New books may give St. Louis a new Image.

Judd, Dennis R.

If we go in search of the overall image of St. Louis as a city and a region, the scholarly literature is not reassuring. What most academics have mostly found interesting about St. Louis is its status as a troubled city and region.

In 1970, Lee Rainwater, then a professor at Washington University, published a book about the social disaster that had unfolded in the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex. Appropriately titling the book "Behind Ghetto Walls," he described the Pruitt-Igoe housing project as a federally sponsored slum that had become worse than the ghetto it replaced. Five years later, Eugene Meehan, then at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, published "Public Housing Policy," a biting analysis of the failure of the public housing program in the United States. He wrote that Pruitt-lgoe was a disaster from its conception. As it happens, in the five years separating these books Pruitt-lgoe had become one of the world's best-known symbols of urban decay. Photos of its implosion by charges of dynamite seemed to capture in a single image the abject failure of federal policy and the continuing plight of the inner cities. In his monumental work "Cities of Tomorrow," Peter Hall called the photo "an instant symbol of all that was perceived as wrong with urban renewal, not merely in the United States but in the world at large." Thus St. Louis became a stand-in for the problems of the post-war American inner city.

St. Louis has also often been widely adopted as the textbook case of governmental fragmentation and its sins. The many suburbs with fewer than 5,000 citizens (including the Village of Champ, with 11) and the racial and class segregation that separated these miniature towns invited sharp criticism. There was a dark side to the proliferation of these governments.

Working as a consultant for the litigants in the St. Louis desegregation case in the early 1980s, political scientist Gary Orfield documented how suburbs in the St. Louis area had used their zoning powers to keep blacks and the poor from following the affluent to the suburbs. Of course, the desegregation case brought a certain kind of fame to St. Louis--it was only settled, finally, in the last year--and Orfield's findings became copiously cited in the scholarly literature.

The St. Louis region also has been regarded as the best example of the long, futile struggle for metropolitan reform (urban historian Jon Teaford has said that "Nowhere did the battle for metropolitanism rage so loudly or long as in Saint Louis County.") In 1926, 1930, 1959, 1962, 1989, and 1990, attempts were made to either replace the multitude of governments with one regional body (the first four times), or to more modestly reduce the number of governments. In the 1980s the debate over metropolitan fragmentation took a new turn, when scholars working for the Washington-based Advisory Council on intergovernmental relations questioned the reformers' assumption that larger governments would result in more efficiency and better services. The Board of Freeholders proposal of 1989, which would have reduced the number of municipalities in the St. Louis region from 92 to 37, was put forward right in the midst of this debate.

I am sure that living in St. Louis has shaped my own writing. By the time I moved to St. Louis in 1970, people had already been streaming out of the city for two decades. In fact, I was a beneficiary of the process. That year I bought a four-bedroom house in University City for $18,600 on a block being abandoned by white families. When I wrote the first edition of my textbook, this experience stuck with me. The statistics I compiled for the book revealed that St. Louis consistently led the nation in rates of population loss from the urban core. Living here provided a perfect perspective from which to observe suburbanization, deindustrialization and racial segregation. And, as John Farley, a professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University--Edwardsville, has amply demonstrated, St. Louis continues to be one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in the United States.

Though St. Louis has been used often as a premier example of urban decline, relatively little has been written about the politics of the city. Why is this? Perhaps its politics are not as sexy or as easy to interpret as those of Chicago, for instance. For much of this century, the machine politics of that city provoked an outpouring of research and popular literature. St. Louis has long been characterized by a machine-style, but not a machine politics. The trading of small favors is not usually as interesting as big-time boss politics and its extravagant scandals. And unlike Atlanta, St. Louis was not a primary site for the national civil rights struggle, and therefore blacks did not become incorporated into the stable political coalition that has built that city into a regional economic powerhouse. Unlike San Francisco, St. Louis politics have not involved a rough-and-tumble competition for power by a multitude of ethnic groups, environmentalists, liberal activists and gays. And unlike such cities as Miami and Los Angeles, it has not recently attracted a floodtide of newer immigrants from Latin America and Asia. The politics of St. Louis just haven't seemed as obviously exciting as politics in those cities.

But the politics of the city maybe changing, and if that happens, surely the research on St. Louis will reflect those changes. The grip of the old power structure is slipping. With access to federal funds and bonding authority, the Empowerment Zone has become a significant player, at least for now. Without it, the prospects for a convention hotel would be dim indeed. The years of leadership training sponsored first by Leadership St. Louis and now by Focus may be bearing fruit, as citizens become more involved in the political process. Metropolis St. Louis is gaining more voice and influence every day. Who knows? Precisely because of these changes, the efforts to give the city a home-rule charter may achieve a breakthrough in the next year or two. Perhaps the Washington Avenue loft district will spearhead a long-sought revival of downtown. And perhaps the next election cycle will bring in a new mayor capable of forging a coalition sufficient to accomplish downtown revitalization.

Please don't shoot the messengers if it doesn't happen, but perhaps the next generation of scholars who write a bout St. Louis will be able to write at least as much about success as failure. But I will be observing it all from a different vantage point. Sometime late this summer I will be moving to Chicago, to assume a new position as professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I'm excited about the opportunity. I also look forward to reading the wonderful books on St. Louis that will be published in the next couple of years by my colleagues Lana Stein and Terry Jones. Lana has already written two books about the city ("Holding Bureaucrats Accountable" and "City Schools & City Politics"). She has just completed a major book-length study tracing the evolution of politics in St. Louis. Watch for it to come out sometime next year. Terry will soon publish a study of governmental fragmentation in the St. Louis area. His new twist is to say that despite a history of failed reform, prag matic cooperative arrangements have evolved that serve the citizens of the region well. Look for his book, "A Mosaic of Governments," in the next month or two.

His book is notable because it offers a narrative of success rather than failure. Perhaps his message will signal a new trend.

Dennis Judd is professor of political science at University of Missouri St. Louis.