Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
"I’m ambitious for St. Louis," says Hall.
When I first message Jason Hall, he’s in an early breakfast meeting in preparation for the NGA land transfer. He’ll spend the rest of the day finagling investments for local startups and strategizing the new STLMade initiative. Son of a Granite City steelworker, he was the first in his family to graduate from high school. Polished by his law school professors, New York economists, a federal appellate judge, the partners at Bryan Cave, and former Governor Jay Nixon, Hall’s learned to temper his intensity. Still, when St. Louis needs a push, he’s not shy.
What set you on your path? The breakthrough was getting involved in debate at Granite City High. I went to Bates College in Maine without ever visiting it, because I’d talked on the phone to the debate coach. Bates made the tuition a lot easier, and my parents made huge sacrifices. My dad was lifetime Granite City Steel, and my mom’s a pet groomer.
And you wound up at Vanderbilt Law School and did so well, you wangled one of the most coveted federal appellate clerkships. You could have gone anywhere from there. The easy choice is to flock to the coasts—but if I care about the place that cared about me, I’m going to go back to it. Besides, I like it here. You’re in a place big enough to matter but small enough to get your arms around, and there’s a fantastic legal community. I started at Bryan Cave in late 2003.
Were you nervous? [He shrugs.] I didn’t know a soul in this city, and I’d just recently come out, but I got involved right away, because Missouri was the first state that had to face a ban at the ballot box on same-sex marriage. When you take the first punch of a wave of that sentiment, it’s tough. Our campaign failed miserably, but I met gay judges, gay lawyers. At Bryan Cave, nobody was out; I thought I was the only one! So I worked with Susan Block and Larry Mooney to form an LGBT bar association, and we got Mike Wolff [then chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court] to be our keynote speaker.
And you were named the first president, which made the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Yeah, and I wasn’t even out to my family. I’d been up literally all night working on a brief from a client, and I get a call from my mom at 6 a.m.: “Your father and I saw the paper…” But my parents were great about it, and so was Bryan Cave. The Post article was one of the three most emailed stories, and I was scared as hell. I was making more money than anybody in my family had probably ever made combined. I didn’t want to lose that job. [Managing partner] Peter Van Cleve sent this note around saying something like “We encourage our associates to get involved in the community, and when they do, we want them to take on leadership positions.” So it was a good reminder: Live an authentic life.
From Bryan Cave, you took a sharp pay cut and moved to Jefferson City. Jay Nixon called right after he was elected—actually, it was a week before. I literally had no relationship with him, other than being a volunteer on his campaign, but he likes people who show up early and stay late. He said, “I want to get more young people involved in public policy. What do you think about being part of my economic development team?” That was ’08 into ’09, financial meltdown everywhere, and economic development was the kitchen table issue for families all over the state.
You agreed—and then couldn’t get confirmed? That was nutso. I held the post for 30 days. Jay was still in his first term when he put me up. The openly gay guy from St. Louis is not the appointment a timid governor makes in his first term! He could have easily, easily made a much safer choice. It was clear that one senator on the confirmation committee was not going to let me get through. So I stepped down and became deputy director, which didn’t require confirmation, and I was able to get done what I needed to get done anyway. We made it work.
You also became the first executive director of the Missouri Technology Corporation. That was an organization that had no money, no vision, no programmatic infrastructure, no sense of how to help entrepreneurs in the tech arena. Jay said, “Figure it out.” I’d represented a lot of tech cases at Bryan Cave. So we created what’s the modern MTC to make grants to support entrepreneurs and, what was far more radical, invest in them. It was a public-private partnership, and the startups paid the state a return when they made a profit or got sold. This was a pioneering concept, a scary one for the public sector, and it was a very delicate act with a very conservative legislature. But it was a way to support homegrown companies, and it got other states’ attention. Illinois copied it almost word for word.
Why focus on growing small companies when you can just poach big ones? There’s something unique and special about homegrown companies. They have a unique relationship to the community when their roots are here. I see them as the most philanthropic, as employing families for generations, as a unique source of pride. Missouri had fallen way down in the ranks. I said, “We have to fight for homegrown businesses”—particularly tech-based firms, which have the opportunity to scale and grow much larger.
Did being Missouri’s first openly gay cabinet official compromise your effectiveness? In some ways, I think it’s what made me successful. I was able to navigate the politics of Jefferson City. If there’s something about you that is different, you need to make it easy for people. They may want to be open, but they’re scared because they don’t know the right words. Learning how to navigate coming out gave me the skill set that helped me succeed in public life—and in civic life in St. Louis, which can be tough.
Yet you had people calling for you to be mayor! That was interesting. I was, like, “Holy cow! You’ve got to be kidding me.” I had never, ever thought of myself in those terms.
Do you now? [He hesitates.] I’m less intimidated that there are spaces off limits to me. When you start life the way I did, you are constantly looking up to other people, and you think there is this magic thing you have to do to be successful. But part of it is just having the confidence that you could do it, too. I realized people trusted me in ways I didn’t fully appreciate.
Flipping back to your résumé, why didn’t you go straight to law school after college? My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer that fall, and my mind wasn’t on my studies. She did fine, though, and that spring I took a job with an economic consulting firm in New York and met a lot of crazy smart fun people.
