Requiem STL? Not Quite.
I sat down at the large table, across from the hosts, in the back room of a newish restaurant on the ground floor of a newish development in the central corridor of the city. Around the table was a venerable bunch — developers, bankers, executive directors, writers, teachers and business owners. We were there to discuss the state of our city and what we could do to make its future brighter, for all. When the introductions made their way to me, I shared my story as it relates to my time here in St. Louis, which has been the majority of my life. I grew up in South County. I moved back home after my first year of college and moved to the city soon after that and I didn’t look back. I jumped right in with an optimism and enthusiasm seldom found in life previously. I knew St. Louis was a place I could make a difference, where I could find myself and do something positive for a struggling town. I was 21, and had just begun to build a recording studio with my first business partner — “A Recording Studio for St. Louis” — the tagline read. It took us a year to build it but once finished, we spent the next six years recording countless records for local musicians on our label and promoting countless events and shows for many other artists as well. We did our best to build a sustainable business, but in the end it wasn’t to be.
I transitioned out and began working on a second venture with a couple partners — a startup that connected gardeners and farmers, with the goal of building up the local food community and economy. We gave it our all for nearly two years and in that time launched an app, which was well received, but ultimately ran out of money. I found myself with a job at the coworking center where we had been working. That’s the two-paragraph, condensed version of the last ten years of my life in the city of St. Louis and for most of that time I have celebrated this city for what it is and cheered for all of the victories and positive developments without thinking twice. The last two and a half years have me thinking twice.
I began to realize that all of the things I had been celebrating were by and large for people who shared my demographics. When asking the question, “who is this for?” the answer is often affluent white people. St. Louis seems to be developing along similar lines to most other cities right now — focusing on attracting the aforementioned demographic rather than supporting its current residents and especially those of Color. I would not be true to my partner — who she is and the work she does with Forward Through Ferguson — if I did not look critically at all of the things I once would have unquestionably cheered for.
With introductions complete, the dinner and discussion proceeded. A question was posed about what we thought the city could look like in ten or fifteen years — what would be different? The lack of diversity at the table was quickly brought up. Despite the hosts’ best and honest efforts, we were all men, and only one of us was a Person of Color as is so tragically often the case. I added to that by saying I want us to stop doing the same things and expecting different results and that become a theme for the rest of the night. With all of our unique and extreme sets of problems, we have a unique and extreme opportunity to be radically different. No city in this country has done it right, and by it I mean equity. The larger cities we’re modeling and comparing to are gentrifying to the extreme — again, focusing on a single, wealthy demographic attached to the narrative of building up a tax base and population to attract more investment and population. With the census results that came out earlier today, we know that St. Louis is not growing. Can we please kill that argument right now? We are moving people around, building up wealth and density in a few areas at the expense of the rest. One of the writers in the room used the analogy of a body: “If the left side of your body has gangrene, you wouldn’t expect the right side to thrive.” Yet, that is what we are doing — allowing literally half of our city to sit vacant and rot and not providing services and assistance to those most in-need while expecting that the other half will thrive and attract more residents and investment. The banker in the room stated simply that he has found trickle-down economics to be a myth — thank you. I expanded on the body analogy. Our region is like a tree, its roots in the city with branches spreading out into the surrounding counties. We all agreed that the region depends on the health of the city, its roots, and until those who do not live in the city are somehow made to care about its fate, the region will continue to stagnate.
So what’s to be done?
Near-consensus in the room was to stop doing business as usual, stop looking towards other cities’ broken and inequitable development schemes as a model and chart our own course. Focus our efforts and money on small-scale community development and neighborhood associations like The DeSales Community Housing Corporation, and focus on building up our current residents’ economic prospects. The second prompt of the evening was what would be different if we had 15,000 additional residents. The first response to that was about how that feels like the beginning of a marketing campaign and if we actually focused inward and built up our neighborhoods and the residents within, we would need no marketing campaign. Eyes would start to turn to St. Louis as a model of radical change and equitable development, and people might even start coming here to stay.
I’m not ready to give up on this city just yet, but I am putting it on notice. We have an opportunity in our new administration, we can hold whomever that is accountable to making radical change but first we must stop doing the same things and expecting different results. The focus of the next administration must be within, on the people who are here, not the people who may come here. The focus must fall on the many instead of favoring the few, and it must be neighborhood and human scale — another stadium will not reverse our census trend. At the end of my life, I want to look back and think that I made a difference where I lived, not just banged my head against a wall. I’m not holding my breath, as we have a long repeating history here, but I’ll do what I can to hold myself and those around me accountable to being better and to changing. My body is still here, but my heart and mind are increasingly somewhere else. Let’s see how the next couple years shape up.
Yours in critical love,
Ryan
