A great newspaper article about St. Paul Minnesota's options for revenue generation | How about Packaging, Marketing, and Branding them into a Program?

 -- "How might St. Paul boost its tax base and stabilize property taxes?" in the St. Paul Pioneer-Press

One of the ideas is what's called a Payment in Lieu of Taxes, or PILOT, by nonprofits. This is done by cities to help to cover the cost of services to nonprofits not paying property taxes.  It's a voluntary program and most places feel they aren't getting enough--which is probably true.  

Boston's probably the best example.  To get around an unwillingness to agree, Providence proposed a "capitation tax" per college student, since so much of the city's property is owned by Brown University.

Interestingly, there was an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "O’Connor’s partnership approach brings millions to Pittsburgh from tax-exempt nonprofits, corporations," about PILOTs which has been a big issue there because the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Allegheny Health System, the University of Pittsburgh, and Carnegie-Mellon University control so much of the property.

Rather than focusing on negotiating a broader PILOT, which could include funding for annual operations, he has moved to getting various institutions committed to putting money towards capital projects.  For example, UPMC is paying for new ambulances--some of the trips the new ambulances make will end up at one of their facilities.  The Heinz Foundation, a strong supporter of the city and region, gave money to the city to finish its stalled new Comprehensive Land Use Plan.  Etc.

Map of St. Paul from Etsy.

In St. Paul, it turns out almost 60% of the nonprofit land is government owned, where no PILOT would be derived.  And the rest of the organizations are generally much smaller than those in Pittsburgh.

Making it harder, St. Paul is small, about 315,000 population, while the rest of Ramsey County is only 226,000 more.  Plus, the county has lost population since 2020.

Building the tax base through capital investment.  The article goes on to describe various options.  Some are what I call investment oriented, in that "you need to spend (invest) money to make money."

One of the items discussed is Tax Increment Financing, where you sell bonds to support development based on the idea that the new development will raise tax revenues.  So you get the loan against future benefits, which pay off the bond.

According to the article, a number of groups oppose more TIF, even though the city has the capacity for more, because they see it disproportionately benefiting developers, which I suppose it does.

Neighborhood TIF, Minneapolis.  But I couldn't help but think of the counter example of Minneapolis, which created a TIF system to fund neighborhood improvements.  Called the Neighborhood Revitalization Program, resident associations worked with the city, school district and parks district to make physical improvements with long term positive effects (case study, "Empowered Participation in Urban Governance: The Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research).

Perhaps St. Paul could look at multiple approaches to TIF, neighborhoods as well as more traditional development projects.

Some MPAS4 projects.

Metropolitan Area Projects, Oklahoma City.  Another program, although more in terms of packing, is the MAPS program in Oklahoma City.  

It's an add on sales tax, which in different phases each with a preapproved capital projects plan, has funding major projects, from a sports arena, to a streetcar, to canal and river improvements, and physical improvements to schools ("Big League Cities: Small Cities," "Change isn't usually that simple: The repatterning of Oklahoma City's Downtown Streetscape"). 

From the Daily Oklahoman article, "What MAPS projects will start in 2024? Everything to know about ongoing OKC projects":

For three decades, Oklahoma City’s Metropolitan Area Projects program, better known as MAPS, has played a key role in ongoing development of the city.

The debt-free MAPS program is funded by a one-cent sales tax, approved by voters and currently expected to raise more than $1 billion between 2020 and 2028. The funds are used for capital projects, neighborhood improvements and job-creating initiatives.

Various projects for MAPS 4, the program’s current iteration, are underway, with all of them in different stages of development. Passed by voters in 2019, MAPS 4 encompasses 16 projects that address issues like homelessness, post-incarceration programming, youth and senior well-being, along with traditional MAPS projects like the fairgrounds coliseum and updates to the NBA Thunder's arena.

Note that the current MAPS4 program is less focused on big capital projects, and includes a number of social service facilities, transit development, and  "beautification" projects, as well as providing operating funding for some programs  ("Some OKC MAPS 4 programs will receive annual operating funds. Here's how that will work," Daily Oklahoman).  Operating funds will be provided long term, through a creation of a trust funded by MAPS. (Although I think that many of the funding commitments should instead be paid through a larger property tax.)

MAPS might not work that well for St. Paul as it's small, whereas OKC is as large physically, as many US counties.  A city exclusive tax wouldn't generate enough money.  But could the city and county develop a similar program, jointly?

Hennepin County Community Works.  The county next door to St. Paul (which is in Ramsey) is the home to Minneapolis.  In the 1990s Hennepin County realized that population leakage from Minneapolis as a result of suburban outmigration would also hurt its revenue stream.  

It studied the areas of the city that best retained their value, and found them proximate to lakes, parks, rivers, and trails.  So it created a program to make investments in the city to extend those qualities of livability to more places, both to retain population and to gain it.

