On the heels of the 2016 election, author Michael Lewis published a book that provided a rational path forward during a divided time. The Undoing Project details the complex relationship of two Israeli psychologists, the brash Amos Tversky and the more reserved Daniel Kahneman, who both served in the Yom Kippur War and began collaborating at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the fall of 1969. Over time, the pair laid the groundwork for a host of insights into human behavior that have transformed how we think about everything from economics to public policy, medicine to happiness.
Lewis discovered the story of Tversky and Kahneman after a review in The New Republic pointed out that the social scientists had already shared the underpinnings for the premise of Lewis’ bestselling book Moneyball, which told how biases of the mind caused baseball scouts, supposed experts, to misevaluate players. A more objective statistical analysis, what came to be known as sabermetrics, could yield better results with undervalued players.
The takeaway: Human reasoning is often fallible. Our thinking is not always as rational as we might like to believe. Instead, we should apply more scrutiny to even the most strongly held beliefs in a particular field, rationales that can drive judgments and decision-making. Personally and as a society, we should be open to acknowledging instinctual errors and find a way to step back and look for a better solution.
In the same spirit, this feature takes a fresh look at some of the region’s most fundamental concerns. It embraces the words of Steve Jobs, who once said, “Let’s go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday.” The story examines how we might address some of the region’s most pressing issues, often drawing on other cities for inspiration.
These case studies are just that—a starting place from which to work that might require refinement and rethinking.
As we move forward, the region will need to embrace the same type of resilience and innovation that have helped us endure the past year. With any luck, after everything we’ve been through, issues once considered daunting won’t seem so insurmountable.
In finding common ground and looking ahead together, we might draw another important lesson from Tversky and Kahneman. Their many differences sharpened their work but also caused them to grow apart. At one point, Kahneman recalled, “I sort of divorced him.” Days later, Tversky told his longtime friend that he’d been given a diagnosis of malignant melanoma and had just six months to live. The two reunited shortly before Tversky’s death at age 59.
Years later, in his bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman reflected on his collaboration with Tversky, as well as what we might learn from history. He observed, “The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.”
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A Breath of Fresh Air
The American Lung Association’s 2020 State of the Air report gave St. Louis an F for high-ozone days. It will take an elevated effort to fix it
There was a cruel irony at play as the coronavirus pandemic swept into St. Louis in March: In a way, the wide-ranging effects of a respiratory illness made it easier for St. Louisians to breathe. With fewer drivers commuting to work and industry brought to a halt this spring, air quality in the region improved.
According to data collected by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, concentrations of nitrogen dioxide—a pollutant from motor vehicles and industrial plants—measured March 23 to May 4 were significantly lower in 2020 than during the same span in 2019.
Poor air quality is an issue that cities across the country, including St. Louis, have grappled with for decades. In the 2020 State of the Air report, released the same year as the Clean Air Act’s 50th anniversary, the American Lung Association found that nearly half of the nation’s population, or about 150 million people, lived with polluted air. Examining the two most widespread outdoor air pollutants, the report gave the St. Louis region a grade of F for its high-ozone days and ranked the area 25th on its list of the most polluted cities by year-round particle pollution.
So how do we fix it? The short answer: It’s complicated.
It’s easy to look at air quality and the effects of pollution through a narrow lens. In reality, bad air quality is the product of many things: traffic, industry, poverty, segregation. The air that we breathe is inextricably entwined with every other thing we do, and solving air quality issues will require fixing a list of other things first.
“It took decades for this to happen, and it’s going to take a while to get out of it,” says Christine Ekenga, an assistant professor of public health at Washington University.
Ekenga was the lead author of a study published last year showing that St. Louis residents living in neighborhoods with high levels of poverty, unemployment, and segregation have higher cancer risks because of their proximity to bad air. Addressing this issue will require a region-wide effort to reduce segregation by looking at housing laws and affordable housing options and by promoting civic engagement so residents can use their voices to fight for zoning regulations.
