Ruskin Singh has chosen St. Louis twice. The first time, in 2016, he was coming from India to attend college at Washington University—and he had some trepidation. But he quickly realized that “what you read online is not factually true.”
On his part-time salary from the university’s medical school, he was able to rent a house with a roommate, pay his bills, and still have spending money. “That truly helped me,” he says. After graduation, his company required him to relocate to Boston, where he lived until 2018, before moving to Milwaukee. But he missed St. Louis, and he convinced his employer to let him find a role at its St. Louis office. In 2021, he returned with his wife, a New York City native. “I made her fall in love with St. Louis, too,” Singh says.
The couple purchased a home near Singh’s old stomping grounds of University City and Clayton. “I love this area,” he says. “It’s vibrant, has a younger crowd, and has lots of nice bars and restaurants.”
Having experienced East Coast housing prices, he knows that St. Louis offers much more value. “Early in your career, you can easily afford a house, even in tumultuous times,” he says. “For people my age, you need a city that allows you to have a little left every month, so you’re not living paycheck to paycheck.”
Singh considers St. Louis a perfect “small big town” in other ways as well. Through his work as the head of life science IT for a smart-manufacturing organization, he frequently travels—to meetings across the metro area, to the company’s U.S. headquarters in Boston, and to its corporate headquarters in Germany. He finds St. Louis to be well-positioned between both coasts, and he loves the direct flights to Frankfurt.
He’s also enthusiastic about St. Louis’ free amenities, especially cultural options, such as the region’s museums. “In terms of entertainment, St. Louis has grown tremendously over the past seven to eight years,” he says. From City Foundry STL in Midtown to The Factory in Chesterfield, there are constantly new and evolving places to socialize.
“I truly love St. Louis,” Singh says. “The community is very strong, and people are very welcoming. I did not see this in other cities; it took me a while to make friends. Here you can have one-on-one conversations in a grocery store and then hang out—and I met a few of my best friends like that.”
Upsizing For a Family
After growing up in Edwardsville and Alton and living in Decatur, Illinois, for college and their early careers, Joe Havis and Jody Cox wanted the diversity and resources of a larger city. They also wanted a reasonable cost of living and security. St. Louis turned out to be exactly what they were seeking.
Since moving to the city in 2013, they’ve lived in the Central West End, downtown, and Lafayette Square. After having two children in two years, they now make their home in Compton Heights. “Life has changed pretty dramatically over the past 24 months,” Havis says with a laugh. “But we’ve found a ton of resources.”
They’re anchored in the South City area by Cox’s business, Dreams by Design. She also owns An Affair to Remember, Styled + Staged STL, and Sunrise Coaching + Mentoring, and she’s launching Host + Honey, a retail business focused on luxury housewares. In addition to supporting those businesses, Havis is general manager at the marketing agency Jump Co.
For their busy lives, the convenience St. Louis offers is unparalleled. “We’re a really active family,” Havis says. “We spend a lot of time in Tower Grove Park. I work out in Forest Park. We’ve been to a couple of baseball games this week. And we just had a birthday for our daughter in Lafayette Square Park. We can have broader experiences than we could in Chicago or D.C. or Los Angeles.”
Havis is also enthusiastic about the metro area’s educational options, the variety of restaurants, the ease of public transit, and new experiences, including CITYPARK. He recognizes that some costs of living may be higher within the city limits, but he feels any additional expenses are worth it for the resources that are freely available. He also loves the intangibles, such as the close-knit neighborhoods and how neighbors will help each other out in a pinch.
“Having the flexibility to pursue the kind of house and living situation we wanted has been great,” he says. “The city is just a huge asset.”
Building a Business
Deciding what city to call home has largely revolved around work for Jairo Villa and Olivia Cupp. Their small business, MindFlowers, makes fashion accessories and home décor, such as light-switch covers and wall art inspired by the vibes of the 1960s and ’70s.
“She’s the creative genius behind all of the designs,” Villa says. “I help with the graphics and marketing.” He also uses his background in advertising, marketing, and social media in other projects; he currently manages social and creative direction for Groovetime, an app that helps users learn their favorite dances.
