An Overview of the St. Louis Region by Jerry Blair, Director of Transportation Plannig East-West Gateway Council of Governments June 2009 Ambrose Bierce admonished his readers to “Cultivate a taste for distasteful truths. And ... most important of all, endeavor to see things as they are.” Too often it seems that we, as a region, try to bury distasteful facts with promotionalism or simple fatalism, both of which keep us from strategically challenging our problems. Ninety years ago, one of the first major planning documents produced under the leadership of Harland Bartholomew was titled Problems of St. Louis. That title did not connote pessimism about the City, but a belief that progress depended on an unsparing critique of existing conditions. Perhaps we would do well to follow Bartholomew’s lead, heed Bierce’s admonition, and take a hard look at our region – identifying both our strengths and weaknesses – to better equip ourselves for building on our strengths and overcoming our weaknesses. This overview will not provide a comprehensive analysis of the St. Louis region. The narrative contains a loose mix of data, interpretation, and judgment, with the intent to explore some realities about our region. It does not claim to establish any truths about the metropolitan area, but is offered simply as one foundation for thinking about the region and our possible future. The concept of regionalism may be a productive starting point for thinking about our present situation. It is important to recognize, in a way that really matters, our essential bond as a region. Metropolitan areas have become economic and social units that compete for resources, jobs, and people with urban regions throughout the nation and world. Drawing together around that truth is critical to our future well-being. In a sense, we are burdened with a federal, state, and local political architecture that works against our embracing and exploiting regionalism. The St. Louis MSA is divided into two federal regions, two states, and more than 850 local units of government. Only New York and Chicago, with more than three times our population, have more local units of government, and only Pittsburgh has more units of government per capita. Our governmental fragmentation, coupled with the lack of regional political structures, impedes cooperative planning and action. It also creates an environment of intense internal competition for resources, diverting our attention from competing as a unified economic region. Growth is the primary metric used to judge metropolitan success. Employing that simple measure is understandable, but it does have its unfortunate aspect. If growth is the measure of our success, the tendency is to perceive growth as an end in itself. In cautioning about the unreflective pursuit of what we often consider progress, Edward Abbey wrote that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” We need to consider growth not as a stand-alone goal, but as an outcome of a healthy and prosperous community. Many metropolitan areas are growing faster than St. Louis. Phoenix, Houston and Charlotte are all fast-growing , but they also experience more congestion and crime than we do. Growth has both its benefits and costs. Many people who live here want to stay here, and that is not necessarily a function of social inertia or a personal lack of ambition. It’s based on a judgment they have made that life here is good.

Many of us have decided, consciously or unconsciously, that trading bustling growth for urban equilibrium is not a bad deal. It’s a trade-off we can live with. Yet even in accepting that deal many realize that a metropolitan area not striving to improve risks backsliding, or to lift a phrase from Bob Dylan, a region that is “not busy being born is busy dying.” Growth is productive when it is a sign of improvement and energy, not merely a rising count of people. Metropolitan growth depends on creating the type of social, economic, and natural environments that attract people and businesses. Healthy and interesting communities, good educational and challenging employment options, stimulating cultural and recreational amenities, exceptional public services, and productive business climates are all necessary for growth. More important, they are essential to ensuring opportunity and prosperity for existing residents. Strengthening the region in those critical areas should be our focus, whether or not it leads to huge increases in population or jobs. While excelling in each of those areas will create growth possibilities, sustaining a thriving regional community with broad opportunities must be our first concern. Improving life in the region will benefit current residents, retain those thinking about leaving (especially our young adults), and ultimately attract others to migrate here, bringing with them new ideas and energy. While St. Louis is the 18th largest metropolitan area in the nation, we have the 20th largest economy. That slight discrepancy between the two rankings suggests that our economic performance is lagging. Although we had a pre-recession annual GDP approaching $120 billion, our economy is growing at a much slower pace than most large metro areas. Among the 30 largest areas, only Detroit had a lower economic growth rate than ours between 2000 and 2006 (the last year for which GDP data are available). We did experience double-digit growth in the service producing sector over that period, but this was partially offset by declines in the goods producing and government sectors. Employment statistics tell a similar story. In 2008 there were nearly 1.36 million jobs in the metropolitan area. Although we had one of the lowest job growth rates among the top 30 metro areas, we can take some solace in the fact that employment did not decline, as it did in five other regions. There is nothing extraordinary about the employment structure of our region: 85 percent of jobs are in the service sector and employment in the goods sector continues to decline, with manufacturing losses leading the way. Since 2000, we have lost 25 percent of our manufacturing jobs. That is consistent with losses in many other areas throughout the nation. Our major growth sector is Educational and Health Services, which added 32,500 jobs during the last eight years. These jobs provide a relatively high average wage. Although many service jobs are not highly remunerated, we do not find ourselves simply replacing every high wage manufacturing job with low wage service positions. Regional changes in employment are manifest in our average wage per job, which increased five percent in real terms between 2000 and 2007. That represents a slower growth rate than most of the top 30 metro areas. Interestingly, although our comparative standing on wage rates declined over that period, our standing in per capita personal income remained stable. This suggests that other types of income – employer contributions, investments, transfer payments, etc. – are moderating the effects of relatively sluggish wage rates. One item of bad news about our per capita personal income ($39,602 in 2007) is that it is less than 65 percent of San Francisco’s.

