The owner of the NexCore co-working space in St. Louis’ Fox Park neighborhood said he is closing his facility and eyeing a relocation outside of the city because of a dispute over enforcing face mask requirements on his tenants.
“It’s a tough situation," Jim Shelvy, co-founder and president of NexCore, told the Business Journal this week. "We came there because we wanted to make a difference in the neighborhood and I feel like there’s a fight brewing if we want to stay there.”
Shelvy said the decision to close NexCore, located at 2631 Gravois Ave., comes after the city of St. Louis health department visited the facility in August and told the operators they needed to require individuals inside the space to wear face masks. That visit stemmed from a complaint filed with the city. Shelvy does not know who made the complaint.
The visit prompted Shelvy to post a video online last month explaining why he wouldn’t require individuals at NexCore to wear masks.
He said the NexCore facility is large enough to allow for proper social distancing and that it has followed distancing guidelines. Shelvy also contends that, as the landlord of the property, he can't dictate how his tenants dress in their leased space or do periodic checks on businesses in rented space without providing notice.
"It's a pretty casual environment at NexCore but the facts are that people are working, and disturbing them several times a day to ensure compliance is bad for their business, our business and the feel in the building," he told the Business Journal. "Someone working in a 800-square-foot room alone is properly social distanced yet we were told that is not acceptable if they do not have a mask on."
NexCore opened the co-working space in 2017 and describes itself as a “business accelerator." It operates several companies — such as NexCore Media and Marketing Group, NexCore Consulting and NexCore Financial — designed to provide a single location for entrepreneurs and companies to find business resources and assistance. NexCore houses roughly 125 companies at the Fox Park facility, many of which Shelvy operates.
Its closure is already a disruption for the tenants he doesn't personally operate. One such tenant posted on LinkedIn recently that it was looking for a new office space for its staff of six.
Shevly said he "didn't want to go into battle with the city," adding it wouldn't do either entity any good. And staying there could mean facing thousands of dollars in fines while exposing his employees to an environment he doesn't consider safe because of the outside effects of Covid-19 safety protocols. He cited a recent incident at a nearby Family Dollar that involved a man firing shots inside the store after being told to leave because he wasn't wearing a face mask.
"If someone comes to the door and isn't wearing a mask, I don't feel it is in their best interest to tell someone they cannot come in or that they must leave for not wearing a mask," he said.
He's now looking to relocate to either St. Louis County, which also has a mask mandate, or Jefferson County, which doesn't. But along with the move, NexCore is going to shift its business model from a traditional co-working operation, in which tenants lease specific spaces, to a virtual co-working model in which members reserve time to use the physical location as needed.
Shelvy believes that business structure will make it easier to follow local health guidelines wherever it operates.
The tenants will be occupying “our space versus a rented space, which means we can enforce some of the things we need to do in that space to be compliant with whatever the county requirements are,” Shelvy said.
The change would also make co-working a byproduct of NexCore's overall operations rather than its anchor.
“I never wanted to run a co-working space," Shelvy said. "I wanted to be a resource for those businesses because I’ve had businesses in the past that failed because I didn’t have resources."