And it won’t stop there. “The main source of our poor air quality in the region is mostly transportation-related air quality and pollution,” Ekenga says, “so we really need to think about transportation policies when we think about reducing pollution in the air. We need to think about multi-mobile streets, so restricted travel, more pedestrian lanes, more bicycling lanes, boosting public transit, thinking about open spaces for people instead of cars and vehicles.”
AVERAGE HIGH-OZONE DAYS FOR ST. LOUIS AND SEVEN OTHER MIDWEST CITIES
- FAYETTEVILLE 0.0 / GRADE A
- MINNEAPOLIS 1.3 / GRADE C
- NASHVILLE 3.2 / GRADE D
- KANSAS CITY 5.7 / GRADE F
- INDIANAPOLIS 6.0 / GRADE F
- DETROIT 7.3 / GRADE F
- ST. LOUIS 9.3 / GRADE F
- CHICAGO 19.2 / GRADE F
HIGH-OZONE DAY DEFINED: Emissions from cars, power plants, industrial boilers, chemical plants, and other sources are already not ideal. Add a dry, sunny day and the chemical reaction is extremely harmful ground-level ozone. Breathing ground-level ozone can cause or worsen a variety of health problems and take a toll on ecosystems. These days, often called Ozone Action Days, are usually declared by a county or state and occur most often in urban Midwestern cities.
SOURCE: United States Environmental Agency Protection Agency, American Lung Association
Fun Factor: Rooftop River Dining
While we’re on the topic of taking St. Louis to new heights, let’s take another look at rooftop dining options, especially with the increased desire for alfresco spots. Yes, there’s Cinder House and Three Sixty, but we might also look farther north and south, at underutilized plots just beyond the typical flood zone. In recent years, for instance, restaurateur Munsok So renovated a collapsed historic building into a five-story restaurant and event space. “I still don’t understand why we don’t do more to build up what’s happening on the river,” he told SLM at the time. “Why does St. Louis not want to do that?”
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A vertical garden in Madrid
Going Green
How we can transform slabs of concrete into walls of vegetation
When you squire out-of-towners around the historic heart of our city, do you gesture to the parking garages and beam with pride? Nope, because they’re lifeless behemoths of concrete and sadness—and they’re everywhere. Mercifully, there’s a way to spruce them up and accomplish a lot more in the meantime: vertical gardens.
Vertical gardens (a.k.a. “living walls”) are just what they sound like: structures affixed to the exteriors of buildings that fill up the surface with plants. Cities around the world are experimenting with them. Miami boasts several parking garages with such gardens.
The benefits abound. They reduce the urban heat island effect, that broiling concrete jungle feeling you get while walking to Busch Stadium in the summer. Living walls cut down on car exhaust pollution by sequestering carbon dioxide. They capture dust particulates—good news for people with asthma. They muffle unpleasant city sounds, like jackhammers or, say, a free Sammy Hagar concert. There’s also a psychological benefit well attested to in scientific literature: Green plants reduce stress and enhance feelings of well-being.
So how would this work downtown? Jennifer Smock, manager of the Kemper Center for Home Gardening at the Missouri Botanical Garden, points to several species with a strong chance of survival on the exterior of a downtown building. One example is Carex, a genus of sedges, native to the state, that grow in a range of conditions and feed butterflies. Heuchera, coral bells, is another; it offers multiple colors and has thrived on MoBot’s vertical garden.
Then there’s Sedum, commonly known as stonecrop. Mark Woolbright, founder and CEO of St. Louis–based vertical garden company Varden, says a good example of that plant’s potential is the MADE STL building on Delmar. It has a 50-foot living wall of Sedum that was planted last summer and is now “totally green.”
Establishing vertical gardens downtown may be trickier, he notes, because the high-rises will block some natural light. “You’d have to work with a really skilled horticulturist to come up with species to work in sun and shade,” he says.
Funding all of this would likewise require some creativity. Each year, the downtown garages pay real estate taxes—some of them hundreds of thousands of dollars. A portion could be abated if the owners greenlighted vertical gardens. As for the city-owned garages, look at Mexico City. There, private enterprise has sponsored living walls around the columns that support raised highways; in exchange, the companies use some columns for advertising. Another solution: Ask voters to raise parking rates. A longer-term strategy, Woolbright suggests, is to amend the building code to require living walls.
