KMOX has an interesting 4 part piece entitled St. Louis Outside the Box. It is a shorter and more concise version of STLToday's Can St. Louis Compete? series. I'm happy to see the local media offering up solutions to area problems and offering a more detailed analysis than we typically expect from them. But I wish they would skip the typical history lesson and focus on what we can do to be better.
Here's my abridged version of how these articles describe St. Louis' history:
1) St. Louis rises to become one of Americas premier cities and is one of the grandest for much of its history
2) Urban decline creeps in starting in the 1950's and goes full force through the 60's, 70's and 80's
3) Along the way corporate icons disappeared, manufacturing left, and population sprawled out
4) Pathetic attempts at urban revitalization include shopping malls, housing projects, new stadiums, and other grandiose projects aimed at window dressing serious deep seated problems just make things worse
5) Before you turn off your computer, book a U-Haul, pack your stuff and move to Chicago, you are reminded that actually, things in St. Louis are at least stable and looking up in many ways
I think St. Louis has a fascinating history and is many ways a lesson of "How NOT to run a city" from 1930 to 2000. The tone of these articles often feel to me like the writer just wants to point fingers and show off how stupid regional leadership has been (and still is in many ways). Unfortunately the people who really screwed things up around here have mostly died, and in some ways didn't know any better.
Here's my abridged version of how these articles describe St. Louis' current state:
1) Too many municipalities take from each other resulting in zero net gain for the region
2) Too many big projects focus on making a splash and a headline rather than bringing in jobs (see #4 above)
3) Sprawl has ensured racial and economic lines change position but still remain in place
4) Area growth is stagnant
5) Grassroots urban revitalization has turned some parts of the city around
I share in these critical views but wish #5 would receive more coverage than it does. Here is where these types of articles typically end. They will offer up some solutions such as St. Louis developing its economic niche in something like Biotech. Or merging municipalities together so we stop competing with ourselves. Or introducing TIF reform. Or how St. Louis just really needs to market itself better.
This is all well and good but it took us this long to get to what we should have been discussing all along! Solutions. They aren't all feasible and they won't all work, but getting a dialogue going about really turning things around is what the local media should be doing. Some of them do it better than others. I would love for each of these features to be a weekly thing so that these topics are constantly on the table and being discussed. And I don't mean just in the blogs like Building Blocks.
To be fair, the independent media in St. Louis does a good job at this already. UrbanSTL has an active forum where empassioned St. Louisans discuss important issues relating to development and the future of St. Louis. The blog UrbanReviewSTL does a good job of this as well. More focus on area redevelopment and moving St. Louis forward can only be good for the area. If people cared about bringing more jobs, people, and advancing the local economy as they did about the Cardinals, then I'm sure many of the proposed solutions would happen sooner rather than later. Or at least it would be a start.
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