A Conversation with Alex Ihnen of nextSTL.com

Every day, in boring meetings across the region, public officials approve demolitions, change traffic lights, and grant building permits. It’s the sum of those little decisions that makes our region what it is, but most average citizens pay no attention—unless they follow nextSTL. Alex Ihnen’s wonky blog is required reading for the civic-minded, shedding light on how public policies big and small shape the city. We asked him what St. Louis should do next.

Does preservation hinder progress? Why preservation has taken a certain tactic here, which is generally “save everything,” is that what replaces it is usually crap. When you see things that people rally against, it’s when you tear down an apartment building for a parking lot. Or you just tear down a warehouse because people think it’s ugly, and you replace it with grass.

How would you rate the overall impact of silver-bullet developments like the proposed stadium? The big silver bullets projects have failed St. Louis over and over again. We’ve built other stadiums over the last 30 years, and we’ve lost 300,000 residents and probably 100,000 jobs in the city. Those silver bullet ideas are just not what builds a city. A lot of times the people who love those projects are not the ones who live near them or encounter them except for a game day. If you think about any city that you love to visit, it probably wasn’t built for you. It was probably built for the people who live there. The tourist areas of the cities that we love are kind of the worst. Tourists like to go places that are made for people to live. We get that wrong here all the time.

Has Ballpark Village hurt downtown? The unfinished Ballpark Village is hurting downtown. What we have is a parking lot and some bars. That’s it. That’s not what was promised. The whole premise was you would add a couple thousand jobs in office towers, and you would have a couple hundred condos. That might help. If you are a sports bar and Ballpark Village opens across the street, it’s crazy to think that’s not going to have a negative impact on your business. For the most part, it’s a turnover of restaurants that happens all the time. What matters is that in this case, we have a heavily subsidized development that brought in the big national chain names. Then you had local restaurateurs taking a hit from it. That’s a problem.

What could help downtown? It needs to be rebranded as a great urban neighborhood. I think we’re stuck thinking of downtown as our central business district, our skyscraper district, where all of the parades and marathons and sports events happen. It is that and will continue to be that. But downtown has 10,000 residents and is a great place to live. We have a great grocery store downtown. We have great parks. We have great transit. You can live in an amazing loft for basically nothing, and there are a ton of events and bars and restaurants.

What’s your opinion of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency project? The NGA is too big and too important to lose. As much as I don’t like the fact that it’s a huge monolithic project, I think most people don’t understand the amount of vacancy on the near North Side, so I don’t blame the city for going after this. Once the NGA is somewhere, this is a 100-year or longer decision for them. The eminent domain is not something you ever want to pursue, but if there is a case to do it, this is certainly better than for a sports stadium or a Menards.

What else can be done to help North City? It goes back to building a city for the people who live here. It’s about replacing sidewalks and having two-way streets and maybe traffic lights that are synchronized and just these little things that make daily life a little better. That matters. We have this desperate idea that people outside our city aren’t going to drive to our city unless we make it really easy. We’ve done that. We’ve built highways everywhere. That hasn’t worked. If you build the city for the people who want to be here, then other people want to come.

Segregation is a huge issue. You cannot minimize the importance of that issue. There are things our communities should do to address it, whether that’s our education system, our tax system… But you can’t take the attitude that we’re going to solve the racial divide before we do anything else. To limit ourselves because of our challenges is foolish.

You proposed reducing the speed limit on Gravois, which led to a heated debate. People get used to whatever the current situation is, and they consider that to be normal. But there is nothing natural or normal about cities. Our city is a reflection of us and our decisions, big decisions and small decisions that were made over decades. We can make the type of city that we want. So I write about Gravois and talk about how property values along the road have dropped and there is a lot of vacancy. Cars passing by a small storefront at 45 miles per hour isn’t good for the city. People say, “I would never come to your city if you slow down traffic.” You don’t have to. But other people will. It’s so clear that what we’re doing hasn’t worked. We should try something new.

Is that a risk? These things have worked other places. This isn’t a grand experiment. But any time you make a change in a city, people are impacted, some people negatively and some people positively. There’s a tendency just to not want to make anyone mad. That attitude has to change. We need to frankly tell some people like, this is going to be bad for you. But the current situation is bad for the city at large.

What about efforts to close off streets to reduce crime or improve neighborhoods? Closing the streets is probably one of the biggest mistakes that St. Louis has made. It’s another thing that people get used to, but I think it’s a huge mistake. It closes off the city. We already have a lot of parks, we have a lot of industrial areas and things like that. You start closing off streets and what it does is push a lot of traffic to a few streets, like Gravois, like Kingshighway. Any time you close off a street, there is always a good side and a bad side. That hampers development where some might say, I don’t want to be on that side of this closed-off neighborhood or this closed-off street. You see that between Shaw and the Botanical Grove development.

Are you a fan of consolidating local governments? If you’re a doughnut franchise and you want to open 40 locations in the city and county, you may have to go to 40 different city council meetings and get zoning approval from 40 different organizations. That’s insane… In retrospect with the stadium, there simply was no way for the region to speak with a voice and say we do or don’t want the Rams here. We lack the ability to act as a region, and that’s going to hurt us in a lot of ways.

How do you change that? Voters need to reward people who have a bigger vision. Several years ago, they passed the change to reduce the number of wards from 28 to 14. I think there should be a push to reduce that even further. There needs to be a rethinking of what the alderman’s role is. We should really vote in some at-large seats that are required to have a bigger vision and more responsibility for the city as a whole.

My alderperson takes pride in giving personal service. It’s what the job has become. When they reduced the number of wards, there were a couple of aldermen on the radio saying, “I take pride in the fact that I give my cellphone number to everyone in my ward and they can call me if a tree falls down.” But that shouldn’t be your job.

What is your take on the effort to repeal the city’s earnings tax? There is some real merit to considering increasing the earnings tax. People start howling and say, “That is going to kill us. People are going to leave this city.” Well, look what has happened over the last 30 years. People have left St. Louis as fast as they have left any other city in the country. I’m not so sure it’s the 1 percent earnings tax that has made that difference. People don’t want to live here. The city we get is built and paid for by the taxes we pay.

Anything you want to add? In the end, St. Louis can be whatever we want it to be. There is nothing that’s stuck. Gravois doesn’t have to remain a highway through our city. The North Side doesn’t have to remain empty. These things that people think were inevitable aren’t inevitable. There is no predetermined future for the city—so we can start making decisions now that build a better place to live and a better place to work.