The good news is that the median value of a single-family home in our region is about 75 percent less than in San Francisco. Our much promoted affordability increases the purchasing value of our incomes over ostensibly wealthier and more expensive metro areas. Put another way, it simply costs less to live here than in many other areas that basically offer the same urban amenities. To what extent we can interpret affordability as a regional strength is an open question. Affordability may be a two-edged blade. On one hand, it should make us a more attractive location for business and people. At some level it undoubtedly does, although our growth rates suggest it may not be as important a factor as we might wish. On the other hand, it may reflect a lack of demand or attractiveness, unless there is an intrinsic, historical reason for our relatively low cost of living. It is a difficult issue to dissect. Take housing costs, for example. Some of the areas attracting the most new people and jobs (i.e., Atlanta, Dallas, Houston) have comparatively modest home prices, while lower growth areas (i.e., Boston, San Francisco, San Diego) have managed to sustain extremely high housing prices. (Areas with extraordinary high prices tended to suffer the greatest losses in home values during the present recession, much higher in both absolute and percentage terms than the 32 percent drop in the median price of a single-family home in our region between 2006 and the first quarter of 2009.) Suffice it to say that the relationship between affordability and attractiveness is multidimensional, and that affordability provides few clues about the health of a region, except at the extremes. The St. Louis region is home to 2.8 million people. Our 4.4 percent growth rate since 2000 ranks us 22nd among the top 30 metro areas. The 118,000 increase in residents between 2000 and 2008 is only ten percent of the population increase experienced in Dallas, Atlanta, Phoenix, and Houston, the fastest growing metropolitan areas in absolute numbers. Growth is evident in 15 of the 16 counties making up our metro areas. Notably, population increases in the City of St. Louis during this decade have reversed a fifty-year decline. Just as notable is that St. Louis County, dropping below one million residents, lost population for the first time in modern history. Although significant percentage increases are occurring in most of the outlying Missouri counties and Monroe County in Illinois, the major growth impetus is toward the northwestern sectors of the region, principally St. Charles, Lincoln, and Warren counties, where growth rates have ranged from 23 to 35 percent since 2000. According to the Brookings Institution, foreign immigration is driving population growth in most large metropolitan areas, although domestic migration and natural increase are fueling growth in the fastest growing areas. In St. Louis, natural increase supports our population growth, as we continue losing people to domestic migration and have one of the lowest influxes of international migrants. Although our ethnic diversity has increased, we effectively remain a biracial community: whites and African-Americans make up almost 96 percent of our population. Hispanics and Latinos account for just over two percent of residents. African-American and immigrant populations are disproportionately concentrated in some of our most economically challenged core communities. Regarding this concentration of AfricanAmericans, there is almost a sense of historical inevitability, that things are the way they are simply because they happened that way. Colin Gordon, however, has dissuaded us from that perspective. In his book, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City,

Gordon documents the intentionality behind the geographic separation of whites and AfricanAmericans. Discriminatory real estate practices, planning and zoning, and federal housing policies all led to this separation, which, in many cases, left African-Americans isolated in declining communities. Those factors coupled with the dispersal of jobs, the rising necessity of automobile use and the decline of public transportation, and low-income housing restrictions created obstacles that prevented many African-Americans from fully engaging in the social and economic life of the region. The result is that our region ranks high in most indicators of racial disparity pertaining to employment, education, health, and poverty. An undeniable measure of a region’s social and economic health is the number of people living in poverty. Poverty statistics measure, to a degree, the lack of social, educational, and employment opportunity. Prior to the recession, more than 11 percent of metropolitan area residents and 16 percent of children lived in households with incomes below the poverty level. Comparatively, these percentages put us at the lower end of poverty rates among the 30 metro areas. Still, poverty in the region affects more than one-in-ten people and almost one-in-six children, and while poverty exists throughout the metropolitan area, it is more pronounced and concentrated in our core communities with high minority populations. Twenty-three percent of residents and one-in-three children in the City of St. Louis live in poverty. Poverty figures are even higher in some of the inner suburbs of St. Clair and St. Louis counties. African-Americans are 3.5 times as likely