As the title says.
I know Chicago had similar issues with white flight/suburbanisation/white no-go areas, but St Louis has failed even more than that...
It's surprisingly hard to find articles explaining exactly what the fuck happened. Is it just a combination of white flight/de-industrialisation and really fucking poor governance/forward planning..? I honestly don't understand how at least the majority white parts have still continued to decline as they have...
We don't have cities like this, in this part of the world. Frankly, I don't think many cities like this exist (where population has declined more than 60%, since 1950!!), outside North America, so it's an interesting test case.
It reads like a failed state. I guess, in a sense, it is. But how the fuck has it done worse than Detroit..?
Yeah, pretty much. I've been to STL a bunch of times for Cardinals games and such. I've never seen anywhere with a bigger discrepency between the good parts of town and the bad. Maybe in Central America but not by much.
The city was hit just as hard as the rest of the rust belt by de-industrialization. There just aren't any jobs anymore. Mercy Health and Anheuser Busch are the only major companies I can think of that are headquartered there and the latter doesn't really employ that many people.
Adelaide, Australia, is like this (no hqs, decline in manufacturing base, suburbanization, massive divide between “good” and “bad” areas), and yet the population hasn’t dropped yet…
Immigration rates seem fairly comparable (although the US has many more metros to choose from), but yeah… Shrinking cities are almost a uniquely American and Canadian thing, in the “developed”, non-war torn West…
The UK has regions (Wales) and a few notable examples, but nothing to quite the same extent…
It’s just odd, to me. It doesn’t seem to have quite the same problems as Detroit, Chicago, or even Minneapolis right now, and yet, its decline is proportionally much worse (well, slightly worse than Detroit, but much worse than nearly anywhere else)…
Seems strange. 🤷🏻♂️
Stl's population decline is a little misleading. You really need to look at the metro area population rather than the city itself. A lot of that decline is people moving to better suburbs like Brentwood and Clayton. I'm sure they still work in the city.
Yeah, probably true. That’s like Glasgow (although that was less voluntary, more forced), and of course many other US cities…
Makes sense. Though apparently the metro has declined too. Just to a much lesser extent.
But yeah, I guess when we measure Australian cities we usually go for the wider Metro area (it’s complicated, but sort of), so perhaps that is a fairer comparison…