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..?
The population of the city proper has declined by the statistic I mentioned, but apparently even the metro population is dropping…
Highest crime levels in the US (for a city, anyway). You get my drift…
It’s clearly very sick, even if it doesn’t look so…
It’s not wokeism that I was poking at specifically. It’s the collapse in population, industry, infrastructure and economy…
It doesn’t seem to have turned that around.
Though apparently the black areas (“North City”) are largely emptying out, so I guess that could make for an interesting future, in that sense…
Gentrification and all.
I couldn’t find that stat anywhere but I’m not going to claim I looked very hard. I think the other poster is right, it’s very much split up from good areas and total no-go ghettos. That’s not a lot different than where I grew up, so maybe it just felt normal to me. Memphis seems way worse to think of one example.
All the American cities end up with the black locust effect where they come in and destroy until run out by gentrification where they then move to destroy something else.
But I’d point to St. Louis industrial decline to be directly attached to the decline and automation of the railroads. Starting with my granddads on both sides, my family goes back as three generations of railroad workers. Decent lower middle class jobs for the most part. Most of their jobs don’t even exist today, and if you look at small towns that were even more railroad dependent than St. Louis, they are massive shitholes.
Interesting about the railroads…
I didn’t really consider that effect!
But yeah, I could see that being a thing…
We have that here, too, to an extent. It’s just that the small towns are pretty much all ghost towns, and the cities pivoted to other things.
But yeah, same principle.
Sucks about that for your family though.
I remember when they gutted the railways in my home city. The impacts were pretty massive, and it had already been in decline for decades before that, so… I can only imagine.
Though in this case it wasn’t so much automation as really bad government decision-making, and deliberately shifting those jobs, and that industry, elsewhere, even within state…
Which kind of holds, too, I guess…
They all aged out of the business really. So while I guess it's not the "family business" anymore. Although it really was for a while, almost every man my grandparents generation had a railroad job. My parents generation didn't do that great really, but myself, my brother, and most of my cousins are generally doing well in something even the ones I don't like or talk to that much. So I guess it all worked out.
Is there such a thing as "good" government decision-making? Generally they should be completely uninvolved in everything.
At best, government's make the least worst decision. We are no where near the best.
This is more or less what happened to Oakland. It was initially an industrial center with access to a major port. There were shipyards and Chrysler had their biggest west coast factory there.
With improvements to the transportation system the town basically got bypassed. Without jobs, rents went down. The poor underclass moved in and it became a ghetto and a major hub of crime activity with at least two major gangs operating out of Oakland. Notably the Hell's Angels paid a chemical engineer to invent an efficent process to make amphetamines.
I absolutely hate dealing with Memphis and the times I was there I didn't even feel safe in broad day-light. And I've spent a lot of time in a city that outsiders think is a crime-ridden pit. (Which, it is..in the black parts of town but road/urban-development ended up keeping those parts separate from the rest thank goodness)