Photography by Matt Marcinkowski
We can landscape and pave and organize consortiums, but how do we squeeze out the social glue that keeps newcomers from turning around and leaving? We went to Anthony Bartlett, founder of St. Louis Transplants, thinking he could give us some savvy tips for new people trying to break into a social life in our friendly but cliquish city. He threw the question right back in our lap. In every St. Louisan’s lap. It’s not a transplant’s job to connect with us, he said firmly. It’s our job to connect with them. And while St. Louis does indeed have great architecture and green space and sports, easy affordability and traffic, sophisticated restaurants and cultural offerings, and smart circles of innovation, the city’s future hinges on something far less controllable: a genuine openness, a warm invitation to coffee or a backyard barbecue. Here’s Bartlett on what he’s learned by helping St. Louis’ economic powerhouses recruit and retain talent. He created City-to-City, a reference app that provides St. Louis analogies for other metropolitan areas; he’s studied stats and demographics, developed consulting programs, organized a team of volunteers who help welcome newcomers. But what matters most, he learned by watching his mom.
My parents are transplants—my mom’s from New York, and my father’s from Pittsburgh. They were transferred for my dad’s job, at a Clayton brokerage. The first three years were hard for my mother—there was a lot of isolation. Then she was adopted by a very well-seasoned transplant, a woman in her sixties who lived across the street. That woman said, “Here is this church, here is this school, and you are going to come over for wine and cheese every afternoon.” Then another woman adopted her, and those two introduced her to all their friend circles. My mom got her MSW and began working, but the people were her entrée. After she had that social connection, that glue, my dad got a major job offer in New York, and my mom said, “I’m not going back there.”
So I’ve always been interested in the impetus that creates that conversion. It really is the relationships that people have here, and that is the piece that was missing in relocation. We hear it all the time: “I love my house, I love my job, but… They’re all gonna fall in love with the architecture, the greenery, the convenience. But how do you, in a city where so much of the population is native and already has their network, form relationships?
We used to lose to Austin, Denver, Nashville, Brooklyn, Atlanta all the time. Now those places have become so saturated. St. Louis has the grit and the authenticity; it’s still real. A lot of the young talent—and by young I’m meaning anyone under 49, see that St. Louis hasthose attributes a lot of other cities are marketing but don’t actually have.
People don’t like to be just a number in a big place. They want to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond, in a way that lets them see the ripple effect of what they’re doing. So even some of the pieces about St. Louis that are still broken and need work can be a draw. People who want to be changemakers know what they do here will be seen and—they all use the same word—appreciated.
St. Louis is also an opportunity where they can play on a very big level, be it in research, finance, agriculture, health care, technology—and still be home by 6 p.m. The culture of the city encourages that. Our last four clients in a row each had an hour-and-45-minutes-each-way commute, and that’s the difference between seeing your family at night or not. Young families—moving’s never fun for a kid. But they see that this entire city is set up for them.
A lot of St. Louisans will say to a newcomer, “Why are you here?”—or even, “Why are you here?” With natives, there’s no middle gear; they’re either very, very defensive about St. Louis or they’re ripping it to pieces. What I try to recommend to people is to maybe try a different approach, which is first of all to understand that whatever they think about St. Louis from afar, that’s not their fault, it’s our fault. They don’t know yet. I move data scientists for a living—these are the people who are goodat this—and they still don’t know. So cut them a little slack. They get off the plane, and they’re scared.
Instead of asking, “Why are you here?” and interrogating them on whether they have been to X, Y, and Z—“But have you seen the park?”—ask them what they need. “Have you been invited to a barbecue yet? Have you been invited to a dinner party? Is there a service that you need or something you’re looking for that you haven’t found?”
When the transplant experiences the city through the native, it makes a huge difference. St. Louisans have a very protective, suspicious position, but if a native makes the call, it’s unbelievable how nice people are. “Hey, Bob, someone is going to be calling…” There has not been a business, a school, a country club, a church that has not dropped everything to help. I’ll tell a chef, “I have a family coming from New York. Thank you so much for your restaurant. We’re trying to attract and retain the best from around the world, and you are helping us do that.” Enroll St. Louisans in that idea and they will go all out. I don’t know if there’s an issue around the city they care about more.
Transplants need an intermediary. That happens naturally in other markets. In Nashville there’s a culture of hospitality. Ours is a culture of privacy, of roots.
In transient cities, nobody’s from there, so they meet each other and the invitations are instantaneous. In St. Louis, 70 percent of the population is native; in a lot of first-tier and coastal markets, that’s reversed. So yeah, there are neighborhoods where there’s a block party every week. But a lot of the socializing is with friends and relatives, and St. Louis is so damned convenient, people can reach those friends and relatives in six minutes. They just don’t need to meet the new person.
St. Louisans don’t mind being a little protective. They say it takes 10 years to become a New Yorker. That’s the kind of thing we need to create. Right now, you can live here 40 years… There are plenty of transplants who are accepted. But Chicago, it’s their city, the people who move there. Indianapolis, which has grown way more than people ever expected—those cities that boom have that component. St. Louisans are in the process, there’s the innovative side that wants that changed. But there’s also the legacy side that doesn’t. You’re looking at a city that for eight generations has really gone to great lengths to make sure St. Louis did not become Chicago. People want to have their little community. They don’t want hundreds of thousands of people. “Keep my traffic low. Keep St. Louis a secret; keep us off the radar.” I had a very intelligent client turn to me as we were driving around and say, “This is the greatest swindle I’ve seen since Iceland!” There’s a piece of us that’s OK with the world not finding out.
