The long-empty Foodland building on South Jefferson Avenue may soon get new life.

Developer Green Street Properties has filed plans with the City of St. Louis to rehab the empty 47,000-square-foot supermarket and hopes to fill it with a smaller grocery store and other retailers. It has a contract to buy the building and hopes to start a $6.6 million first phase in the spring, with a second phase potentially to come later.

The store - just across Jefferson Avenue from Lafayette Square - has sat empty since 2004, when Foodland closed after failing to get neighborhood support for a liquor license. It had previously been a National store. Much of the surrounding neighborhood is now considered a "food desert" by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for lack of grocery options.

A grocery is high on the list of potential tenants, said Green Street's Phil Hulse, though the neighborhood likely can't support a full-size, stand-alone supermarket there. Hulse said he expects to split the building among tenants, and plans to put up a second retail building of 5,000 to 8,000 square feet. He said he's in discussion with a variety of retailers, but wouldn't name specific tenants yet.

"There's certainly a lot of voids in that market," he said. "We're out speaking to a fairly diverse group that would play well to surrounding community and would do well there."

To help fund the $6.6 million project, Green Street is asking the City of St. Louis for $1.36 million in tax increment financing, and to establish a Community Improvement District on the site, which would levy an extra 1 percent sales tax and raise $340,000. The TIF was set for a public hearing in January and will need approval by the Board of Alderman. Hulse hopes to start construction in the spring, and finish in late summer.

A second phase would involve buying an existing retail building next door and rehabbing it - though Hulse said he doesn't yet have that building under contract.