OT: Midtown Development

[brianstl]

The county's population is starting to decrease for some of the same reasons the city's population started to 60 years ago aging housing stock, under performing school districts, transportation infrastructure making it easier to live further away (and now telecommuting), some white flight, etc.. One party rule didn't cause that in the city and two party rule in the county isn't going to stop it.  The city's population problems started when the city still had two competitive political parties.

The city county divide hastened the city becoming a one party political entity as the city's boundaries were fixed and the city wasn't able to annex close in suburbs.  St Louis has been stuck at 66 square miles since 1876.  Chicago added 125 square miles 1889 alone.

[Old guy]

You may well have a valid point there brianstl. The population in the County is aging and its housing stock is also aging (the city's housing stock is much older than the county's though). However, there is a lot buying tear down property to build new housing in some areas like Kirkwood and Town and Country; and there is also much buildable land still available further out west in the County. You cannot telecommute unless there is readily available net access in the area you are building, something that is iffy in the western reaches of the County.

The idea that adding areas by annexation is the way to maintain prosperity of a city is also incorrect. Chicago is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy despite its growth (or perhaps because of its growth). There are also cities, like Boston, which cannot grow by annexation, but which have managed to maintain vibrant and alive neighborhoods in the downtown area and are currently thriving. Every city is different and none responds in exactly the same way to measures taken to maintain their prosperity.

[hsmith19]

20 minutes ago, brianstl said:

The city county divide hastened the city becoming a one party political entity as the city's boundaries were fixed and the city wasn't able to annex close in suburbs.  St Louis has been stuck at 66 square miles since 1876.  Chicago added 125 square miles 1889 alone.

And yet today Chicago is every bit as much a one party system as St. Louis. We had a Republican mayor more recently than they did. The Great Divorce definitely resulted in some unique situations politically, but it's also an easy scapegoat for masking results that have much more to do with national trends. Cities are never as unique as their residents like to think they are, and we certainly aren't unique in becoming a one party city since the Civil Rights Movement.

[SShoe]

11 minutes ago, Old guy said:

The idea that adding areas by annexation is the way to maintain prosperity of a city is also incorrect. Chicago is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy despite its growth (or perhaps because of its growth). There are also cities, like Boston, which cannot grow by annexation, but which have managed to maintain vibrant and alive neighborhoods in the downtown area and are currently thriving. Every city is different and none responds in exactly the same way to measures taken to maintain their prosperity.

The City of Chicago lost 200,000 people during the previous decade.  It is not growing.  In fact, it lost a similar percentage of its central city population during the previous decade as STL.

[hsmith19]

7 minutes ago, SShoe said:

The City of Chicago lost 200,000 people during the previous decade.  It is not growing.  In fact, it lost a greater percentage of its central city population than STL.

And it's not just the central city. It should be an even bigger concern that the total metro population has decreased so much since the last census.

[SShoe]

Just now, hsmith19 said:

And it's not just the central city. It should be an even bigger concern that the total metro population has decreased so much since the last census.

I'd have to look, but it's my understanding that the Chicago region continues to grow, albeit at a snail's pace (similar to STL). 

[hsmith19]

Just now, SShoe said:

I'd have to look, but it's my understanding that the Chicago region continues to grow, albeit at a snail's pace (similar to STL). 

Nope, the metro as a whole has had the biggest population loss of any region:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-chicago-population-record-loss-met-20160324-story.html

[brianstl]

2 hours ago, hsmith19 said:

True. Being a city of 300,000 built for a million is both a blessing and a curse. In terms of urban fabric it "feels" like a big city in certain ways that some newer, much bigger cities really don't. But the attitude that because we are shrinking we don't have to worry about planning or design and can just sprawl every which way is the biggest threat to that asset. The problem with a lot of suburban style developments is not so much poor planning as it is a complete lack of planning. With the SLU hospital there were at least efforts at planning the development and making it consistent with broader efforts in the area, in spite of attitudes like bonwich's above being fairly common among the general citizenry.

