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Originally Posted by ssiguy
An excellent point. St.Louis has a rather lousy reputation due to it's urban blight and especially due to it's astronomical crime and murder rate. Building these start-up areas is the easy part but getting highly skilled and educated workers to work there is the hard one. Such needed workers are highly employable and mobile and can get a job basically anywhere they want. This is where things like quality of life show themselves as not just as positive social and living environments but also a definite economic advantage.
The best thing St.Louis could do to secure their economic future is to concentrate on making the city a more liveable and especially much safer one. Create a city trained workers WANT to move to and not have to because of their job as they are far more easy to entice in the first place and just as importantly easier to retain.
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The worst part is, these stats on crime and poverty are often misleading. When comparing stats at the metropolitan level, crime and poverty are not high at all in the St. Louis metro. What puts St. Louis at the top is that the city of St. Louis itself makes up a relatively small portion of the regional population and due largely to redlining and similar issues, most of the worst crime and poverty is concentrated to a particular portion of the city. Because crime and poverty rankings often look only at the city level rather than metro-wide, St. Louis fairs poorly and pushes the stigma forward.
As a non-native to St. Louis, I believe the city flies under the radar on many things. It has beautiful, historic architecture; culture; natural beauty; institutions; and urban conveniences of a caliber to cities much larger than it. Some of these things may be a little unpolished but the bones are more than there.
I strongly believe one of the biggest reasons why St. Louis struggles so much in attracting talent is the dysfunction of local and state government. Local government operates as if every little corner of the region is a fiefdom competing with every other little corner of the region. They seem to prefer this than try to work together to better the region collectively. As such, they typically pilfer Home Depots from one another rather than chase tech companies to move from outside markets. The State only caters to rural voters and forces rural ways of thinking on urban areas, so they are of even less help. Typically local institutions have to do all the work. They have been the ones to spearhead the most successful neighborhood and green space reinvestment. We have an excellent innovation district for example, one that has multiple local universities, medical centers, and large companies as investors. It's been a model to other cities (my wife works for its managing entity), and growth has been strong, yet doesn't quite live up to its potential as it can only do so much to get its name out without greater governmental support.
The region is not without frequent policy proposals that would do a lot to help it get its shit together, there just has yet to be one where the balance in benefits is enough to bring most leadership out of their fiefdoms.