step forward. But you're there because if you're successful, people's lives are changed.

SPEAKER_03 10:39

How do you handle the emotions of the job? Because you're gonna go for a grant, not get it. You're gonna get it, put it to use, you're gonna see a family's life change, you're gonna see a community change. Obviously, those are things that tug at the heart's things. How do you keep your emotions in check?

SPEAKER_02 10:53

Well, again, look, if in in in this business, if you don't have thick skin and you can't take a no, man, you don't even start. Because that's just the way it goes, right? You're gonna get a whole lot more no's than yeses. And for me, it's okay, well, what didn't we do to get a yes? Right? How can we be better to get the yes next time? And just again, I I thick skin, short memory, man. You know, get it because because again, because again, the people we serve don't care about my feelings. They don't care that I'm that I'm sad. It's like, what are you gonna do with this money? That's right. That's all they want to know. That's right. So and but but the reality is to do this work, you have to understand that you're running a business, as you and I talked earlier, whose business model is terribly flawed, right? So so we got into this fiscal year for us. Um our budget's around 20 million. 10 million of that is charitable contributions that I hope I get. Yeah, yeah. I got I don't have prayers. I don't have a guarantee of 10 million, right? So so you go into it saying, I'm pretty confident in that, we're not gonna be foolish, but I we still got to make that happen, right? And and we don't have control over that. Again, we're we're yes, I'm selling the mission and the work we're doing, but there's no guarantees that that that money is gonna come in the door.

SPEAKER_03 12:07

When you do get that money, when you do change your family's life, where's your heart? Does it just flutter?

SPEAKER_02 12:14

Yeah, yeah. But look, it this it's look, I don't wake up to say, oh, well, we got 100 employees and 20 million budget. No, I wake up because we're making a difference, right? And if I wear some beyond housing gear out in the community, invariably somebody will say something to me. That's cool. You helped me buy a house, you know, I used to live in one of your homes, you help you help my baby go go to college, right? Well, all those different kinds of things that we've been able to do as an organization over these years. And and clearly, look, that's the biggest driver. And again, for for me personally, it's yes to the individual stories, but I want to create community change, right? I I can I look I look in the mirror, I I yeah, you you try you did you try to get it, they do go get some sleep and do it again. But but what I really want to do is can we get to community level change? Because that's where the cascading impact lies, right? It's not the individual stories, oh, they're so great, and we should we should try to make those happen. But imagine if we can turn a place like Pine Lawn and Wellston and Hillsdale and all these places that have suffered for literally decades. Imagine if we turn those around, the vibrancy of those communities came back, and those families had the chance to succeed, and they did have the equity of opportunity to live their best possible lives.

SPEAKER_03 13:23

Where does all this love for the community come from?

SPEAKER_02 13:26

You know, uh I I grew up in a working class family, right? I didn't I didn't know a dog want to think about not-for-profits, right? You know, my folks paid the bills and you know, we have a simple life. Um, you know, we were talking to somebody about vacations. You know, you and I are the age when you took a vacation, that means you rode in a car for about seven, seven hours. Exactly. And if you're the youngest like me, you rode the hump, right? So um, so so the world, the world is a is a different place, but as as as we think about you know, what can we do um to really make a difference and say I was a part of something, right? I gave my best, right? I know um when I hand the baton off to my successor that the race ain't gonna be done, right? But I want to make sure that I'm running hard through the tape, right? And I'm handing the baton off and say, go. And I know that hopefully I got us closer to that sense of community level change, that I got us closer to um saying that this is how we should treat our neighbors, this is how we should treat the children of our of our community. Um, because guess what? If they do better, we all win.

unknown 14:30

Right.

SPEAKER_02 14:30

And that's that and that's the frustrating part, right? It's not it's it's not like it's a zero-sum game where I want to take something from you and give it to somebody else. No, no. Uh we can do this proverbial, we're gonna raise all boats here, right? If we have the courage to invest differently, to act differently, if leadership in St. Louis can say, we have to stop doing things the things that we have been doing for decades, and we're frustrated that, oh, look, look what's happening in the region, right? We keep going backwards, we're sliding in the metrics of where we sit across the country. Well, guess what? Y'all should do something different then, right?

SPEAKER_03 15:02

It's kind of right right in your face. Yeah. Um, do you think this is contagious? Do you think people are catching onto your model and going, we could do that here, or is it a still a slow process? It's a slow process.