The good news is we can't keep shrinking much longer. If we haven't hit the bottoming out point yet, we're at least very close. When we finally reach the point where the City is maintaining its population, I think we can expect modest improvement in efforts at regional cooperation. But the County's growth totally stalled around the year 2000 and they're just now realizing it, so it will probably take some time for perception to catch up with reality.

And FWIW, while Vienna's empire disappeared, the St. Louis metro region does still exist, St. Louis City is still its cultural capital, and Downtown St. Louis is still one of its two economic capitals.

One of the main reasons St. Louis feels more like a big city than many cities that have a larger population is that the population density numbers for the city rank pretty high for non coastal cities.  Chicago's number dwarfs our's, but in a lot way's Chicago is a coastal city.  St Louis City ranks pretty high for population density for non-coastal area with a population above 250,000.  We are just below Pittsburgh and just above Cleveland.  We are above Detroit, Portland, Denver, Dallas, Cincy,  Atlanta, Nashville, Austin, San Antonio.  Higher density development in the city would be nice, but that isn't what is stopping the City from growing like others.

[Billiken Rich]

It is kind of sad that all over the country it's easier to move than to fix the intractable problems facing cities like Saint Louis.  The same old corrupt politicians, from the same old boys network, trying the same old solutions will never work.  You can't fight city hall.....

[hsmith19]

2 minutes ago, brianstl said:

One of the main reasons St. Louis feels more like a big city than many cities that have a larger population is that the population density numbers for the city rank pretty high for non coastal cities.  Chicago's number dwarfs our's, but in a lot way's Chicago is a coastal city.  St Louis City ranks pretty high for population density for non-coastal area with a population above 250,000.  We are just below Pittsburgh and just above Cleveland.  We are above Detroit, Portland, Denver, Dallas, Cincy,  Atlanta, Nashville, Austin, San Antonio.  Higher density development in the city would be nice, but that isn't what is stopping the City from growing like others.

This is only half true. People are always shocked by how StL City's density compares to other central cities', but that's mostly a product of our city limits being so geographically tiny, as you mentioned above. Most other "legacy"-type cities have 67 square miles in their urban cores as dense or denser than our current city limits, but ours shows up as the density for the entire city. It's one of the ways the Great Divorce really does make us look unique.

[brianstl]

13 minutes ago, Old guy said:

You may well have a valid point there brianstl. The population in the County is aging and its housing stock is also aging (the city's housing stock is much older than the county's though). However, there is a lot buying tear down property to build new housing in some areas like Kirkwood and Town and Country; and there is also much buildable land still available further out west in the County. You cannot telecommute unless there is readily available net access in the area you are building, something that is iffy in the western reaches of the County.

The idea that adding areas by annexation is the way to maintain prosperity of a city is also incorrect. Chicago is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy despite its growth (or perhaps because of its growth). There are also cities, like Boston, which cannot grow by annexation, but which have managed to maintain vibrant and alive neighborhoods in the downtown area and are currently thriving. Every city is different and none responds in exactly the same way to measures taken to maintain their prosperity.

Chicago hasn't annexed anything since 1956. 

[hsmith19]

The areas that have seen the most annexation recently are the Southwest and South, partially because of actual growth and partially because the legal mechanisms for annexation tend to be easier. We'll have to wait a few more decades to see if rapid annexation really screws them over long-term.

[davidnark]

The one-party system had little to do with the population decline of the city, but bad Federal government policy (and racism) had everything to do with it. Abandoning urban infrastructure such as trains and trolleys, spending billions to run highways right through key city center neighborhoods and out to rural/suburban areas, and enabling white flight by providing government-subsidized mortgages that killed the urban real estate market and artificially crated a suburban one had everything to do with it. I just spent the last 3 months living in central Europe, and it is amazing the difference in their city centers and urban areas, all of which didn't face these same government policies. The 50s and the "Greatest Generation" killed the US city.

[brianstl]

Just now, hsmith19 said:

This is only half true. People are always shocked by how StL City's density compares to other central cities', but that's mostly a product of our city limits being so geographically tiny, as you mentioned above. Most other "legacy"-type cities have 67 square miles in their urban cores as dense or denser than our current city limits, but ours shows up as the density for the entire city. It's one of the ways the Great Divorce really does make us look unique.

Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and St. Paul are smaller land wise.  Cleveland and Cincinnati are not that much bigger land wise. 

[ACE]

On 3/1/2017 at 4:14 PM, prebilliken said:

 

 

Rich cracks me up. 

[hsmith19]

11 minutes ago, brianstl said:

Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and St. Paul are smaller land wise.  Cleveland and Cincinnati are not that much bigger land wise. 

Pittsburgh is a unique case because it is one of the least dense regions on a metro level. Look at the least dense regions and it is always a bunch of young metros in the South, plus Pittsburgh. I don't have the list handy, but there a bunch of Midwestern cities like KC that look much less dense than StL on paper, but have 67 sq mile cores with similar or greater densities. Then there are other cities like Detroit that look similar in density on paper but have 67 sq mile pockets that are much more dense.

[SShoe]

1 minute ago, hsmith19 said:

Pittsburgh is a unique case because it is one of the least dense regions on a metro level. Look at the least dense regions and it is always a bunch of young metros in the South and Southwest, plus Pittsburgh. I don't have the list handy, but there a bunch of Midwestern cities like KC that look much less dense than StL on paper, but have 67 sq mile cores with similar or greater densities. Then there are other cities like Detroit that look similar in density on paper but have 67 sq mile pockets that are much more dense.

Pittsburgh is a very hilly place, so it's very dense in certain areas (downtown, for example), while other parts are mostly undeveloped due to rugged terrain. 

[brianstl]

8 minutes ago, davidnark said:

The one-party system had little to do with the population decline of the city, but bad Federal government policy (and racism) had everything to do with it. Abandoning urban infrastructure such as trains and trolleys, spending billions to run highways right through key city center neighborhoods and out to rural/suburban areas, and enabling white flight by providing government-subsidized mortgages that killed the urban real estate market and artificially crated a suburban one had everything to do with it. I just spent the last 3 months living in central Europe, and it is amazing the difference in their city centers and urban areas, all of which didn't face these same government policies. The 50s and the "Greatest Generation" killed the US city.

Europe is different than the US because of population density.  The continent as whole has over twice the population density as the US.  

People in the US moved because they wanted to move and in many cases had to move.  Many of the policies you decry were a direct response to a massive housing shortage following WWII.  Billions were spent on the highway system because Eisenhower believed it was a national defense priority after his experiences in Europe during WWII.  It was not a plan by the "Greatest Generation" to kill the cities.  

[hsmith19]

1 minute ago, brianstl said:

Europe is different than the US because of population density.  The continent as whole has over twice the population density as the US.  

People in the US moved because they wanted to move and in many cases had to move.  Many of the policies you decry were a direct response to a massive housing shortage following WWII.  Billions were spent on the highway system because Eisenhower believed it was a national defense priority after his experiences in Europe during WWII.  It was not a plan by the "Greatest Generation" to kill the cities.  

Yes, it was a specific response to the housing shortage that turned out to be shortsighted. It prioritized new suburbs and shiny new modern developments in the urban core over rebuilding old cities and their "slums." The plan may not have been to deliberately kill the cities, and there was definitely an element of good intention that turned out to be just plain bad execution. But there also absolutely was an undercurrent of racism that became enshrined in the policy choices that generation made. Both the good intentions and the outright racism are obvious in projects like Pruitt-Igoe in hindsight.

[brianstl]

Just now, hsmith19 said:

Yes, it was a specific response to the housing shortage that turned out to be shortsighted. It prioritized new suburbs and shiny new modern developments in the urban core over rebuilding old cities and their "slums." The plan may not have been to deliberately kill the cities, and there was definitely an element of good intention that turned out to be just plain bad execution. But there also absolutely was an undercurrent of racism that became enshrined in the policy choices that generation made. Both the good intentions and the outright racism are obvious in projects like Pruitt-Igoe in hindsight.

I would argue it wasn't the Fed's that caused the problems for the cities, but the problems were caused by the urban planners the cities used. The Fed's weren't the one's pushing for the Arch, that was the civic leaders of St. Louis City.  The location of the interstates was pushed for by city urban planners and city leadership.  

