Spencer’s tough task: Delivering abundance in a tornado-ravaged St. Louis

Mayor Cara Spencer hasn’t had time lately to leaf through new nonfiction. Elected on April 8 and sworn in a week later, she’s now consumed with the city’s response to the May 16 tornado that cut a swath of ruin from Forest Park to North Riverfront. But that response, along with her overall agenda, may end up having a lot to do with the new bestseller Abundance by Ezra Klein of The New York Times and Derek Thompson of The Atlantic. Their debate-stirring thesis: Democrats can emerge from the political wilderness by ensuring that any city or state government under their control delivers big on people’s basic needs, from housing to transit.

If such a prescription sounds obvious, the book catalogs myriad examples of where left-of-center administrations failed at it—in many cases, ironically, by trying to achieve too many goals. Municipal overstretch happened to be the crux of Spencer’s back-to-basics campaign message, with which she won the race by 28 points. Whereas her predecessor, Tishaura Jones, emphasized the need to fight racism and poverty, Spencer emphasized the need to repave roads—lots of them. “My approach from Day 1,” she told me in April, “has been: What are our core responsibilities? Let’s figure out how to do those excellently.” Now, in the wake of the storm, she’ll be under even more pressure to prioritize. 

And that’s important, because a common trap for Democrats, Klein and Thompson write, is “everything bagel liberalism”—that is, piling too many priorities onto one project. This echoes Spencer’s critique of how the city recovered from the last major disaster, the COVID pandemic. She believes the city was too scattershot in its use of federal pandemic-recovery funds—for example, by directing $5 million to a temporary guaranteed-basic-income program benefiting 540 participants. (She voted for that bill, which also funded other priorities.) Far wiser, she has said, to focus on goals such as building better streets. While the city did set aside $40 million for that purpose, Spencer has called for even greater investment, and for faster repaving projects, which at present can take 800 days to finish. (Don’t get her started on sidewalks.)  

In housing, which is about to become crucial post-tornado, the city doesn’t build anything itself but rather ensures that those who do so comply with city code. The problem: Permitting has become a major bottleneck. As of April there was just one city employee assigned to reviewing plans on a full-time basis. This has led to delays for those who try to comply and off-the-books construction by those who don’t, said Spencer: “We were seeing these long, six-month waits to get something like a deck improvement permitted.” While the city could approach this as a personnel issue—say, by contracting out the review—that’s not the only possible fix. Here’s another: The city recently got a $400,000 federal grant to collaborate with architects, community groups, and residents on a book of preapproved designs and floor plans for affordable housing—no review necessary. “There’s value in having certain aspects preapproved,” Spencer said. She has also floated the idea of moving plan review online.

Another chokepoint in the city’s development pipeline is the Board of Adjustment—the body tasked with approving deviations from the city’s zoning code. During our April interview, Spencer lamented that the board was backed up until September. “It’s completely unreasonable to wait that long,” she said, adding that the delays had threatened some of the biggest projects in town, such as the Millennium Hotel site’s redevelopment. “[Developers] are like, ‘Our financing will fall through; we have to start!’” She said her team was looking at ways to address the situation—which she attributed in part to understaffing—while also respecting the need for public notice. (She believes an imminent update to the city’s zoning code will obviate such problems.)

It’s easy to imagine Spencer’s progressive opponents imputing venal motives to her on this front. During the mayoral race, Jones accused her of being beholden to the developer Bob Clark, founder of Clayco; he and his company together contributed more than $130,000 to support Spencer’s candidacy. In an interesting parallel, some on the left have criticized the book Abundance as inviting more moneyed influence into politics; Zephyr Teachout writes that the co-authors’ message could be hijacked by “big financial interests” to claim support for a “Ronald Reagan–style deregulatory juggernaut.” Co-author Klein, for his part, responds that he’s really advocating for the government to deregulate itself—to get out of its own way—so that citizens can enjoy more public goods. As for Spencer, she said in April that she was hyper-focused on delivery of such things (e.g., streets), as well as services such as trash pick-up and snow removal. 

But now she’s got a calamity on her hands—and a calamity, the Abundance co-authors argue, is an excellent time for a government to get out of its own way. They recount how Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, reacted to the sudden collapse of the I-95 bridge in Philadelphia: He signed a declaration of emergency. This allowed for the bypassing of an environmental impact statement, a drawn-out bidding process, and certain work rules (like a prohibition on paving in the rain). It wasn’t that those procedural steps ceased to matter; it was that speed mattered more. And all this could’ve gone badly, but he empowered decision-makers on the ground to take calculated risks rather than robotically adhere to process. As a result, a fix that normally would’ve taken months took only 12 days. Shapiro’s popularity “swelled,” the co-authors wrote. “Turns out people like it when their government gets things done.”

Whether Spencer can do something like this within the byzantine machinery of City Hall is an open question. Bemoaning municipal dysfunction is one thing; solving it is another. Spencer has insisted that any city confronting scarcity—a declining population, a modest tax base—simply “can’t do a million things.” She would rather her administration take fewer swings at pitches but knock those balls out of the park. At least she’ll have a target-rich environment: In the city, opportunities for the government to deliver more do, in fact, abound. Now more than ever. 

You may also enjoy this episode of The 314 Podcast: Mayor Cara Spencer reflects on first eight months in office