How a $2 Billion Redevelopment Answered a Skeptical Public

Not all comments are good comments, and not all comments are important to you as the developer. In fact, negative comments can give us more insight into public sentiment than positive ones.

Before we scripted anything, we read what people were saying on YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and LinkedIn. We asked 4 questions.

Then we sorted every recurring theme into 2 piles.

We built the content around the first pile and left the second alone. Answering the fair questions thoroughly does more for a developer’s credibility than debating matters of opinion.

The first video was an 8-minute overview released as demolition wrapped up. We titled it around what people already had strong feelings about, “Chesterfield Mall Is Gone,” and not around the development’s brand name. This video’s job was to draw a crowd and ask people what else they wanted to know.

It reached more than 93,000 views and drew more than 400 comments. For context, the population of Chesterfield is about 50,000. Those comments became the outline for the 22-minute explainer 2 months later. The video’s outline reads like the comment section it came from: traffic and infrastructure, the Clarkson Road upgrade, impact on schools, and a chapter titled “Will this happen?”

Before the in-depth explainer was scripted, we sat down with the development and operations team and with the traffic consultant behind the traffic study. Their answers became maps, drone footage, and annotated plans a viewer could follow without an engineering degree.

2 editing rules did most of the work.

The same message lands differently depending on who delivers it and where. We made that choice deliberately for each video.

We also learned something from the audience. After the 22-minute explainer, some viewers questioned whether a local channel should sound that enthusiastic about a developer’s project. We treated that as useful information. Later videos lead with facts and leave the enthusiasm to the viewer, and the most promotional update moved to the developer’s own channel.

Public financing is where distrust of a developer runs deep. When the project’s tax increment financing (TIF) came up for an amendment in 2025, the public conversation filled with assumptions about where that money goes and who benefits from it.

We also recommended against a public YouTube release.

We never ran a monthly content calendar. We didn’t post a video for the sake of posting a video. Each video was tied to a moment when the project had real news, and each one was a piece of evidence that the plan was moving.

Much of a project’s early progress is invisible from the road. Grading and underground utilities do not look like a downtown, which is why the latest update opens with a chapter called “What You Can’t See From the Road.”