At long last, some good national news for St. Louis: We’ve been ranked by the prestigious Brookings Institution, in Washington, D.C., as one of the strongest OICs in the nation.
If you know your OICs, you also know that it’s no small accomplishment to be dubbed the sixth-strongest OIC in America, looking down our nose at no fewer than 64 other OICs. If you don’t know what an OIC is, just be happy that someone from the East Coast has finally said something nice about us.
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An OIC is Brookings-speak for older industrial city, a moniker that admittedly feels a little too kindly, like being described as well-preserved or young at heart. But on the bright side, ranking highly among OICs is a little like doing well on the senior golf or tennis tour: You might not be winning on the biggest stage, but it’s nothing to sneeze at.
Brookings means well here. The headline on its website reads, “Older industrial cities are key to addressing rising regional inequality.”
From the report:
The United States is about to enter its 10th year of economic expansion, dating back to the end of the Great Recession in June 2009. Job growth is robust, the unemployment rate is low, and median household income is at an all-time high. Yet there remains a strong sense, punctuated by the results of the 2016 presidential election, that many parts of the country have been left behind in the rising tide. The evidence backs this up. Almost four in five urban areas nationwide had household incomes in 2016 at least 5 percent lower than their levels in 1999. Many of the hardest-hit communities were small to mid-sized areas throughout the Midwest, Northeast, and Southeast still feeling the effects of long-run industrial decline.
Like it or not, St. Louis generally fits that description. There’s deep malaise here over the sad state of the city, from its devastating population decline to the crisis of crime to the challenges of public education to the shifting economic realities that have seen it lose three-fourths of its manufacturing base since the 1970s. We’ve lost too many corporate headquarters and sports franchises, seen too much relentless sprawl decimate the city proper.
The negativity is overwhelming, and those who care about the city enough to advocate for regional solutions often focus on idealistic structural solutions, such as a city-county merger, that remain elusive, at best, in the real world.
In fairness, local economic development officials have long promoted the biotech sector as key to the region’s future. But that message is easily drowned out by news of which large companies are coming and going, and there’s a general sense here that most economic happy talk is more rhetoric than reality.
So it was noteworthy that Brookings listed St. Louis—along with such cities as Brooklyn and Queens, New York; Philadelphia, Pittsburgh; and Baltimore—as demonstrating strong economic performance compared with other older places.
The bottom line: There are good things to be done economically with the base that exists, especially if it’s expanded upon with growth in new technologies, be it in plant sciences and biotech, the energy of the Cortex Innovation Community, or such organizations as LaunchCode (which was singled out in the report).
That’s the sort of thing one expects to hear from the local chamber of commerce but not from a leading national think tank.
By no means should the report be set to the strains of “Kumbaya,” though. St. Louis fared poorly, as one might expect, in areas of racial equity. In no way does a glimmer of hope in regard to the economy outweigh or offset the larger sociological tragedies of our time.
Still, there is something to be said for making the most of what we have, of accepting the limitations of being an OIC but working within those limitations to get decent outcomes. It’s a form of managing expectations. It’s the opposite of the aspirational rhetoric that too often has dominated political campaigns and media coverage.
Coming as it does from Brookings, the ranking has both weight and reach. It’s encouraging that others nationwide might see St. Louis as a place with potential for new technologies and growth. That’s a perspective that hasn’t dominated coverage of our town in recent years, to put it mildly. The report is obviously subjective, but it’s serious, not one of those “10 Best Cities to Raise Your Hamster” pieces peddled to send traffic to websites. There’s substance here.
As Alan Berube, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of the study, told St. Louis Public Radio in May, St. Louis has been “one of the stronger economies in terms of job creation, in terms of good job creation. The jobs, on average, are getting better in the St. Louis economy, and incomes and employment are increasing at faster rates locally than they are in a lot of older industrial cities.”
Rather than view St. Louis’ glory days merely in the context of how the numbers have declined, Berube told the radio station that the city’s past provides a framework for a decent future.
St. Louis Public Radio’s May 8 article shared a series of key insights:
Berube says several cities, including St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Baltimore, are strong because, “They are combining the things they knew how to do from the past into new kinds of sectors and industries.” The transition from a former industrial/manufacturing economy to the knowledge economy of the 21st century requires brains, not brawn.
“In a knowledge economy it’s about what your people know and how to do it. It’s not what your machines are good at. [St. Louis] does share this characteristic [with other strong cities]. It’s got talent, it’s got vestiges of its industrial past that are actually finding new forms of value in the modern economy,” Berube said.
While St. Louis was known for manufacturing automobiles, shoes and beer in its industrial era heyday, Berube points to the city’s diversified economy as one of its lasting strengths. St. Louis boasted a wide range of jobs in wholesale, retail and media in the past. Combined with the fact that it served as a transportation hub and home to many big corporate headquarters, St. Louis had a strong talent pool as traditional industry began to decline.
Like many of the cities profiled in the Brookings report, St. Louis became an “eds and meds” location, with strong universities and health care-related businesses. Berube said these newer industries along with the continued presence of strong agriculture businesses are “combining to make the city nationally a pretty prominent center of ag tech and bio sciences, which are big competitive advantages in the U.S. and on the global scale.”
Berube offered one suggestion that will probably wind up in the “Good Luck With That” file: Look to Jefferson City for a helping hand.
“Missouri as a state ought to be looking at other states that are doing a better job of valuing their older industrial cities,” he said.
It’s worth noting that St. Louis is Missouri’s one and only OIC and that our new governor is a rural conservative for whom promoting the city has never been a priority. Oh, and the state legislature is about as fond of the city as it is of, say, affirmative action and gun control, which is to say, not very.
So being valued by the state more might not be at the top of the local to-do list anytime soon. But serious efforts to develop emerging tech sectors and build upon the local base of terrific educational and medical institutions might be a good replacement for unserious talk about things that aren’t going to happen.
The civic slogan “St. Louis: America’s Best OIC” probably won’t catch fire. But as a goal, it beats chasing rainbows—and it’s definitely better than all of the whining.
SLM publisher Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs at 7 p.m. Thursdays.
