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.