Cupp and Villa met in Chicago while she was attending Columbia College. They started MindFlowers with a line of handmade jewelry and decided to move to Los Angeles based on its market. “Getting there, we realized the market for what we were doing was super oversaturated,” Cupp recalls.
The pressure on MindFlowers intensified during the pandemic, as hobbyists started their own home businesses selling accessories like clay earrings, which were cheaper to produce than Cupp’s signature high-quality, laser-cut acrylic products.
“We had to pivot, so we tried home décor—specifically light-switch covers—and that took off,” Villa says. But Cupp’s production studio was in a spare bedroom in their apartment, and a quick comparison of what it cost to rent a dedicated business space showed them that it would be much cheaper in Cupp’s hometown of St. Louis.
They returned in 2020 and rented a house near Tower Grove Park and a 3,000-square-foot facility on Cherokee Street for their business. As they’ve hired employees, they’ve been able to live out their commitment to paying a livable wage, something that Cupp says would have been impossible in Los Angeles.
Cupp also notes the contrast between L.A. and St. Louis in terms of how people view their time and social capital. “Because of the cost of living [in L.A.], everyone is constantly looking at every person they meet and everything they do as an expense,” she says. “People are hustling just to survive—and to have a life on top of surviving. When that’s your constant state of being, it’s definitely a different way of life.”
By contrast, the couple’s network here has grown almost effortlessly, and they can more easily partake in their favorite recreational activities. For Cupp, that includes aerial arts and pole-dancing classes, which were prohibitively expensive in L.A. For Villa, who grew up in Miami and has lived in cities throughout Europe and the United States, the easy access to nature was a pleasant surprise. “In L.A., there wasn’t a park in sight that you didn’t have to pay to get into,” he says.
Both Cupp and Villa also appreciate that St. Louis has strong micro-communities around niche interests, from beer to farmers markets to food to wellness to athletics. Villa says it makes for a very comfortable entrance into friendships, something that he hasn’t always found in other cities. “If you don’t see an avenue toward community, no shininess will make you happy there.”
Finding Your Flow
For a long time, the best way to measure Sneha Chembayil Rajan’s enthusiasm for St. Louis was with her odometer. She commuted to Jefferson City for her job with the Missouri House of Representatives. But recently, she has been using her talents closer to home, as legislative liaison to the St. Louis County Executive.
The job in Jefferson City was a perfect use of her skills and education—she has a law degree, a master’s degree, and a doctorate in government affairs—but she could not bring herself to relocate because she loves the community that her family has found in suburban St. Louis.
It’s a far cry from her first impression: Rajan was researching the city online when her husband was up for a position at a private school in Sunset Hills in 2021, and they were considering moving from the United Arab Emirates. The crime statistics gave them pause. “Despite all of the warnings and negative reviews, we came here, and that was one of the best decisions we ever made,” Rajan says.
Rajan is originally from India; her husband grew up in New York and New Jersey. They met in England, got married in the U.S., and moved to India to start their family. Today, her family lives on the private school campus in Sunset Hills, which she finds to be very convenient for quickly reaching the attractions they enjoy. If they decide to go ice-skating, for example, “the rink in Kirkwood is 7 minutes away—10 if there’s traffic. On the East Coast, there would be a much longer drive.”
Rajan believes one’s choices and priorities can make any metro area more or less affordable. With the free amenities and relatively low costs of consumables here, she’s able to shop at places like her favorite grocery store, Whole Foods Market.
And because so many businesses, events, and museums are family-friendly, Rajan says she saves money on the cost of child care. “In the U.K., you often couldn’t even take kids to a restaurant,” she says. “Here, we went to see Encanto with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra at Stifel Theatre, and there were so many kids.”
She’s found the metro area to be inviting in other ways as well. “We’ve lived in so many places that we have a solid concept of what makes a place good,” Rajan says. “The spirit of welcoming is not to be taken for granted. That is not very common.”
Strangers’ gestures of kindness have ranged from helping her reach items in grocery stores to offering free tickets to The Magic House. “Your everyday experiences are what make life special,” Rajan says, “and we’ve had so many magical experiences here.”