Does St. Louis seem sleepy and unambitious compared to Manhattan? I have a pretty intense personality, and New York probably took it to another level for me. I found a home in the entrepreneurial community here, though. Nobody cared who you were or where you were from; it was how hard you worked and how willing you were to take a risk. I would like to see, in civic work, a higher level of intensity. It was one of the things that frustrated me at the [St. Louis Regional] Chamber and part of the reason I left. St. Louis deserves better.
You were a VP and general counsel when you left the Chamber in 2017. How did you figure out your next move? I started conversations with people like [Cortex CEO] John Dubinsky, asking what was the next big civic thing. We wanted to connect these islands of economic revitalization between the Gateway Arch and Forest Park. The area between them needed to be as standard-bearing and ambitious as those two civic spaces but as an economic center.
So you became cofounder and CEO of Arch to Park—which is what, exactly? Big-picture, it’s a civic-minded investment organization, a switchboard of collaboration to find new investment resources that connect people and jobs in the heart of the city. We were an investor in the Chouteau Greenway, helping create a physical connection between Arch and park. And with buildings like this one [CIC] in Cortex, there’s a role for what we call patient capital. John and I were in Nashville and Pittsburgh, and people there were saying, “I don’t care if I get paid back in 10 years or 15. I want to have a strong city in the future.”
In the Gilded Age, St. Louis had its Big Cinch kingmakers, and through much of the 20th century we had Anheuser-Busch. Philanthropy today seems a bit piecemeal. It is—which is why I wanted to find more resources to get behind what’s working. There’s $8 billion in redevelopment occurring in the city right now. We’re at a critical crossroads; we’ve had decline for the last 70 years.
How does that intersect with talk of a city-county merger? A less fragmented government will make it much easier to have a unified vision and to execute against some priorities. My perception of the narrative is that the city was strong until about 1950, and now the city has problems, and the county doesn’t want to inherit them. But whether you’re from Granite City or Wentzville or Ballwin, your future is fundamentally linked to having a strong city. It’s where the tourists come. It’s how young people judge the vibrancy of the region. A city has an outsize impact, particularly at a time when the world is re-urbanizing. And the millennial generation has clearly expressed a preference for urban living. It’s like skating to where the puck is: We need to be a walkable, safe, dynamic city, or young people won’t come here.
If you were writing a primer on how to get St. Louisans to act… That’s a tension point for me. When I was a kid, I had to be a little scrappy to get ahead. I’m never comfortable—I’m always a little on edge—but I’m getting to a point where I realize it doesn’t have to be about me personally. The tendency is to have ego-driven organizations. Creating space for others to be successful is critical in St. Louis. Being willing to show up. Being willing to sit down with people you don’t agree with. A lot of times, when people hear dissent, the reaction has been [he punches the desk] to squelch that voice.
Why are we so resistant to change? When I think about education and a job, what that meant to my life—a job is not a theoretical thing, so I tend to think people will all view growth as good. But when you work in the urban core, some people’s experience with growth has not always been positive. They may have been displaced; they may have been lied to. We have to be growing, but we have to recognize that not everybody hears that word the same way.
You’re talking about people without resources. What about resistance among people who do wield power? [He laughs.] Yeah. It’s there, too. Getting people to believe our future can be greater than its past is just a challenge generally. We’ve had to deal with something no other region in the country faced at the same magnitude: a 63 percent population collapse out of the city. In a world where you tend to get judged by your city, that’s a lot to work through.
Also, we tend to be a little risk-averse. Correct—and we can’t be. I think that’s why the startup culture has been so good for St. Louis: It’s about risk-taking. They’re taking risks every day. Hell, I’m taking one. I don’t know whether this will work. It’s been two years now, and I’m feeling better. But if it doesn’t work, I’m not the guy with the safety net.
Why were you so interested in the NGA meeting? We’re working with a team of leaders to see if we can become the geospatial hub of the world. Twenty years ago, there were big strategic studies talking about all our assets in life sciences and agricultural technology. Out of that road map came Cortex, BioSTL, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center… Now we have a new $2 billion asset in an industry that’s disrupting transportation, agriculture, the mobile phone industry… When you get a gift like that new headquarters, in an industry that is rapidly evolving—that’s our Amazon. Except it’s homegrown.
How do you get the various factions to collaborate? Most organizations’ tendency is to promote what they themselves are doing. The only brand I serve is St. Louis. That makes it easier for people to come to the table. You can’t be just a flea market of good ideas. The notion of St. Louis as a startup community goes much deeper in the psyche of this region than I realized. It’s influencing areas far broader than tech, and we’re going to be amping that up with STL Made—a platform for people who are changing their community. Ultimately, we want to influence the national perception of St. Louis. We thought the perception would be negative, but a study showed it to be completely neutral. There are people who think we’re in North Dakota. For a region that sometimes is divisive, geographically and otherwise, celebrating what we share in common—the best startup community on the rise—is going to be exciting. To date, we’ve lacked a common story; people don’t know what a great place this is to start a career or business, stand out and be recognized, stay and put down roots. We’ve built this amazingly connected infrastructure, and the support it provides to a fledgling company is extraordinary. [He grins at his own vehemence.] I’m ambitious for St. Louis.
When you were a little kid in Granite City, what did crossing the river represent to you? St. Louis was the big city. My earliest memories are Cardinals baseball and coming over with my family—we took the bus to the new mall, St. Louis Centre. I remember also seeing Washington Avenue—it was not what it is today—and for the first time experiencing urban vacancy and decline. I didn’t know that would foreshadow my life!