“[Owners would] complain,” he says, “but they’d go for it—they’d have to. And it would give them a branding punch and generate some goodwill.”
WHERE PLANTS MEET PARKING
1. HEUCHERA Coral bells, which range in color, have thrived on MoBot’s vertical garden.
2. CAREX This genus of sedges is native to the state and feed butterflies.
3. SEDUM Commonly known as stonecrop, sedum is on the MADE STL building.
Todd Detwiler
Block by Block
How to address gentrification while reinvigorating neighborhoods
The key to solving gentrification might be rethinking how we define it. An influx of new businesses, new people, and new money—or gentrification—can be a driver of economic growth. But if it’s coupled with cultural displacement—increasing housing costs to the point where lower-income folks can’t afford to live there anymore—it comes at a steep price. A recent report in The New York Times detailed the difficulty of adding parks to areas in Denver, in part because residents of lower-income areas worried about “green gentrification.”
So how do you improve neighborhoods without driving out the people whom investments most benefit?
In 2019, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition released a study. It looked at census data from 2000–2013 to try and suss out demographic changes indicative of gentrification and displacement. The good news: Though gentrification was common in the country’s most populated cities, it was actually pretty rare in smaller and midsize ones. St. Louis, researchers found, had nine gentrified census tracts, or neighborhoods. Seven of the top 10 cities with the most gentrified neighborhoods were on the coasts. The bad news: We can also probably conclude that wealth-building investment is concentrated in those cities as well. Ah, a problem for another day.
The gentrification-versus-displacement question might be especially timely, given the Next NGA West’s impending arrival in 2023 in North St. Louis. Housing will be key. Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that gentrifying Philly neighborhoods saw a decrease in affordable rental units at nearly five times the rate of non-gentrifying neighborhoods. The NCRC researchers cited the Petworth neighborhood in Washington state as an example of the opposite. In 2000, 85 percent of the area’s 3,500 residents were African-American, and homeownership was high—80 percent. In 2019, though, the African-American population only made up 63 percent of the population, but home values climbed from $167,000 to $367,000. So though African-American residents might have moved away, they were, with any luck, able to sell their homes at much higher prices than the ones they originally paid, building generational wealth. Although 250 homes were planned for the neighborhood around Next NGA West, according to the St. Louis Business Journal, after building three, the developer said it was uncertain if the project will be finished.
So what do we do? The Missouri Property Tax Credit Claim, a $1,000 credit for homeowners, may help keep elderly residents in their homes, should property values and taxes increase as a result of gentrification. Other options: expanding public housing, offering assistance to residents who fall behind on property taxes, and providing renters with the option to purchase their apartments.
For a local example, consider the $100 million mixed-use Delmar Divine project, slated to open in fall 2021. Build-A-Bear Workshop founder Maxine Clark, who’s spearheading the project, is including 150 apartments in the development, with studios starting at $700–$800 per month, aimed at people who earn $35,000–$55,000 annually. The idea: Affordable housing and economic diversity are at the heart of reinvigorating a neighborhood.
CITIES WITH GENTRIFIED NEIGHBORHOODS AND HIGH LEVELS OF BLACK AND HISPANIC DISPLACEMENT, 2000–2013
Fun Factor: Weekday–Morning Dance Parties
How to brighten the ho-hum weekday morning routine? Dance parties. Yes, we’re serious. Already, such cities as Nashville, Denver, and Austin are hosting high-energy events during the morning, with the help of New York–based company Daybreaker. Like a night at the club, the parties involve DJs and dancing, but the booze is replaced with energy drinks and, oftentimes, yoga and uplifting mantras. It’s a fresh way to jumpstart the morning—and beats a hangover.
