Mean streets, cultural assets; St. Louis is a tale of two cities.

Judd, Dennis

The first tale about St. Louis is embedded in the "St. Louis Has It All from A to Z" campaign of the 1980s. Of course every city has its own booster narrative, but St. Louis' list of virtues and accomplishments seems downright convincing.

St. Louis has world-class and justly famous zoological and botanical gardens, one of the most highly respected symphonic orchestras in the world, a state-of-the-art science and technology museum and a good, well-managed art museum that hosts wonderful traveling exhibits. The latter two architecturally impressive facilities are located in the sixth largest urban park in the United States and, though it may be in serious need of repairs, it still hosts impressive events such as an annual hot-air balloon race and a summer opera season. The cultural scene in St. Louis is diverse, affordable and accessible.

In the last few years, St. Louis has also built the infrastructure required to support a healthy post-industrial tourist/leisure economy: a football stadium/convention center complex that is considered a model for other cities, a gleaming glass-and-aluminum basketball and hockey arena and one of the more interesting (and mandatory) Rouse malls. Also, with MetroLink, the foundation is laid for an excellent metropolitan-wide mass transit system.

Since the St. Louis area weathered the deindustrialization of the 1970s and 1980s, it has also consistently recorded unemployment rates substantially below national averages. Recently, inner-city crime has fallen. And, finally, St. Louis has a powerful symbol in the Gateway Arch - the only urban monument in the world arguably as recognizable as the Eiffel Tower.

Anxiety

Despite this catalog of civic splendor, there is a tale of a second St. Louis, one informed by an abiding anxiety about the future of the City of St. Louis and a Rodney Dangerfield local inferiority complex.

In addition to the Arch, probably the most famous and enduring symbol of St. Louis is the photo of the Pruitt-Igoe complex imploding into the dust. For a while, amusing stories were widely circulated about how St. Louis' biggest industry was bricks - building by building, it was said that the city was being dismantled and shipped down the Mississippi, destined for resurrection as part of the authentic heritage of New Orleans.

The portrait of a crumbling city was recently displayed again in a Jan. 2 New York Times article entitled, "Little Hope in Sight for St. Louis' Treasures." After listing some of the buildings in trouble - the Ambassador Theater, The Arcade/Wright Building, the Statler Hotel, the Fur Exchange - the Times spun a classic tale of a city in decline: "Intricate brickwork is falling apart, copper cornices are deteriorating, and fine terra cotta details are eroding from many facades."

After quoting a mayor who thinks that, "We do not have the people for all this infrastructure," the Times observed that "large swatches of downtown are dominated by boarded-up retail stores; a shopping mall that opened in 1985, the St. Louis Centre, still has vacancies. On some streets, it seems as though little more than parking lots are open. There are few pedestrians . . . and the area is nearly empty at night."

The anxiety about the city's future has been frequently expressed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but recent stories have taken on an alarmist tone that seems to accurately reflect many independent assessments of St. Louis' condition. On Nov. 18 the Post carried a page-one story summarizing a report commissioned by Downtown St. Louis, Inc. The authors of the report, the International Downtown Association, asserted that St. Louis' downtown was "near disaster." In a Dec. 8 follow-up Special Report, Post reporter Charlene Prost's one-and-one-half-inch heading read, "Silent, Empty, Shabby." Her article chronicled the problems of downtown: 92 buildings empty and 52 "half-empty" (not "half-full"); the St. Louis Centre half-empty; the last major office building constructed in 1989; the decay of historic buildings. The president of the national organization, Preservation Action, provided this dismal assessment: "It's depressing. Looks to me like it's in the now-or-never stage of getting its vitality back."

