St. Louis has an identity crisis.
It is the 18th largest city in America, and while it’s not growing as fast as the nation as a whole, it has seen modest increases in population over the past decade.
It’s not a boomtown, but it’s also not a bust.
The most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau confirmed as much, showing that the city enjoyed sizable increases in its outer population, with St. Charles County growing by 27 percent, Jefferson County increasing 10.4 percent, and Monroe County (in Illinois) increasing 19 percent, among others.
On the negative side, the population of the innermost urban core—officially the “city of St. Louis”—decreased by 8 percent. That of the inner-ring suburbs—officially “St. Louis County”—decreased by 2 percent. All of this is based upon piecemeal estimates released in late February by the Census Bureau, with more information to come about the city as a whole.
At this point, it can be assumed that readers are scratching their heads over this narrative, as it certainly does not comport with conventional thinking about the “city” of St. Louis. When the census information was released, for example, virtually all of the media coverage—including our own—focused upon the unexpected loss of population within the original city limits.
Mayor Slay reacted somberly: “I believe that this will require an urgent and thorough rethinking of how we do almost everything.”
I don’t know about that—seeing as how it won’t happen—but there is one thing we could change right away. We could change how we identify ourselves.
In reality, the population growth in St. Charles and Jefferson counties is St. Louis’ growth, and it was only partly off-set by the decline in the official city and county. If we actually recognized that reality, then the slumped shoulders about another blow to a dying city would be accurately replaced with something on the order of this: “We’re holding fast in population, but the center’s lost hold, and maybe we should come together as a region—make that as a city—and start addressing how the whole community can find some common ground going forward.”
Good luck with that.
I would even go further to say that the residents of St. Charles and environs are every bit as much St. Louisans as the people who officially reside in the city and county. These are people, after all, who self-identify as much with local institutions and traditions—be they sports teams, cultural institutions, the Arch, or other landmarks—as the “official” residents do.
How many people in Jefferson County congratulated their neighbors in St. Louis when the Cardinals won the World Series or the Rams won the Super Bowl? How many of them admire and envy St. Louis from afar because of its Arch or its world-class zoo and symphony?
It doesn’t work that way, does it? They “own” the things they like about St. Louis.
It should also work in reverse. Residents of the outer-ring suburbs or “surrounding counties” are also part of the problem in
St. Louis with regard to issues of transportation, the economy, the environment, housing, and urban planning (or lack thereof). They just don’t think so.
Monroe County residents who owned the World Series wins aren’t so quick to take possession of the many shortcomings of the faraway city in which the Cardinals’ stadium is located. The same can be said, perhaps to a slightly lesser degree, of how quickly St. Louis County residents wish to wash their hands of the urban woes that face inner cities like “the city of St. Louis” around the nation.
Only in St. Louis are people so obsessed—and I mean obsessed—with the notion that “city” is a term that must be limited to the famously frozen borders known as “the city limits of the city of St. Louis.” No doubt most residents who don’t live within those borders today will find it offensive that I would not properly differentiate them from those who do. And vice versa.
It’s an obsession that needs to be challenged.
The fateful decision made in the 1870s by the city fathers, presumably to keep out the farmers, was by historical accounts successful, and there’s certainly no farmland today in those original borders. But nearly a century and a half later, St. Louis uses a definition of “city” that has dire consequences in terms of governance, national perceptions, and most important, civic self-awareness and self-esteem.
We speak a different language than the rest of America in our use of the noun “city.”
This is not an exercise in semantics. St. Louis has a definition of “city” that is constrained by its artificially frozen borders and produces an apple-and-oranges comparison to other cities. Almost all of those include their counterparts to University City, Clayton, Richmond Heights, Webster Groves, and perhaps even some of the wealthier suburbs in their city limits.
That really skews the numbers. But the psychological wall that separates “the city of St. Louis” from its surrounding citizens has created an even more harmful barrier.
Officially, the U.S. Census Bureau has a category it calls “metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas” (MSAs). (For some reason, this replaced “Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area,” or SMSA, as the basic measure of American cities.)
As an MSA, St. Louis ranked 18th in America according to 2009 estimates, with 2010 numbers expected later this month. Technically speaking, the official “city” of St. Louis—the one that shrank to roughly 319,000 in the current census estimates—had fallen to 52nd in the nation in 2009 and is certain to drop many more spots when the 2010 totals are final.
But this is meaningless.
Consider this question: Which is the larger city, Miami or Omaha?
If you answered Omaha, you are technically correct, according to the 2009 Census Bureau estimates. Omaha had 454,731 residents to Miami’s 433,136.
But in normal American parlance, Miami is considered the seventh-largest “city” in America, with an MSA population of 5.5 million, or nearly seven times as many people than reside in the “Omaha-Council Bluffs, NE-IA” MSA.
If I may speak as a former winter resident of a city called “Miami Beach, Fla.,” I can assure you that I never heard people making it an important distinction that I did not reside in the city of Miami. Phrases like “I live in Miami” or “I’m going to Miami” or “The beach is great in Miami” didn’t need to be qualified.
I don’t think “the city of Miami” even has a beach.
The same point can be made for Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, Dallas, and just about every other American “city.” We don’t refer to them as “metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas” in the normal course of conversation.
But imprecise as the lingo might be, one doesn’t often hear phrases such as “Oklahoma City is a bigger city than Atlanta” or “Memphis is a bigger city than Boston,” both of which would technically be true.
If someone said Atlanta is the ninth largest city in America, and Boston is the 10th, would someone from Oklahoma City or Memphis rush to correct the statement and point out that we’re really talking MSAs here? Maybe. But eyes would roll from sea to shining sea.
This doesn’t keep Kansas City, Mo., whose population is about 460,000 according to the newest census numbers, from proudly proclaiming itself “Missouri’s largest city.” This distinction would be no great honor were it true—which it isn’t—unless you really think Memphis is bigger than Boston.
Yet it’s how the gigantic “city” of Kansas City bills itself and—more important—actually has come to see itself in the funhouse mirror created by its bogus little slogan. But how many people from St. Charles, who are actually targeted by this nonsense from across the state, would actually take offense at it?
It is St. Louis’ identity crisis in reverse.
There is no end to the consequences of St. Louis’ walled-off thinking. St. Louis the region doesn’t think like a big city—unlike “cities” such as Portland and Denver—so there’s no notion of having a cohesive strategy with regard to big-picture issues affecting 2.8 million people.
We have dueling convention bureaus, nonstop warfare among competing counties to steal businesses from one another, and an utter refusal to even consider comprehensive planning (e.g., the $1 billion white elephant known as the Page Avenue Extension, built seven years ago to mitigate the inconvenience caused by uncontrolled sprawl to those who chose to sprawl).
Every agency that is now “city-county” would actually be completely regional, recognizing that all in the St. Louis MSA are indeed part of our “city.”
I’ve railed in this space before—and will again—for the need to abandon the obsolete, dead-end strategy of having “city” and “county” property taxpayers foot the entire bill for the Zoo-Museum District, so that its institutions can be free for those St. Louisans—now a majority of St. Louisans—who reside in the MSA but not within the “city” and “county,” and thus foot none of its bills.
Certainly, the light-rail system would look very different if St. Louis thought like a city instead of a collection of feuding fiefdoms. So would the region’s approach to housing and environmental issues—meaning it would have an approach—and a wide range of
other matters.
The word for this locally is “regionalism.” It’s often discussed, then casually disregarded.
But St. Louis doesn’t need regionalism. It needs to think of itself, from one end of its 2.8 million MSA population to the other, just like it did during those World Series and Super Bowl years.
It’s just one big city.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