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La Rambla in Barcelona
Room to Roam
What the pandemic’s taught us about parklets and pedestrians
When the pandemic hit here, in mid-March, St. Louisans turned to the outdoors for respite from their homes. People walked and jogged on the sidewalks. Restaurants found creative ways to expand their outdoor dining spaces. Streateries and parklets popped up as real estate typically reserved for cars was temporarily closed to vehicular traffic. Roads in Forest Park and Tower Grove Park were closed to provide more space for pedestrians, and Tower Grove Park’s extra space was used to spread out its Saturday market stands.
The National Association of Realtors has found that 62 percent of millennials favor walkable cities, and pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods are often synonymous with higher property values and more active restaurants and retail. People flock to La Rambla in Barcelona and the Third Street Promenade in Los Angeles. Walkable cities are more equitable, sustainable, and healthier.
Yet streets account for 80 percent of public space in cities. In the past, the nation’s city planning standard didn’t prioritize walking in design plans, yielding safety concerns. In St. Louis, local historian (and SLM contributor) Chris Naffziger believes that dual one-way traffic routes, such as Broadway and Fourth, jeopardize pedestrian safety. As he put it in a March story about how the city has become less pedestrian-friendly over time, “The needs of automobile and pedestrian are diametrically opposed.”
The National Association of City Transportation Officials has created guides to help cities become more pedestrian-friendly. They recommend that sidewalks be wide enough to accommodate pedestrians and commerce. In St. Louis, Great Rivers Greenway executive director Susan Trautman describes downtown streets as “super-wide,” an area where walkways and landscaping could be added to make downtown more pedestrian-friendly. Expanding the existing network of greenways, Trautman adds, can connect people in ways that don’t require cars: “St. Louis can continue to invest in infrastructure and decision-making that supports giving people options for how they want to travel.”
St. Louis might be taking note: Design Downtown STL recently unveiled plans to make the heart of the city more pedestrian-friendly, with more trees and events to attract people, as well as plans to narrow unusually wide thoroughfares, such as Market Street and Tucker Boulevard.
Todd Detwiler
Guardians of Peace
How a new approach to law enforcement might help curb crime and strengthen community relations
A decade ago, Camden, New Jersey, was a city in crisis. Open-air drug markets dotted street corners, and violent crime put the city in the news for all the wrong reasons. Its institutions were broken, too, with corruption, lethargy, and apathy crippling the system from the inside out. Police Chief J. Scott Thomson realized that many things, including his own department, needed to change.
The opportunity to enact meaningful change came in 2013, after the state disbanded the city’s police department. Camden’s policing model was then reimagined to better reflect the needs of the people. Camden didn’t need a band of law enforcement warriors patrolling its streets, officials decided; it needed guardians.
“My message to police officers as we onboarded everyone into this new organization was ‘When you come into this department, you will identify more with being a member of the Peace Corps than you will as a Special Forces operator,’” Thomson recalls.
As calls for police reforms hit full volume in the wake of George Floyd’s death in May, community policing has been pitched as one of several answers. But what is it, and how should it work?
Laurie Robinson, a professor of criminology at George Mason University who served as a co-chair for the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, formed in the wake of the events in Ferguson in 2014, says there are several ways to view and define community policing. At its core, though, it’s about co-producing public safety through coordination between community members and law enforcement officials. The first step: building trust and fortifying relationships on both sides of the divide. “That is the central principle,” Robinson says.
Activists insist they need to have input in the way communities are policed, that traditional methods do not work. For his part, Thomson, who retired from the Camden department last year, refuses to wave a victory flag over his own efforts to change the policing model, but he is eager to point to examples of progress in the city of more than 70,000, located across the river from Philadelphia. The murder rate has dropped by nearly 70 percent over the past seven years, and violent crime has decreased by 42 percent. Thomson says there’s no unilateral approach to community policing, and the methods used in Camden may not necessarily be the best methods to use in a larger city, such as St. Louis, but the underlying ethos of involvement, engagement, and trust still applies.
To establish rapport, Robinson says, departments should be involved in dialogue with community organizations, religious groups, and youth groups. Training and recruitment could also be reimagined; police academies could do more than teach police tactics and instead instill in new officers a broader worldview to help them understand social issues in the communities where they’ll be working. In other words, Robinson says, police forces can be more empathetic, so more effective partnerships can be established.