as a white to live in poverty. Many view poverty as chiefly an urban issue and as the responsibility of affected communities. Poverty, however, is present in urban, suburban, and rural areas, and its effects (and causes) are not limited to where it exists in its most severe forms. Regardless of what judgments one makes about the issue of urban sprawl – and there are great and legitimate differences of opinion – we are indeed a decentralizing region, despite a slow population growth. Although we have seen population increase in the City of St. Louis for the first time in half a century, the population impulse remains outward. Almost 83 percent of this decade’s population growth, excluding the losses in St. Louis County, occurred outside of the four core urban counties. We have the 6th lowest population density among the top 30 metro areas, and over the last few decades we have consumed land at seven times the rate of population growth. A recent Brookings study indicates that we also are one of the most decentralized metropolitan regions in terms of employment, with more than 60 percent of jobs located more than ten miles from the primary central business district. The centrifugal forces that expands of our region are thousands of individual residential location decisions, primarily in the direction of suburban and ex-urban areas. There are myriad reasons for such decisions. People are pushed from or pulled to locations in search of safer communities, bigger backyards, better schools, newer or more affordable housing, and even racial concerns. As the population shifts, so do businesses, placing themselves closer to customers and labor markets, or relocating to areas more suitable for their facility needs. This is all understandable. Yet, this cycle of decentralization has its costs. It requires expansion of infrastructure and public services, with some redundancies, and ever greater expenditures of public revenues. At the same time that new revenues are raised and new infrastructure and services are put in place, communities that lose people and jobs are challenged to maintain their infrastructure and public services with lower revenues, often forcing them to raise taxing rates

above their more successful neighbors. The result often is that they become less attractive places for people and businesses, and a cycle of disinvestment emerges. Preserving mobility in a decentralizing region can be a challenge. Fortunately, St. Louis has a well-developed, efficient road network. Compared to the 30 metro areas, we rank fourth in both the number of roadway miles per capital and the number of freeway miles per square mile of area. Our roadway supply, scaled to our size, is more than adequate. Although we have a number of heavily congested roadway corridors during peak traffic periods, the general capacity of our road network is sufficient. Based on information from the Texas Transportation Institute, we have one of the lowest levels of systemwide traffic congestion and delay among the nation’s large metropolitan areas. Mobility is no problem in our region for anyone capable of owning and operating an automobile. Mobility is a much greater challenge for those residents that do not own or cannot operate an automobile because of income, age, or disability. We often think of transportation in terms of geographic mobility – moving from place to place – but we seldom contemplate the importance of geographic mobility to social and economic mobility. People that lack access to jobs, shopping, medical facilities, recreation sites, and a host of other destinations are unable to fully participate in the social and economic life of the region. That lack of access, which constrains opportunity, is very real for many of those who cannot rely on the automobile for personal travel. Their best travel option is often public transportation, if they live in an area served by transit. Unfortunately, our transit system has been underfunded for decades and is not nearly as expansive as our road network. Even before the recent round of service cuts by Metro, the region’s transit system ranked in the lower third of the 30 metro areas in terms of service supplied on a per capita basis. Prior to the cuts, the average transit commuter could only access 20 percent of the region’s jobs within an hour’s commute. That situation has worsened dramatically since Metro’s March 30 service reductions. Despite our present circumstances, transit is likely to become more, not less, essential as we move into the future. An aging population, escalating energy prices, and reducing greenhouse gases will compel us to rethink the role of public transportation. We are entering a transformative era. The rapidity, scale, and urgency of change is unprecedented. As we go forward we will encounter many challenges of our own making – declining infrastructure, inadequate public revenues, educational and wealth disparities, inefficient development patterns, etc. – but perhaps the more difficult challenges will emerge from things beyond our control. Globalization, climate change and higher energy prices will shape the economic and social environment in which we live, work, and compete. Although the causes are beyond our control, they will demand a response from us. How aggressively and creatively we respond will determine our future prosperity. Responding effectively will require us to think and act as a region.