It’s Halloween, and about 20 young professionals have gathered at Urban Chestnut Brewing Company. The weekly gathering is called Crappy Hour, which stands for Creative Happy Hour, but it’s not exclusively for creative types. Yes, there’s a smattering of designers from places like Dachis Group, PGAV Destinations, and TOKY Branding + Design, but there are also some marketers and scientists from Cofactor Genomics and Washington University. Most of them have at least a bachelor’s degree. They’re generally in their early to mid-twenties, and for the most part, they love St. Louis.
That might be surprising to some, since the city is often labeled as a place from which young professionals flee. If they return, the stereotype goes, it’s only years later, for the sake of raising kids. The result is brain drain—just the thing that some young professionals here are working to combat.
After Tara Pham graduated from Wash. U. in 2011, she decided to remain in St. Louis. “It’s definitely not the trend to stay,” says Pham. “I would say maybe 20 percent of my friends stayed, but 5 percent or less of the class.” One reason Pham and her friends remained was to improve the city. Together, they started Brain Drain, a collective of recent college grads.
Last March, the group gave a presentation at GOOD Ideas for Cities that earned the endorsement of Mayor Francis Slay. The group’s central question: “How do we deepen the pool of diverse people who love St. Louis and are personally invested in its progress?” Its answer: CityPulse, a project that seeks to install beacons around the city that illuminate as people walk by; the beacons would be linked to an online map tracking foot traffic and offering information about neighborhood businesses, activities, and transit. After the presentation, the group received sponsorships from the Regional Arts Commission, AIGA St. Louis, and architecture firm HOK. It’s now building beacon prototypes.
“What we realized is that the city is already so rich in so many cultural assets that what it really needed was a little bit more of a loudspeaker,” says Pham. “It seems that a lot of college students and young professionals find it hard to get plugged in. So visibility has become a really big driving force for our group.”
The group hopes St. Louis will embrace CityPulse through social and civic applications. “It is the perfect example of a new paradigm in developing objects and creating solutions, which I think speaks really well to how our generation is solving the problems in the world around them,” says Matt Ström, a co-founder of Eleven magazine and the drummer of local rock band Union Tree Review.
We met up at Nebula Coworking, a collective office space with bright orange walls painted with concentric rings, alongside Pham and Logan Alexander, a TOKY designer. To them, St. Louis is vibrant and accessible, brimming with opportunities to make a difference.
“There’s a certain level of involvement,” says Alexander, “that you don’t get elsewhere.”
Aaron Perlut is also determined to improve the region’s image. In 2011, he penned the article “St. Louis Doesn’t Suck” for Forbes’ MarketShare blog. In it, he argued that the region is fine—it simply has a PR problem and an inferiority complex.
The article went viral, and soon people were asking Perlut and business partner Brian Cross for suggestions.
They developed Rally Saint Louis, an online platform to fund new ways to market the region. In November, people from the community submitted ideas. In December, community members were set to vote on the ideas, and this month, a marketing committee is scheduled to review the most popular ideas, estimate the costs of those projects, and put them back online to solicit crowdfunding. Those who wish to will then be able to contribute money to the various projects.
“The great thing about the Rally platform is, it’s for everybody,” says Perlut. “We’re giving up quite a lot of control of the asylum to the inmates, and that’s not a bad thing.”
The goal of Rally Saint Louis is to collect positive stories about the region and hopefully fund beautification projects to burnish the city’s image. “The conservative nature of the way we have marketed the region in the past has really hurt us with young people, because we are not perceived as a hip and progressive place to live,” says Perlut. “This can offer some opportunities to break through that perception.”
Still, neither Brain Drain nor Rally Saint Louis believes it has a cure-all for St. Louis’ ills. “People have been talking about branding St. Louis as if it’s going to make St. Louis the best city in the world,” says Ström. “We want to create an environment where we can create solutions constantly, as new problems arise.”
The secret to retaining top talent is jobs—preferably high-paying ones—and fostering engagement, says Steve Johnson, executive vice president of the St. Louis Regional Chamber & Growth Association. He suggests engaging area college students even before they arrive on campus and keeping them invested in the city. Area businesses could partner with universities to build long-term internship and co-op programs, he adds. The Partnership for Downtown St. Louis hosted Downtown College Day in early October, for instance, offering restaurant specials, self-guided tours, an “interactive career fair” on Twitter, and an alcohol-free reception.
“It’s not just, ‘Let’s have a job fair during their senior year,’” says Johnson. “If you engaged a student from the moment they arrived on campus until the day they graduate, you have created a brand. St. Louis is the brand, and you’ve shown that it’s about accessibility, opportunity, and fun things to do.”
Still, experts tend to agree that retaining talent is complex—particularly when it comes time for those college grads to find jobs. In the past, St. Louis has relied heavily on corporations like Anheuser-Busch, Nestlé Purina, and Wells Fargo Advisors, largely ignoring startups. But with businesses like Pfizer, Monsanto, and KV Pharmaceutical downsizing in recent years, the region’s leaders have begun to realize the importance of entrepreneurial ventures and business incubators.
Meet Marshall Haas. The Dallas native moved here to launch his startup, Obsorb, which creates project-management software. He sits inside T-Rex (short for TEC @ Railroad Exchange Building), a tech-focused collective of startups downtown. He’s wearing a T-shirt that says “Make Mistakes.”
The 23-year-old entrepreneur says he wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Arch Grants, which offers $50,000 nonequity loans to startups. Haas, who also founded a virtual architectural-rendering firm, AllRendered, was working on his startup in Santiago, Chile, before he heard about the program. Now that he’s in St. Louis, though, he plans to stay.
“Everyone’s really welcoming,” he says. “They want to help you out and see you succeed. They’re looking to put St. Louis on the map and build cool things.”
Last December, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the area attracted more 25- to 34-year-olds than it lost each year from 2008 through 2010. Coincidentally, in the past few years, St. Louis has seen some surprising resurgences. Downtown’s population grew by more than 350 percent during the 2000s, and once-blighted neighborhoods like Cherokee and Old North St. Louis are slowly coming back to life.
In Dutchtown South, just east of the Bevo Mill, John Pa and Matt Seilback work in another collective workspace. The co-owners of Anastasis Films are working to create TV shows and movies set in St. Louis. They recently made a video montage called Here is St. Louis, a loving tribute to some of the city’s overlooked treasures like Sump Coffee, The Mud House, and Pint Size Bakery. Since its release in September, the video has amassed more than 72,000 views.
“Our goal was to essentially bring about affection and pride for the city and to create a greater awareness for people outside of St. Louis that, hey, there’s great stuff going on here,” says Pa. “We have our hipsters, too.”
“The Midwest, in general, has an inferiority complex,” says Seilback. “We shoot ourselves in the foot because we don’t want to speak up and say we’re a legit city.”
Still, the two boosters do have their criticisms of St. Louis. In April, Pa and Seilback released a video called Racism in St. Louis, in which they interviewed people about the issue. (The video wasn’t nearly as well-received as Here is St. Louis.) Despite the city’s ongoing problems, though, grass-roots efforts like Pa and Seilback’s demonstrate that St. Louisans are committed to improving the region in new ways—and that the momentum seems to be growing.
“I feel like there’s this huge critical mass in the city,” says Pa. “I don’t know if it’s going to be a renaissance, but it’s going to be a great time for St. Louis.”