“The community has to have a sharing hand on the wheel of how a police force is being guided,” Thomson says. “You’ve got to engage with people. You’ve got to empower them. That is the start.”
Fun Factor: Light Installations
To lift spirits and light up the night, we might look to Quebec City. There, light installations transform industrial structures into colorful masterpieces. The historic Jacques Cartier Bridge changes shades with the season and hosts hourly short animations influenced by the traffic, weather, and social media data. Across the St. Lawrence River from the walled city, Bunge’s grain silos served as a 600-by-30-meter canvas for a light show inspired by the Aurora Borealis. In recent years, St. Louis’ skyline has already been illuminated by the St. Louis Wheel and Stan Span; imagine the Eads Bridge and Cargill grain elevator in a new light as well.
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Kids draw and make crafts. Children with educational toys and school supplies for creativity. Background for preschool and kindergarten or art classes. Boy and girl play at home or daycare
New School
What we can learn from our neighbors about universal pre-K
In Missouri, early childhood education is a seesaw of give and take. Last year, the state rolled out a new pre-K program, the Missouri Pre-K Foundation Formula, but reduced funding for the existing Missouri Preschool Program, a competitive grant offered in just 9 percent of school districts statewide. Enrollment increased to 5,788 children in 2018–2019, up 3,410 children from the previous year. State funding for the two programs also increased by $8 million, to more than $19 million total, yet the National Institute for Early Education Research ranked the state 39th in access for 4-year-olds and 37th for resources.
So how might we expand access to pre-K? We could start by looking to our neighbors to the southwest as a model. Oklahoma is one of a handful of states with free voluntary pre-K. The state spent a whopping $182 million on early childhood education and $4,264 per child in 2018–2019. (By contrast, in Missouri, spending per child dropped to $3,330, down $1,388 from the previous year. These figures weren’t adjusted for cost of living, like the bar graph to the left.) The quality of education that 4-year-olds receive in Oklahoma is gold star–worthy. Pre-K teachers there must hold a bachelor’s degree in education with a specialization in pre-kindergarten, and the student/teacher ratio is 10:1. The approach seems to be working: A report in 2016 found that Oklahoma was one of 13 states to see “significant growth on fourth-grade reading scores as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.”
But Oklahomans lucked out in getting the funding for the program in the first place. Before launching free pre-K in 1998, lawmakers discovered that schools with half-day kindergarten were receiving money to cover full-day costs and misusing the overage. Legislators expanded the aid formula to include preschool.
In the absence of budget indiscretions and a tax increase, we could look to Chicago for a possible solution. There, a partnership has formed between the Chicago Public Schools, the city, and private investors. The Child-Parent Center Pay for Success Initiative is a social impact bond aimed to enroll more than 2,620 low-income children in pre-K classes. The idea: Private lenders provide the capital ($17 million upfront, in Chicago’s case) to increase access to education, and the government repays them if educational outcomes improve. Because children are less likely to need special education services if they receive quality early childhood education, the state will save and use that money to repay investors. Funding partners also receive repayments for increases in kindergarten readiness and increases in third-grade literacy—a win across the board.
VARIATION IN STATE SPENDING PER CHILD, ADJUSTED FOR STATE COST OF LIVING
In 2018–2019, total spending for early childhood education increased, but spending per child remained stagnant. The gap between the states that spend the most on early childhood education and the states that spend the least continues to grow.
Source: National Institute for Early Education Research
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Picture of two groups of freelance designers working together in an office.
Talent Tap
How state policymakers might help keep skilled rising stars in Missouri after graduation
The exit of young educated workers from the state is not a problem unique to Missouri. More states—most notably in northern New England, the Plains, the Southeast, and the Rust Belt—are losing more trained and skilled laborers than they are keeping or gaining them.