There were two big debates in economic development a while back: One theory said, if you bring the jobs, then the culture and people follow. The other said people follow culture and then jobs come. I was at the Federal Reserve the other day, and whether people decide to go or stay is notbased on economics the way they thought. The new generation of talent choose where they want to live and then look for the job. That’s what people aren’t understanding. There’s been this massive paradigm shift. Is this place going to share my values? Is this going to be somewhere I’m proud to live? For a lot of people, their first job was to be a New Yorker. Then it was career and family. As the coasts get so saturated and so expensive, people are letting go of a very big dream to come to the Midwest. It’s an identity change. Some of these people are making every bit as much money as they were in Manhattan, but that’s not what it’s about.
People say, “I’ve been here a year, and I’ve heard about these famous St. Louis cookouts, and no one’s ever asked me to one.” We had 70 people on Thanksgiving Day and they said, “You know, in every other city I’ve lived in, I always had an invitation for Thanksgiving. Here, I didn’t.” I was telling nine St. Louisans that story. Three of them got offended: “They’re not putting themselves out there.” Three said, “Listen, I’m so busy with my family and my kids and my work. I wish I could’ve done something, but I just can’t.” And the other three went, “Andrew, oh my God, I’m so sorry. It didn’t occur to me. We never had a stranger at our Thanksgiving table.”
Because it’s small and manageable, St. Louis can be easy to break into. But if you’re on the outside looking in, it’s very isolating. We forget how hard it is in St. Louis to go somewhere alone. We have no culture of dining alone, going to a festival alone. It takes that entrée, that liaison to open doors.
One hundred people a daymove to Austin. In Denver, it’s 300. That’s real growth. Right now, our net is slightly negative, although people aren’t streaming out anymore. But we don’t have a critical mass of population. We have so many neighborhoods coming up—the Grove and Botanical Heights and Downtown West—but now Clayton and the Central West End are a little quiet. We’re ready for half a million more people.
What I wish people could understand is the impact that crime has. People thinking of moving here either don’t know anything, or they’ve heard something bad. The metrics are such a factor. If businesses and nonprofits and dealerships and everybody really knew the jumbo jets of people who are diverted, they’d be hysterical. So as we’re spending time talking about governance and who’s going to plow the streets, we’re fighting over water droplets and not turning off the faucet. Crime is the faucet.
It’s not necessarily a change in tax credits or a referendum; we don’t need to build new city blocks, though that’s wonderful. Each person already living here can turn to the person next to them and make a huge impact. “Can I take you out for a drink? Can I show you my place of worship?” And this is the big one: We need a culture of follow-up. People say, “Andrew, 11 people called me—once.” It’s not the transplant’s job to hunt you down.
Too often the first person to connect with a transplant is trying to sell them something, recruit them for something. Make friends just because.
Find what we call transplant-friendly businesses and services, places that are comfortable and extra welcoming. Often they’re well-established, and they know their regulars, so they’ll recognize that someone’s new and make an extra effort. Maybe a waiter hears that someone’s from New York and brings out the chef, who’s also from New York… At some restaurants, the culture is that people talk to each other; at others, you keep to yourself.
When somebody’s flying in to interview or assess: Put them in a hotel in a vibrant, cool neighborhood they can walk around, not the hotel by the office. Take them out for food theywant. They need to know that their food is here. What you want to get them to say is “You have that here?” Go somewhere that is unique and authentic. It doesn’t have to be fancy. They won’t remember every little detail, but they’ll remember how they felt.
A lot of St. Louisans have an agenda, because they’re so passionate about their own neighborhood, their school. But what’s right for that new person? We’ll start by asking, “What’s your perfect day? What do you like best about the neighborhood where you live now?” We listen. As a result, I drive 150 people a year around the city, and I’ve never taken the same route twice.
You get very few chances. People make the decision whether to remain in the city in the first seven days. A few really bad experiences, where they feel shut out and they’re standing someplace and no one is welcoming them or talking to them, and they will start to think about leaving.
The next crucial turning points are milestones. The one-year anniversary of a move is critical. People need to be paying attention not just the week somebody arrives, but when they’ve been here eight months to a year.
What we need to improve is the negative sale. It’s OK to acknowledge what’s broken and still love this city. I don’t need it to be perfect. We lose a lot of credibility if we don’t discuss all of it. You have to address what they’ve read in the media. I drive people from the airport through Ferguson, and a lot of that fear goes out the window. My phone rang off the hook after the Stockley and Ferguson protests: “How are you going to show off St. Louis now?” I said, “The protests are on the tour.” People were so worried they were never going to get anybody to move here again. What are you talking about? This is showing them we’re a real city, a place they can make a difference. St. Louis is not a bubble.
St. Louis is not an echo chamber, either. What did Jim McKelvey say? “It’s not a monoculture.” In D.C. or California, I’ll be at a dinner party and I know exactly what everybody thinks. Here, I have no idea. And that’s a richer experience.
Sometimes we’re nervous of transplants, though, because we want a box, and we don’t have high school, and we don’t have church. A lot of St. Louisans ask those questions as a way to bond. They’re not used to someone they can’t put into a box. They haven’t grown up around anybody they haven’t known since seventh grade. They say to me, “What should I ask?” Ask them what they like to do for fun. What interests them. Start to find points that aren’t just “What do you do?” or “Who’s your family?” or “Where did you go to school?”—because in those questions, the transplant hears judgment. Other cities have their version, too: In D.C., it’s “What do you do?”; in New York, it’s “What building do you live in?” But we’re not talking about them. We’re talking about us.
It’s not just recruitment, it’s retention. If you just kept 10 percent of the kids right up the street [at Washington University], you’d change the whole city. —As told to Jeannette Cooperman