The population density of St. Louis City was over 14,000 per square mile in 1950.  There was no way a city like St. Louis was going to maintain that.   Boston today is slightly below that number.  DC which is about the same size land wise is way below that number.  Some population shedding was going to happen, but the leadership of St. Louis City made the decisions that moved many to the suburbs.  

Much of the what hurt St. Louis City in the post war decades was set in motion back in motion in the 20's and 30's before the "Greatest Generation" ever was close to gaining power.  That was when St. Louis City handed over planning Harland Bartholomew and his planning was being implemented.  That resulted in a love of bigger road building, overly complex zoning and way too much central planning.  That was the start of the City's love affair with the big massive projects at the expense of everything else.  Bartholomew's prints are on many cities problems after the war, but he basically had free reign in St. Louis for decades.

 

[Billiken Rich]

Lets not forget the schools.  My wife's parents lived on the northside in the 60's right up until the point  that the neighborhood schools were destroyed.  

[hsmith19]

1 hour ago, brianstl said:

I would argue it wasn't the Fed's that caused the problems for the cities, but the problems were caused by the urban planners the cities used. The Fed's weren't the one's pushing for the Arch, that was the civic leaders of St. Louis City.  The location of the interstates was pushed for by city urban planners and city leadership.  

The population density of St. Louis City was over 14,000 per square mile in 1950.  There was no way a city like St. Louis was going to maintain that.   Boston today is slightly below that number.  DC which is about the same size land wise is way below that number.  Some population shedding was going to happen, but the leadership of St. Louis City made the decisions that moved many to the suburbs.  

Much of the what hurt St. Louis City in the post war decades was set in motion back in motion in the 20's and 30's before the "Greatest Generation" ever was close to gaining power.  That was when St. Louis City handed over planning Harland Bartholomew and his planning was being implemented.  That resulted in a love of bigger road building, overly complex zoning and way too much central planning.  That was the start of the City's love affair with the big massive projects at the expense of everything else.  Bartholomew's prints are on many cities problems after the war, but he basically had free reign in St. Louis for decades.

 

Oh please, the Harlond Bartholomew-as-antichrist meme is even more exaggerated than the interstate-highway-act-as-bugaboo meme. But more importantly, this is a false dichotomy. Local planners did stupid (and sometimes racist) things, so that means federal policy makers didn't? There's plenty of blame to go around, both on an individual project level like the Arch and on the nationwide level of interstate siting and mortgage policy. FWIW, Bartholomew and other professional planners working for the City had almost nothing to do with the push for the monument that became the Arch in the first place, and even less to do with the design and construction of it once it was greenlit.

I assume you've read Mapping Decline. It does a good job of tracing the factors that made St. Louis a special case within the broader trends that were driving development nationwide. The real question is what happened to mid-American cities over the course of the 20th Century. St. Louis is an exemplar of what happened to cities all over the Midwest and the nation. The question shouldn't be what St. Louis did individually that failed, and the idea that one individual planner screwed St. Louis over is just silly. The idea that "overly complex" zoning is what screwed St. Louis is especially ridiculous. If anything, the lack thereof is helping hold us back today.

[hsmith19]

48 minutes ago, Billiken Rich said:

Lets not forget the schools.  My wife's parents lived on the northside in the 60's right up until the point  that the neighborhood schools were destroyed.  

This is a turtles-all-the-way-down question. The decline in the schools is tied to population loss and capital flight. It's not like there was a button pushed one day in the '60s, or the '80s, or the '90s and the city schools in St. Louis or all across the country suddenly went to $hit. Although if you want to look for one moment when people's attitudes towards not only public education but public housing and a whole lot of policy tools in general shifted, Brown v. Board is a pretty good one. Together with the other civil rights Supreme Court cases in the '50s, no other event did more to drive demographic change in cities or shifts in attitude toward "nanny state" social programs.

