St. Louis County, MO Property Maintenance: Vacant Lot Maintenance (2026)

Read the trigger as a clock and a condition running side by side. The 90 day count establishes that the property is genuinely vacant rather than briefly empty between tenants, and the nuisance test asks whether something on the ground needs fixing now. A tidy vacant house does not qualify. A house with tall grass, accumulated debris, or broken windows does, and the county's own example of a qualifying nuisance is tall grass. The exit is written into the rule as well. Inspections continue until the nuisance is abated, which means the schedule ends with the owner's work rather than with the passage of time.

There is no fixed number of visits and no automatic release date, so every month the condition survives is another inspection and another charge. Cost recovery is what separates this from ordinary code enforcement. Rather than an invoice an absentee owner can set aside, the inspection cost is billed as a special tax bill. Vacant property work sits alongside the county's broader nuisance framework in Chapter 1110 (Property Maintenance) and Chapter 1120 (Public Nuisance), and the Problem Properties Unit takes reports and questions at (314) 615-5089. Chapter 1111 is separate again: it covers the Sewer Lateral Repair Program for most sewer line failures up to the main.