SPEAKER_02 15:14

I mean, look, so again, we'll take St. Louis as an example. What's our regional North Star? Like, what are we what are we all saying, yeah, man? That's that's who we all want to be. What's my part in making that North Star happen? Right? We we need regional leadership, right? The people always point to Detroit, right? Oh, the the turnaround in Detroit. Well, I've been and I've visited and I've seen some of my peers who work up there. And yeah, downtown, yeah, yay. You hit rock bottom and now you're coming up. Um, but Detroit only happened because one guy, Dan Gilbert from Quick and Loan, said to the other leadership in Detroit, I'm gonna drop a ridiculous amount of my money here, if and only if all you guys get your act together and have a plan about how we're gonna do this together. And in St. Louis, we just don't have that right now. We we we forever worrying about city-county merger. Fine. So here's a great example. We spend energy on the merger, and I want to know to do what? Okay, so we're gonna have a better structure, okay, but what are we gonna do that's gonna make St. Louis better? People somehow think, oh, we do merger, problem solved. No, we still have all these other issues. So again, this is this example: a merger is a good and positive thing, but then you have to say, but what are we gonna do and how is that gonna effectuate real change versus the top headline about a merger? It's such a such a short-sighted conversation, right? Where do we want to be and then work backwards to figure out well, does a city-county merger make that happen? Does does consolidation in St. Louis County make it happen? Are there too many school districts? Should we have that conversation? And we never get to that.

SPEAKER_03 16:52

There's a lot of conversations that have to be had. And and I think when I look at it between the county and and the city, do I think it'd be better off if it was all one? Yes. Because I think it adds to the tax base, I think it adds to the ability to protect people. I just think it it adds to the sense of somebody living in West County saying, I better give a damn about the city because now my zip code is tied to it. I need to do a better job for our entire region. So as you look towards the future, you're 30 plus years into the game now. Do you see it all coming together, or do you think this is um marathon, a race that is never going to be won? That it is going to just go on and on and on and on. I mean, because sometimes you I look at it sometimes and I think why is it still this way? And it's been this way ever since I've been here, and that's been 22 years.

SPEAKER_02 17:45

So look, I I I'm not naive to think everybody in St. Louis is gonna be a millionaire, right? I'm not naive to any of that. But what I am confident about is as a region, we can do so much better if we invest in those folks who have been left behind for far too long, that we all win. I think we need an inflection point that, quite frankly, we still haven't got yet, right? You know, again, Detroit only turned around after they hit bottom. I don't want us to hit bottom in the region. I want us to be proactive and say, what are the things that are holding us back? Again, structurally, of course it makes sense to bring the city and the county together. But then again, the deeper conversations to accomplish what to bring out efficiencies. That's not our North Star. What do you want to? We want to both be the most efficient region. No, no, right? But yes, that's a tool to achieve something greater, right? Look, we know public schools aren't working, right? What are we doing about it? What are the big conversations around how do we teach our children in a better way? Right? And it's not simply choice and charter, those are pieces of the puzzle, but public education still has to work.

SPEAKER_03 18:52

Right.

SPEAKER_02 18:53

So what where are the conversations about how are we making that better? Including if children and their families are struggling with the weight of poverty on their shoulders, they're gonna struggle to do well academically. I'm not that smart. That's not rocket science, right? That's just common sense. But do we invest in strength of family, strength of neighborhood as we're thinking about strength of school systems?

SPEAKER_03 19:15

Not enough. And improving the communities also gives a kid an opportunity to see a better tomorrow and understand that the circumstances I'm under right now can indeed improve, and I don't have to become a victim of them. You know, what can you hope for, right?

SPEAKER_02 19:30

You've got to be able to see that that's a real thing versus some you know hypothetical where you can be a lawyer and da-da-da. I'm like, you know, what the hell are you talking about, right? No, they have to be able to see and feel and believe it's true. And it's hard to do that in a lot of these kids' circumstances. Not impossible, it's always the great stories, but again, we know what some of the problems are. We just haven't had the courage to change the way we try to address them and how we invest in the community.

SPEAKER_03 19:55

Chris, I appreciate this conversation. I love your vision for tomorrow. I'm gonna borrow some of that too for myself. And I think everybody attributed it once and then it's yours. I just can't paraphrase it, change it. I don't know if everybody takes away your message and understands that coming together makes us much better than if we try to do it ourselves in a heart. That we this thing here matters more than this thing here.