[almaman]

5 hours ago, Billiken Rich said:

1)  I am not worried about "uni-gov."  Having 300,000 new voters in St.louis County with loyalty to one party is enough of a bogeyman for me.  Why would anyone in the county vote to dilute whatever power they have left?

2) and 3) One sure fire way to accelerate  these problems is to bring the city back into the county.  Why do you suspect that St. Louis County is losing population?  Creeping nanny-state socialism?  Loss of Jobs?  Straight up  white flight/racism? 

When I see the mayor and county executive getting together on a $12 an hour minimum wage increase, I start to see the end of my time in this county due to creeping nanny-state socialism.....

which two party county do you plan on moving?

[Old guy]

4 hours ago, SShoe said:

The City of Chicago lost 200,000 people during the previous decade.  It is not growing.  In fact, it lost a similar percentage of its central city population during the previous decade as STL.

 

4 hours ago, hsmith19 said:

And yet today Chicago is every bit as much a one party system as St. Louis. 

4 hours ago, hsmith19 said:

And it's not just the central city. It should be an even bigger concern that the total metro population has decreased so much since the last census.

 

Fine, I wanted to quote your own words to demonstrate that the administration of both Chicago and St. Louis have a lot in common and leave a lot to be desired in terms of performance and development. People are literally fleeing both places. This is not so in other cities, many of which are also socialized and single party as you describe for St. Louis and Chicago. Boston is a land locked city (cannot expand its area but is a sea port) that remains fresh and vibrant, I have not been in Cinncinnatti for a long time but I recall it as having a very nice city life, Minneapolis and St. Paul are growing nicely and are very clean and even manicured cities. One of my daughters went to college in Pittsburgh, which has not fully recovered from the loss of the steel industry there but which had a very nice atmosphere. St. Louis, and (apparently) Chicago are not doing as well or progressing as well as these cities. Nope, people are pulling up stakes and moving out, oftentimes just beyond city limits or metro area limits for Chicago. Worse, businesses are fleeing the City as well.

Please ask yourselves why do people live in West County and the answer is, of course, because they do not want to live in St. Louis, they do not want to pay the extra taxes the city gathers, they do not want to be exposed to what from West County's point of view looks like a high level of crime and violence present in the city, (or is all of this claptrap and fake news just designed by nefarious people to defame St. Louis?). Just ask yourselves this one question please: Despite whatever wishes the mayor of the City and the West County administrator may have, and however they may have agreed at least in principle to work towards a merger of both entities, any merger will require, by necessity, a favorable  vote from the the residents of both the City and the West County. I really do not see the chance of a snowflake in hell that the people living in West County will vote in favor of a merger with the City. No, sir I do not think this will come to pass in my (possibly longer than you expect hsmith) lifetime. So, dream your dreams, and place the blame for the continuing disaster affecting both St. Louis and Chicago where ever you may wish to place it, from Fed regulations to school systems.

And something else for you to ponder, the government of Massachusetts, at all levels, including city and local, is overwhelmingly single party and it is much farther out to the left in the political spectrum than whatever level they have in St. Louis or Chicago. Despite this and despite the fixed area of the City of Boston, the City is really a gem. It is not a political philosophy or a single party type of issue whatever it is that is negatively affecting St. Louis as you seem to think it is. Also kindly keep in mind that Boston is very highly  segregated, blacks do not like whites and whites do not like blacks, Italians hate Irish and are hated by the Irish in return, and so on and so forth, and yet the city works and there is real Christian harmony between the population groups that (in their hearts) hate one another. Do you see real Christian harmony between the population groups in St. Louis? 

Remember this too, an ultra left wing politician in Oklahoma may spouse similar views as a conservative republican does in Massachusetts. Ta DaH! Live and let live. Life and love is a many splendorded thing (of course you do not remember Nat King Cole) with multiple unexpected turns everywhere. St. Louis is no worse than many places but it is locked into a downward spiral. In aviation terms it is in a stall. If it does not get out of the stall it will crash with absolute certainty, and you will not have the help you crave from your loving neighbors out west to end the stall either. This is you own show baby, live it and love it, feel victimized, assign blame here and there, but get it solved otherwise it will only get worse. You are on your own.