Such a gloomy prognosis about downtown and the city as a whole is the norm among scholars and commentators on St. Louis. The authors of an entry in the 1992 edition of The Almanac of American Politics offered this assessment: "A century ago, St. Louis seemed to be at the center of America: . . . the site . . . of the World's Fair of 1904 that produced the hot dog, the ice cream cone and, eventually, the musical 'Meet Me in St. Louis.' . . . In [those] days, St. Louis' old street grids . . . were filled with densely packed brick houses, with people living within walking distance of streetcar lines, but when autos came in, the people moved to the suburbs."

When this author was interviewed by the leading New York Times urban expert Neil Peirce for a piece Peirce is writing about St. Louis (which will be published, in part, in the Post), the first question was, "What's wrong with St. Louis?" Don't expect a rosy forecast for St. Louis when Peirce publishes his research.

Assessments such as these may lead one to conclude that St. Louis is one of the most convincing stories of urban failure in the 1990s. The evidence of decline is not difficult to uncover - and it goes well beyond a troubled downtown. St. Louis exhibits all the classic signs of urban decline: big population losses, stagnating property values, extreme racial segregation, concentrated poverty - the works.

Since 1950, the St. Louis metropolitan area has often led the nation in the rate of population loss from the central city. From 1980 to 1990, St. Louis' population fell by more than 12 percent, from 453,085 to 396,985. Today it probably contains no more than 385,000 people. The median family income in the city is about half the median for St. Louis County. The metropolitan region is among the nation's most segregated urban areas and, according to a study by the East-West Gateway Coordinating Council, there is a greater degree of economic disparity between blacks and whites than in all but five other metropolitan areas in the country.

In 1990, housing values in the city were 60 percent of those in St. Louis County. According to the 1990 census, 29 percent of the city's population fell below the federal poverty line. Almost one-third of the white households in the city made "very low" incomes (less than 50 percent of the regional median income), but three-fourths of the city's blacks fit this category.

The fragility of the city's neighborhood is indicated by survey results showing that from 1987 to 1991 a rising proportion of city residents ranked their neighborhoods as "worst" or "next to worst" on a neighborhood satisfaction scale and the proportion ranking their neighborhoods as "best" fell sharply. These kinds of attitudes could spell trouble for the city's south side, where the population is aging. White families are spilling across the city's boundaries into adjoining suburbs. If the losses become big enough, some of the city's most important community institutions, especially the churches and parochial schools, will follow.

Reality check

It is tempting to conclude that the decline of St. Louis is irreversible and inevitable, but in actuality, both narratives - the tale of urban vitality and of decline - are plausible.

The significant problem with the doom-and-gloom story is that it reduces the city to one indistinguishable whole. But, in fact, St. Louis is composed of various parts and it is absurd to lump them together. Several vital areas are not only holding their own, but have obviously rebounded, including Soulard, South Grand, the West End, even Dogtown. The Hill appears to be rock solid. The city has an extraordinary housing stock, much of it highly prized: Portland and Westmoreland Places (for instance), Clifton Heights and much of the near-south side. There are institutional anchors that are not likely to be pulled up, however the statistics describe the city, notably St. Louis University and the Washington University hospital complex.

To talk as if the "city" is in decline is misleading. It is well to remember that all the cities pointed to as examples of successful turnarounds are, without exception, places with homelessness, residential deterioration, racial conflict, poverty and crime. For these cities, the narrative of success is at least as over-simplified as St. Louis' narrative of decline. It would be generous to observe that inner-city revitalization has been uneven. In most cases, downtown office complexes, tourist districts and gentrified neighborhoods have become segregated from surrounding areas of decline. The style of redevelopment - redeveloped waterfronts, stadiums and convention centers, enclosed malls and atrium hotels - all too often has resulted in protected bubbles inhabited by white-collar workers and middle-class tourists.

The best jobs created in the revived downtowns tend to be taken by suburbanites (commuters hold 60 percent of the jobs in San Francisco and 70 percent in Boston, for example), with the seasonal, low-wage service jobs left to people living in the inner cities. And, finally, city governments everywhere have so heavily subsidized the revival that a fiscal dividend for neighborhoods and city services virtually never appears.

