http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/us...&ex=1177041600
Hopes for a Renaissance After Exodus in St. Louis
By SUSAN SAULNY
Published: April 17, 2007
ST. LOUIS — Cities, like most living things, have sensitive spots. Here in the old “Gateway to the West,” the subject of population loss is one of the touchiest.
On the north side of St. Louis, near the Mississippi River, abandoned and rotting buildings are symbols of the city’s population loss.
From a peak of nearly 860,000 residents in 1950, St. Louis had lost more than half a million people by 2000, a depopulation not unlike the devastating postwar exodus from Detroit. Since the 2000 census, St. Louis has kept shrinking, the Census Bureau estimates, while most old cities have added people.
Population is a critical indicator of any city’s health, but the sinking numbers here are particularly unwelcome as the city has spiraled from one woe to the next.
In the past few months, the public schools were stripped of accreditation and taken over by the state; the city was designated the most dangerous in the country in a national crime survey; and 15 police officers and supervisors were disciplined for giving World Series tickets seized from scalpers to friends and family.
“These things are absolutely not helpful,” said John Haul, an assistant professor of architecture at Washington University who has been involved in numerous municipal planning projects. “We have to redevelop the city regardless; this just makes it harder.”
City officials question the accuracy of the census calculations and suggest the city has turned the corner. Their optimism is based on a flurry of downtown development since 2000, including hundreds of loft condominiums, boutiques and restaurants.
“We’re actually doing very well,” said Rollin B. Stanley, director of the city’s planning and urban design agency, which puts the population at 354,000, about 6,000 higher than the Census Bureau.
But the effort to put a positive spin on the population debate — and with it, the hope for a long-awaited renaissance — comes against a difficult backdrop.
In March, the Missouri State Board of Education took over the public schools for consistently poor performance. Teachers and parents, who largely opposed the takeover, said the district had been starved for resources to care for some of the neediest students in the country.
“Without financial and human resources, we’re set up to fail,” said Chip Clatto, an assistant principal at a school on the north side. “I’m wondering if people on the outside realize that not only are we trying to educate these kids, we’re trying to turn them into citizens when their society has failed them.”
Signs of a looming disaster for the district of 35,000 students, mostly poor and black, had been clear for years. In 2004, a national education advocacy group found that only 5 percent of 11th graders in city schools were proficient in reading.
“They’ve had a revolving door in and out of the superintendent’s office for some time,” said Michael Casserly, the executive director of the group, Great City Schools. “They’ve had a lot of turmoil, and it’s made it almost impossible for the system to gain any momentum.”
In October, St. Louis was identified as “America’s most dangerous city” by a private research firm that publishes an annual crime ranking. Though city officials and some experts criticized the ranking as simplistic, aggravated assaults with guns, considered one of the best gauges of a city’s level of violence, were up more than 30 percent over the past two years, according to the Police Executive Research Forum.
“A few people are responsible for most of the crime, and we’re targeting those people,” said Barbara A. Geisman, the city’s director of development. “The vast majority of St. Louis is as safe as any place in the suburbs.”
But recently there was more bad news from law enforcement in the case of the World Series tickets. One of the best moments of civic pride in recent years — the Cardinals’ victory last fall — was tainted. Chief Joe Mokwa recommended that 8 of the 15 officers be suspended for two weeks and be reduced in rank for a minimum of one year.
“They’re not thieves,” Mr. Mokwa said when announcing the punishment. “They made a mistake.”
Even the weather got the better of the city last summer, when a storm knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of customers for more than a week. Tempers flared as the power company was unable to restore service quickly, with utility workers from as far away as Arizona ultimately enlisted to help.
Rebuilding, and rebranding, St. Louis when some basic quality of life indicators point in the wrong direction has not been easy. And while the city’s population has shrunk, its sprawling suburbs have grown. The metropolitan area’s population is more than 2.6 million.
“This is a city that at one point was the fourth largest in the United States,” said Richard B. Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. “The distance we’ve fallen from the status of being a major national city does affect St. Louisans.”
The city has retained attractions like Forest Park, excellent universities and a vibrant arts scene. But vast sections of North St. Louis show what happens when people leave town in big numbers: What is left is a shell of a city, boarded up, rotting, populated by the most impoverished. Residents, mostly black, are still fleeing these parts of town.
Chip Clatto is an assistant principal at a north side school.
For years, experts said, as the population dwindled, there was no sense of urgency about how the city could come back. Now there is. Last year, for instance, the city developed a new land use plan for the first time since 1947. And a state tax credit program has been spurring investment in some forgotten parts of the city.
Some neighborhoods, like Lafayette Park, are even thriving.
Since 1999, according to the Downtown St. Louis Partnership, a civic group, 62 historic buildings have been redeveloped for residences and businesses, 12 are currently being remodeled and about 20 conversions are in the planning stages. And according to the city, the two-square-mile downtown area has over 9,000 residents — 6,300 more than in 2000.
“There’s a young middle-class movement beginning,” said James Neal Primm, a retired professor and author of “Lion of the Valley,” an extensive history of St. Louis. “My overall reaction is that there should be a lot more. But there is something going on.”
Dr. Primm’s grandson, Chris Termini, 29, lives in one of the new downtown lofts, in an area that was unfit for comfortable living just 10 years ago. At night, the sidewalk cafes are full. Joggers pass; dog walkers idle.
“We walk everywhere for food and entertainment,” Mr. Termini said. “It’s great.”
Mr. Stanley, the city planner, had all this in mind when he challenged the Census Bureau’s 2003 population estimate. St. Louis won that dispute, successfully arguing that it did not lose 17,000 people between 2000 and 2003 — rather 50. “That’s five-zero,” said Mr. Stanley, a Canadian by birth with great love for St. Louis.
This year, he said he had a feeling that the bureau would say St. Louis was down again. And it did, giving the city an estimated population of 347,180 — slightly less than the 2000 population count of 348,200.
That is just plain wrong, Mr. Stanley said, adding that his challenge of the estimate is ready to go.
Win or lose, officials will probably not know with any certainty who lives in St. Louis until the next national count, in 2010, because interim figures are based on less accurate estimates.
“We have to wait,” Professor Rosenfeld said. “I think it’s clear that the rate of decline we’ve seen through the last decades is not going to continue. The question is whether we’ll see a net increase.”
He added, “Sensitive subject.”
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