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..?
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.