Although Missouri has low out-migration because many people who are born here stay, those who do leave are more educated than those left behind. There’s a 16 percent gap between the percentages of leavers who are highly educated and the percentage of stayers who are highly educated. There’s also an 8.8 percent gap when comparing leavers to entrants, according to a 2019 report by the United States Congress Joint Economic Committee. For context, in regard to the gap between those who leave and enter, North Dakota and Delaware top the list with nearly a 20 percent difference, whereas for states with low brain drain, such as California and New York, the difference is closer to minus-20 percent.
There are strides: The Missouri Chamber Foundation, for example, is analyzing the state’s workforce through a 15-year plan aimed at improving its economy. In September, it helped launch a service that matches companies with apprentice programs to potential apprentices.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, Missouri holds its own at attracting college students. In 2019, 8,320 Missouri high school seniors left the state for tertiary education, but we also had an influx of 9,875 out-of-staters attending our universities.
So in some cases, why can’t we keep them after graduation? One key is bustling metropolitan areas, with which such states as Illinois, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia have won over millennials in recent years.
In 2007, Maine became the first state to give a large tax credit to help college graduates pay off student loans, on the condition that they stay and work in the state. But, so far, the initiative hasn’t created dramatic change. As Ohio is discovering with the slow progression of its 2017 House Bill 396 (which would help pay off student loans for STEM graduates working in the state), policy change takes time.
In the short term, Missouri could take a lesson from Purdue University, which in 2019 launched the Purdue Brain Gain Initiative, inviting alumni to move back to Indiana. The pilot program found 220 alumni interested in discussing new jobs in the state, leading to conversations between them and the program’s partner companies.
As many companies shift to remote working, perhaps now is the time to begin those conversations—and for policymakers to brainstorm how to sweeten the deal.
Gross Brain Drain, 2017
Gap in percentages of highly educated between Leavers and Stayers
SOURCE: U.S. Joint Economic Committee
Fun Factor: Wilderness Expeditions
Out-of-towners might be drawn to Six Flags, then zip down I-44 to Busch Stadium. They’d be remiss, however, in overlooking our natural offerings. The scenic stretch of wilderness at the region’s edges—hills, rivers, trails, wildlife—is like a slice of Colorado in our own backyard. Perhaps all that’s needed is a little nudge, guided trips, in the same spirit as Big Muddy Adventures' river expeditions, to experience these wonders with a pro—a seasoned photographer, a knowledgeable naturalist, an experienced adventurer. Such experiences might help both tourists and lifelong St. Louisans see the metro region through a new lens.
Todd Detwiler
Making Moves
Rideshare and bus rapid transit services offer less costly alternatives to mass transit.
The call to action came four years ago. That’s when, in a report on the ongoing evolution of the public transit industry, the American Public Transportation Association challenged public transit agencies to get away from the traditional idea of transit service as a system in which buses and trains move around the city and think of themselves more in terms of where people go. In other words, the charge for these organizations is to stop thinking of themselves as public transit agencies and start reimagining themselves as mobility agencies.
“It’s much better if the transit agency can be seen as a partner in all of these ways of moving people and not as something separate,” says Victoria Perk, a senior research associate at the Center for Urban Transportation Research at the University of South Florida. “Think more along the lines of combining all the ways that people move in a community. That would include walking and biking and perhaps even scooters and partnering with rideshare companies so that these modes aren’t competing with each other—they’re complementing each other.”
Our region is already getting a taste of what the future may hold. In June, St. Louis Metro Transit launched a new on-demand rideshare transit service, Via Metro STL, that allows riders in North and Southwest St. Louis County to hail a vehicle from a smartphone app. (Think Uber but under the Metro umbrella.) Metro reports that 1,300 trips were completed in the first month of the program.
There’s also the possibility that an action plan for the long-discussed north-south MetroLink expansion is put into place in the next decade, says Jim Wild, executive director of East-West Gateway, but such a project is estimated to carry a price tag of at least $940 million. Nationally, ridership was already on the decline entering the year, and the pandemic only exacerbated budget problems for agencies across the country. In May, APTA projected that transit agencies will face a shortfall of $23.8 billion through the end of 2021, so it may take time before cities are able to fully implement bold ideas.