Baltimore is a textbook case of successful urban revitalization: Its abandoned docks now replaced by the dazzling Harborplace, with its expansive stone plazas, a translucent, block-long Rouse pavilion, and its luxury hotels, bars and restaurants. Despite all this investment, the poverty rate increased in Baltimore's black neighborhoods. All through the 1980s, the city's per-capita income grew slower than most other Frostbelt cities. Last year, Baltimore announced that it was installing surveillance cameras on the sides of its downtown buildings. Not long after assuming office in 1987, the city's first black mayor, Kurt Schmoke, observed that, "If you were revisiting Baltimore today after a 20-year absence, you would find us much prettier and much poorer."

His observation could fit virtually all of the cities that St. Louis would like to emulate.

So let's be clear: Success, like failure, is in the eye of the beholder, and it often depends on public relations.

Having said all that, a city with a busy downtown, a tourist bubble and some gentrified shopping and residential areas - even a winning football team - is preferable to one that doesn't have those things.

Let's assume that St. Louis aspires to the kind of revitalization that is evident in Baltimore or - since it seems to be the latest model - Cleveland. What makes this so difficult to accomplish? Why is St. Louis a classic case of failure and not of success?

St. Louis has three characteristics that largely account for the city's condition: governmental fragmentation; racial tensions; and a lack of leadership and vision within the city. Of these three, the last is the most important, and the easiest to remedy.

Fragmentation

Everyone knows, because it is constantly pointed out, that St. Louis is unique, in that its boundaries were permanently fixed in the state constitution of 1876. At the time, this did not seem to be much of a problem; even as late as 1904 the marshal for the World's Fair got lost in the woods on his way to the opening ceremonies. But, over time, the inability of the city to expand its boundaries has had pernicious consequences.

The city encompasses just 61 square miles; compare this to Austin, Texas, which covers 218 miles, or Phoenix with its 342 square miles. This one fact - the small size of the city - accounts for many of the city's problems. Imagine if the city's limits reached as far as, say, Lindbergh Boulevard (which would still make the city smaller than Phoenix). Every statistic about the city would automatically be different. To begin with, much more than 15 percent of the metropolitan area's residents would live in the city. Because it has often been considered the nation's textbook case, everyone knows that metropolitan St. Louis, which includes six Missouri counties and two in Illinois, has an exceptionally high number of suburban jurisdictions - 692 governments and governmental agencies (which includes 208 municipalities), compared with 386 in the Detroit and 377 in the Kansas City areas. Quite a few of the 92 cities in St. Louis County seem to exist mainly to support municipal corruption and feuding.

Over the years, there have been numerous reform attempts. In 1926, a Board of Freeholders put an initiative on the ballot that would have allowed the City to absorb the County and its municipalities. Predictably, the proposal was defeated by county voters. There have been at least six other major efforts to consolidate governments, and there will be more. Any consequential reorganization is destined to fail - for the good reason that a great many suburban residents benefit from fragmentation.

In 1989, the median household income of Clayton residents was $44,218 and the assessed property tax valuation per capita was $29,051. This compared to a median family income of $26,372 in Berkeley and a $10,673 average assessed valuation. The property-tax rate in Clayton is much lower than Berkeley's, but the quality of amenities and services - well, it is pointless to compare. Now, when we consider that the average family income in Berkeley is higher than the average for St. Louis City and that is average assessed valuation is higher than the city's (and its tax rate lower), one reason why reform efforts fail comes clearly into focus.

The other reason, and perhaps a far more important one, is race. There can be no doubt that the degree of racial segregation and the level of racial tensions in the St. Louis area make it difficult to turn St. Louis into a success story.

