Is St. Louis Finally Turning Around?

"From a peak of nearly 860,000 residents in 1950, St. Louis had lost more than half a million people by 2000, a depopulation not unlike the devastating postwar exodus from Detroit. Since the 2000 census, St. Louis has kept shrinking, the Census Bureau estimates, while most old cities have added people.

Population is a critical indicator of any city's health, but the sinking numbers here are particularly unwelcome as the city has spiraled from one woe to the next. In the past few months, the public schools were stripped of accreditation and taken over by the state; the city was designated the most dangerous in the country in a national crime survey..."

"City officials question the accuracy of the census calculations and suggest the city has turned the corner. Their optimism is based on a flurry of downtown development since 2000, including hundreds of loft condominiums, boutiques and restaurants." {Ed: see related link}.

"Rebuilding, and rebranding, St. Louis when some basic quality of life indicators point in the wrong direction has not been easy. And while the city's population has shrunk, its sprawling suburbs have grown. The metropolitan area's population is more than 2.6 million.

"This is a city that at one point was the fourth largest in the United States," said Richard B. Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. "The distance we've fallen from the status of being a major national city does affect St. Louisans."

The "vast sections of North St. Louis show what happens when people leave town in big numbers: What is left is a shell of a city, boarded up, rotting, populated by the most impoverished. Residents, mostly black, are still fleeing these parts of town."

"For years, experts said, as the population dwindled, there was no sense of urgency about how the city could come back. Now there is. Last year, for instance, the city developed a new land use plan for the first time since 1947. And a state tax credit program has been spurring investment in some forgotten parts of the city."

"There's a young middle-class movement beginning," said James Neal Primm, a retired professor and author of "Lion of the Valley," an extensive history of St. Louis. "My overall reaction is that there should be a lot more. But there is something going on."