Several Midwestern cities, such as Kansas City, Columbus, and Indianapolis, have explored cost-effective alternatives to light rail, including bus rapid transit services. These BRT lines often use dedicated roadways and take priority at intersections to deliver a faster transit experience than standard bus service. In August, the city issued a request for qualifications for north-south transit options, including the possibility of BRT service. BRT is worth looking into, but Wild says it’s important to consider that operating costs mean that these hybrid bus systems aren’t always the long-term money-savers they’re touted to be.
Whichever direction the region goes, the best way for St. Louis to better embrace transit is to show riders what the system can do for them. “We need to understand that transit is for everyone,” Wild says. “It’s a way for people to get to their jobs, to do their shopping, to do everyday errands. We need to educate the community about the benefits of transit.”
ANNUAL TRANSIT BOARDINGS PER CAPITA AS OF 2018
- CHICAGO 67.0
- MINNEAPOLIS 35.5
- MILWAUKEE 23.7
- CLEVELAND 20.2
- ST. LOUIS 18.6
- COLUMBUS 14.1
- CINCINNATI 11.3
- NASHVILLE 10.9
- KANSAS CITY 10.6
- DETROIT 9.8
- INDIANAPOLIS 6.4
- MEMPHIS 6.3
SOURCE: Federal Transit Administration, National Transit Database
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Close up of a flower shop worker teaching the new employee
Cracking the Code
How a wonky tweak to zoning can make a big difference for small businesses
From barbershops and microbreweries to florists and taquerías, lots of small businesses thrive on foot traffic. Just as much as they want their neighborhood regulars to drop by, they want wandering pedestrians to spy something through the front window and venture inside. Foot traffic is a feature of urban density. And density, it turns out, can be fostered and guided with a wonky policy tool called “form-based codes.”
The city’s current zoning code is decades old and not form-based. It’s use-based: It separates the land into spheres of activity (so heavy industry goes here, houses go over there). A form-based code, however, is more explicit about what form the built environment should assume and what strolling through it should feel like. A form-based code may mandate that new buildings be made of brick, be a minimum height, be snug up to the sidewalk, and have mostly glass fronts on the ground level.
“Form-based codes are intended to create walkable, mixed-use urban space,” says Marta Goldsmith, executive director of the Form-Based Codes Institute at Smart Growth America, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit. “Walkability is really key.”
Two city neighborhoods, Forest Park Southeast/The Grove and the Central West End, have already nailed down their own form-based-code districts. They “overlay” onto the city’s code. Brooks Goedeker, now the executive director of the St. Louis Midtown Redevelopment Corporation, helped bring these codes to fruition and has witnessed their potency. “I’ve seen it work,” he says. Developers there, he observed, realized that the code made everyone play by specific rules, so they could invest with more certainty, knowing their projects would be protected.
Thanks to the expansion of Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine, those neighborhoods saw a multi-year burst of construction, so they had momentum to channel. But Goldsmith says some towns and main streets around the country have used form-based codes to stimulate investment: “They have a clear vision and write a code to achieve it. In these cases, the code comes before property values rise to help expedite redevelopment.”
Building these codes takes patience. It starts with soliciting input from stakeholders on what they already like and what they’re aspiring to, which is time-consuming. It’s not a cheap process, either, costing in some cases more than $100,000. Don Roe, executive director of the city’s Planning and Urban Design Agency, says he’s been getting more funding to hire staffers who can work on neighborhood planning, which could lead to more form-based codes. But there’s still plenty of opportunity, he says, for nonprofits and private foundations to step in and get started in select areas. “We can’t be everywhere at once,” says Roe.
At least one nonprofit is already doing this. Abdul-Kaba Abdullah, executive director of Park Central Development, says his group is working on a form-based code in DeBaliviere and the West End, and laying the early groundwork in the neighborhoods of Academy, Sherman Park, and Fountain Park, north of Delmar. “I’d like to see more private funding for place-based community-development corporations to do this type of planning,” he says. “We’re happy to teach the neighborhoods how to do it. It just takes more money.”