Racial tensions

Studies consistently have shown the St. Louis metropolitan region to be among the nation's most segregated urban areas. On statistical measures of segregation, St. Louis was found to be the most highly segregated city in the country in 1980, and the metropolitan area ranked sixth. Compared to other urban regions with a similar proportion of African Americans, the St. Louis area was found to have much less black-to-white exposure than the norm. John Farley, a professor at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, has conducted studies showing that although the degree of segregation declined slightly during the 1980s, nonracial factors such as housing costs and economic differentials accounted for less of the segregation than in any previous decade, leading him to conclude that, "race may matter even more than in the past."

The notable exception to this occurs in the Central West End. The Skinker DeBalivere area in the Centra West End, for example, has been majority black for more than two decades, but has remained an integrated, thriving neighborhood. There are also integrated neighborhoods in University City and a few others in the inner-ring suburbs. These are clearly the exceptions to the rule, however.

Even the recent movement of blacks into St. Louis County is actually the ghetto spilling beyond the city's boundaries. By 1990, blacks made up 14 percent of St. Louis County, but most of them were concentrated in a corridor extending from the northwestern and northern sections of the city. Of the 33 municipalities in St. Louis County with 20 percent or more black residents, only one is located outside of this corridor (Maplewood.) Only three cities outside the corridor have populations of 10 percent black or higher. In nine cities within the corridor, the black population accounts for 60 percent or more of all residents: Bel-Ridge, Berkeley, Beverly Hills, Hillsdale, Kinlock, Northwoods, Norwood Court, Pagedale, Pine Lawn, Uplands Park and Wellston. All of these municipalities are clustered in the Normandy area close to the city's border. In all of these municipalities, median family incomes, housing values and poverty rates look more like the city's statistics than St. Louis County's.

Racial fears have real consequences for the kind of regional development that would benefit the city. The lion's share of the area's subsidized housing is located in the city. Trying to put more into fragile neighborhoods already characterized by low housing values and racial tensions is risky. Plainly, it would help the city if subsidized units were distributed throughout the metropolitan area.

In St. Louis County, however, nothing excites such bitter opposition as subsidized housing. When the County Housing Authority tried to implement a scattered-site strategy, it encountered unremitting opposition. It seems certain that the possible location of subsidized housing helped to solidify the 65 percent positive vote for the incorporation of Green Park in April, 1995. In September of the same year, a controversy was ignited in Affton when the Authority proposed to buy a single home as a subsidized unit. About 300 residents attended a public meeting, complaining loudly that the tenants would threaten property values. In response to this and other controversies, Buzz Westfall suspended the program and announced he would appoint a committee made up of county residents to advise the housing authority on the selection of sites - virtually admitting this would mean the death of the scattered-site program.

For the city to break out of its cycle of poverty and decline, it desperately needs a regional transportation system so that its residents can commute to jobs in the suburbs. MetroLink lays the foundation. But racial fears may well truncate the program by limiting its reach to inner areas of the region. This fall St. Charles voters turned down a tax increase that would have helped fund the extension of MetroLink into St. Charles County. Can there be any doubt that race was an ingredient in this vote?

Finally, the racial segregation of the schools is one of the most intractable problems holding up the development of the city of St. Louis. A Post story of Jan. 6 profiled an independent report on the city's schools, which found that "most parents with kids in the public school system would opt out if they could" - presumably, by moving to the suburbs.

For years, the state of Missouri has been fighting to end is financial contributions to the intra-metropolitan desegregation program, through which 15,000 black children are able to attend suburban schools and some white children from the county are motivated to attend magnet schools in the city. In the spring of 1996 the state took its case to the federal courts. It has been in the hands of an adjudicator, William Danforth, ever since. Even if the state is allowed to withdraw gradually, it means big trouble for the city and its schools. If the city were required to suddenly find room for 15,000 students and pay the costs of educating them, it would bankrupt the district. It might also be the final blow to several fragile neighborhoods.

The vision thing

Even in a region where it is isolated physically, fiscally, racially and culturally, the city could achieve the kind of revitalization - with its admittedly uneven effects - that has become a common feature of older industrial cities all across the country. The compelling problem facing the city is not governmental fragmentation and it is not even racial division. It is the absence of public leadership and vision.

