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Pearl Companies is planning a $75 million, mixed-use development with a restaurant, 135-room hotel and 173 apartments near the southwest corner of Highway 40 (Interstate 64) and Chesterfield Parkway.

And on the other side of Highway 40, Reinsurance Group of America has filed a 250,000-square-foot expansion plan with the city that calls for a new office building, auditorium and parking garage on its current corporate campus.

“We knew we wanted to be near the action, and we felt this quadrant of the intersection of Highway 64 and Chesterfield Parkway was where the action was,� said Jeff Tegethoff, principal of Indianapolis developer Pearl Companies.

Pearl has recently turned its attention to ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ from Indianapolis, in part because of Tegethoff’s roots here. By the middle of next year, Pearl hopes to open the Hibernia, a $25 million, 100-unit apartment complex with a grocery store in Dogtown. It hopes to finish its revamp of the remaining City Hospital buildings near Lafayette Square into 74 apartments about the same time.

Its latest project, The Pearl at Wild Horse Creek, aims for “an urban village type of feel in the suburbs,� Tegethoff said.

“What we’ve seen over the last five years is a tremendous amount of job growth,� he said. “There’s this desire to live near where you work, and as we see further job growth in Chesterfield with RGA and Pfizer, people need choices with the type of living they want.�

If it receives the necessary approvals from Chesterfield officials, Pearl hopes to begin construction by the end of March and complete work by the fall of 2020.

Plans call for a rooftop restaurant and about 12,500 square feet of retail. Apartment rents are estimated to start at $1,250 a month for one-bedroom apartments and go up to about $2,250 for the largest units, which will have as much as 1,700 square feet of space and two bedrooms and two bathrooms. Late-stage millenials and early-stage empty-nesters are the target market.

Reinsurance Group of America, meanwhile, is considering an expansion just four years after completing its $150 million, 405,000-square-foot headquarters. The option for a 250,000 square-foot second phase has been part of the plan from the beginning, .

But since the Fortune 500 company announced the new headquarters in 2013, its full-time workforce has swelled from 700 people to some 1,200 (1,600 workers if contractors and temporary staff are included). An RGA spokeswoman said the company recently leased space in Weldon Spring and planned to move some of its local workforce there “while we continue to consider more permanent alternatives for additional space.�

The plans filed with Chesterfield indicate the RGA expansion plan could go before the municipality’s city council as early as February.

“While we have filed these conceptual plans with the city as a matter of process, no decision has been made as to if or when we will expand our campus — and we do not have any current plans to break ground on another building,� RGA said in a statement.

Downtown Chesterfield?

The new development in the area, as well as some already underway nearby, could finally begin to build something of a city center in ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ County’s second-largest suburb.

A plan for “Downtown Chesterfield� was pitched by the Sachs family a decade ago on the roughly 99 acres it owns north of Chesterfield’s Central Park. Little has happened though until recently, when the Sachs agreed to sell roughly 11 acres to Pearl Companies for the mixed-use development. That land is under contract. A price was not disclosed.

Chesterfield would like to create a little more density using smaller setbacks and a mixture of uses in that area rather than “the stereotypical suburban development,� said Justin Wyse, Chesterfield’s planning and development director.

The Pearl at Wild Horse Creek is the first proposal that’s covered by the Downtown Chesterfield plan, he said. The Sachs still own the roughly 77 acres just south of it as well as the immediate corner lot at Highway 40 and Chesterfield Parkway just to the east of the Pearl site.

“Some of the hope has been the Pearl project starts and will act as a catalyst to prime the market and bring interest to the area, and hopefully, we see some more of that concept come in from the development side,� Wyse said.

Beyond the boundaries of the Downtown Chesterfield footprint on the other side of the park, a $66 million, 345-unit apartment complex is under construction called Watermark at Chesterfield Village. It should open within a few months.

Next to the Pearl site, Above All Development proposed a 169-unit apartment building last year. But it is still pending review and hasn’t broken ground yet.

The big wildcard for the area is Chesterfield Mall, which like other malls, has struggled with vacancy in recent years. New owner Hull Property Group has disclosed few details to city officials about its plans for the 1.3 million-square-foot property. Though Chesterfield officials had said they hoped to see some sort of transformation of the site, such as a mixed-use redevelopment, there’s little indication Hull plans anything beyond retail.

Meanwhile, there don’t appear to be any new plans for the Chesterfield Mobile Home Park just to the west of the Pearl site. A plan for hundreds of apartments on the site of the most affordable living in affluent Chesterfield ran into resident opposition last year, and the developer walked away.