Fun Factor: Party Barges
For a city of river people, we don’t spend nearly enough time cruising on the Mississippi. The Gateway Arch offers relaxing daytime and dinner cruise options, but we want—no, demand—a party barge. In the summer, fill it with sand for a blowout volleyball tournament or an A+ adult sandbox, or install a tiki bar and treat it like a beach. In the winter, artificial snow could be a cool setting for an epic snowball fight, as long as the water’s not too icy to sail.
Todd Detwiler
Building a Bridge
A merger might not happen anytime soon, but trans-governmental contracts and mutual aid networks could provide a solution.
Yes, the consolidation conversation is nothing new. Since the Great Divorce of 1876, numerous proposals for regional governmental unity have been presented—only to fizzle. Better Together, which spent six years examining regional governance before dissolving last year, was only the latest entrant in the stop-and-start debate.
Talk of regional unity is often focused on the examples of other city-county agreements and the lessons they could provide St. Louis. Better Together, for example, examined consolidation efforts in Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville to inform a path forward. But instead of scrutinizing other cities’ reform plans in search of inspiration, perhaps St. Louis should look to—and try to learn from—a new kind of model.
“Historically, one of the issues with a merger has been that all mergers are really focused on merging territories and they have not examined other efficiencies that can exist,” says local historian Michael Allen, a lecturer in American cultural studies at Washington University.
Proposals to merge have met all kinds of roadblocks in the past century, but that doesn’t mean cooperation can’t happen. It might just have to look different. Mutual aid networks could serve as inspiration for how the region might think differently about the way government could work better together.
In the age of COVID-19, mutual aid networks have sprouted at the grassroots level to pool resources and ensure that people’s needs are met. On a governmental scale, this model would mean coordinating police departments, fire departments, parks departments, and similar civic services so they could be reallocated from a central source to help cut down on wastefulness and duplication.
“It’s not something that even has to entail dissolving your favorite municipality,” Allen says. “Ladue can still exist at the end of the day. St. Louis city can still be independent, but resources could just be shared and pooled and redistributed to new trans-governmental contracts. And maybe that is how St. Louis will get there. For some reason, the territorial boundaries and names are all sacred to people, but I don’t think people care as much which parks district is improving and maintaining their park. If you live in Ladue, that’s the Ladue city government. But what if that was a regional parks district and the parks still had the same quality? I don’t think anyone’s going to be offended by that, as long as Ladue is still on the map.”
Absent a merger or any other profound structural changes, Todd Swanstrom, a public policy professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, believes there’s also room for more cooperation with economic development in mind. “What we have done pretty well as a region, I think, is to have special districts that cleave off certain functions and fund them with the city-county tax base,” Swanstrom says. “The Zoo-Museum District uses property taxes from the city and the county, and I think that’s been a huge success. The question is ‘Could we do that in other areas? Could there be some way in which the city and county can collaborate and coordinate more intimately on economic development in the future?’”
ST. LOUIS’ GREAT DIVORCE... AND ATTEMPTS TO REUNITE
- 1875 By popular election in November, a board of freeholders is to be appointed to write a new charter separating city from county.
- 1876 On August 22, the new Scheme and Charter are voted down. After a November recount, the measures pass.
- 1877 In March, the city officially declares itself independent.
- 1924 A new board of freeholders is formed.
- 1926 The county rejects its plan to consolidate city and county.
- 1930 A bid for a Greater St. Louis metropolitan government is defeated.
- 1959 Another board of freeholders offers a plan to create a Metropolitan District with city-county cooperation, but it falls flat.
- 1962 Both city and county refuse a reorganization into boroughs, à la New York.
- 1982 An initiative led by John Hanley, Monsanto CEO, considers reunification but winds up urging only increased city-county cooperation.
- 1987 Another board of freeholders is established, but opponents sue and block the plan.
- 1996 Talk of city-county merger heats up again.
- 2004 The Advance St. Louis charter reform task force strikes out; voters reject all four of its suggested amendments to the city charter.
- 2019 Better Together pushes for a statewide vote on reunification—then withdraws the proposal.