The 1980s bred a generation of entrepreneurial mayors who assembled coalitions of government officials, business leaders, along with nonprofit and community organizations, in the cause of regeneration. Their names are almost legendary: William Schaefer and Kurt Schmoke, Baltimore; Ray Flynn, Boston; Mike White, Cleveland; William Hudnut, Indianapolis; Frederico Pena, Denver; Neil Goldschmidt, Portland; Norm Rice, Seattle; Richard M. Daley, Chicago; and the list goes on. These mayors came into office under circumstances that hardly looked promising: federal funds were being slashed, at the same time that deindustrialization was still running its course. Federal administrators were telling mayors that if they wanted their cities to survive, they needed to make them attractive for investment.

Whatever one thinks of the consequences of these policies, cities learned to leverage private-sector activity through tax incentives, tax increment financing, the pyramiding of block grant funds, tax-exempt bond issues and private consortiums, public-private partnerships, reduced regulations and privatization of services, and the like. The means this generation of mayors used to fashion redevelopment coalitions was reminiscent of the 1950s, when aggressive mayors all over the country likewise brought together downtown business and the corporate sector, plus labor and sometimes community leadership, behind the urban renewal programs on Sept. 5, 1996, the members of the Mayor's Advisory Committee on City Governance held a press conference on the steps of the City Library, to announce the release of their report on the governance of St. Louis. The committee recommended thorough-going changes in the city charter; one of their principal aims was to give the mayor significantly more authority. St. Louis' weak-mayor governmental structure is, indeed, antiquated, and some reform is overdue. Still, the fact that entrepreurial mayors have emerged in cities with widely varying structures indicates that fragmented government can be overcome by mayors with sufficient political skills applied in the service of a vision. Much has recently been made of the fact that Cleveland has 26 planners while St. Louis has two. The sorry fact is that under the current administration, St. Louis wouldn't know what to do with 26 planners anyway.

Older industrial cities have rebounded because they are the repositories of a unique and irreproducible built environment. The downtowns of cities have been reconstructed to house the management functions of corporations and governments. In virtually all older cities, the integration of significant. historic buildings with new office towers is considered an important signature of a city's distinct personality. In all older cities, heritage and an architecture signifying the past provide the themes for place-marketing. One of the most important economic sectors for the revival of central cities - tourism - requires a combination of historic buildings with rebuilt waterfronts, festival markets and shopping districts, arcades and atriums, sports stadiums, and pedestrian malls.

Any city that destroys its unique heritage loses its one important advantage over the suburbs. Preservation must be pivotal to any strategy of inner-city revitalization; to think otherwise is pure fantasy. Trying to make the city like the suburbs by, for example, building a golf course as the anchor for a gated community, is an awful lot like the proposals that made the rounds in Detroit during the 1980s - not always made in jest - that since the city was basically abandoned anyway, why not turn it into a wildlife preserve?

St. Louis possesses a history and it still has amenities and institutions that can become the basis for revitalization. The pieces are there; what is lacking is a civic vision that would make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. The business community can provide leadership for pieces of the whole - for a sports stadium here, a festival mall there. What the business community cannot do is speak for the public.

Only a mayor can claim the legitimacy to provide leadership in the public interest. Revitalization requires a sustained direction, which is supplied by coordination and planning. It requires a melding of public and private powers and authority, and the integration of public amenities and services with private investment.

In the end, there is often a subtle difference between the narratives of success and decline; revitalization is always partial, as is failure. Between the two, however, who wouldn't accept the amenities and the sense of civic identity and progress that comes from a sense of movement and change?

St. Louis must begin the process of this kind of revitalization. If it does not, St. Louis may become the perfect place to house the world's first Museum of Urban Decline, and it could build it from the bricks scavenged from the rubble of what used to be St. Louis' downtown.

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