This journal article, "A COUNTY AND ITS CITIES: THE IMPACT OF HENNEPIN COMMUNITY WORKS," Journal of Urban Affairs (2006), describes the program.   

Faced in the nineties with a growing imbalance between the declining prosperity of its core city (Minneapolis) and suburban municipalities, Hennepin County, Minnesota, pioneered a different path. In 1994, Hennepin County launched an urban redevelopment program, “Hennepin Community Works” (hereafter HCW) that clearly supplemented the more common models of county activity. HCW devised an entirely new redevelopment role for the county, and has consequently had a major impact on Minneapolis and its suburbs. 

Since its inception, Hennepin County commissioners have committed close to $200 million of infrastructure spending into a targeted redevelopment program with five goals: (1) to enhance the tax base; (2) to reshape troubled neighborhoods; (3) to improve transportation within the county; (4) to protect and develop green space; and (5) to create new jobs. While much of the U.S. urban past since the eighties has featured decreasing levels of public sector funding and involvement with urban affairs, Hennepin County voluntarily took on substantial additional financial and political commitments with this program

... HCW began here in 1994 as a public works program initially intended to address declining property values. Since then, HCW has significantly transformed portions of the county through major housing, transportation, parks, and environmental restoration investments. Through 2008, HCW launched nineteen projects, totaling $197.5 million in investments.

Later they added creating a light rail transit system as part of their overall investment program.

The city's peak population was 522,000 in 1950.  From 1980 to 1990 it was about 370,000.  It grew to 382,000 in 2000 and today is 435,000.  They have a ways to go to equal their peak but at the same time Hennepin County's population in 1950 was only about 150,000 people outside of Minneapolis.  Today the non-city population is almost 850,000 people.

Allegheny County Regional Asset District.  The Regional Asset District in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania is funded from a county-wide sales and use tax ("How the Regional Asset District rode to the rescue of Allegheny County attractions," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).

Historically, the City of Pittsburgh paid for and provided regionally-serving cultural assets (museums, zoo, etc.) without support from other area jurisdictions.  As cities lost population and business activity, funding such facilities became an increasing strain.  The RAD, also supporting cultural assets in the County, was a way to spread out the cost.

Business Revitalization District Zoning Overlay, Cleveland.  This calls for an extra level of review, including design, in designated zones where the city has already been investing, to ensure that each new project adds value to the whole, rather than diminishing it.  The classification has been subsumed into a broader category of design review.

"Outlines of a plan."  To me, St. Paul has had a relatively high turnover of mayors.  So some programs that have been introduced, like "Vibrant Places and Spaces":

• Ensure Saint Paul puts people first
• Encourage vitality through investment, private and public alike
• Create accessible places where people want to connect and spend time
• Promote healthy living
• Celebrate the city’s cultural diversity

get dropped when a new administration takes office.  

Plus, while I am contradicting the conclusion in the entry about Pittsburgh and the NFL Draft Day Event and many small projects versus one or two large ones ("Big events as priming actions: Pittsburgh and the NFL Draft | Go big, medium, or little? Go for a few projects or many?"), the placemaking focus on the Vibrant Places initiative improved places on the margins, but didn't contribute to a larger whole.

St. Paul has focused on leveraging the light rail, greening initiatives, and projects converting large vacant industrial properties ("Why hasn't light rail revitalized the Midway neighborhood of St. Paul | While it has for the Prospect Park neighborhood of Minneapolis").  And a soccer stadium ("Sports facilities and the reproduction of retail space often doesn't work for the locals").

St. Paul also has the Grand Round, a parkway system conceived of before Olmsted.  It's connective capacity ought to be leveraged in the same way Hennepin County focused on rivers, lakes, parks, and trails in Minneapolis as a way to stabilize neighborhoods and add population.

Conclusion.  These programs show various ways St. Paul could work with Ramsey County to develop a long term investment approach for the city and county based on creating a package of programs and funding sources.   

Revisiting St. Louis City and County: The idea of a merger | Renewing the Gateway to the West

Could a consolidated City and County of St. Louis be the next urban success story?

This has been suggested by the new County Executive, Sam Page ("St. Louis County executive floats city rejoining county amid budget crisis," St. Louis Business Journal).  From the article:

St. Louis County Executive Sam Page is expected Thursday to call for St. Louis to consider reentering St. Louis County as a municipality, framing the idea as part of a broader push to consolidate services and respond to mounting budget pressures in both jurisdictions.

In prepared remarks for a press event Thursday, Page said county budget cuts and rising costs have forced service reductions and opened a need for a larger public discussion about how the city and county can sustain core services without new taxes.

“Faced with the Council’s budget cuts and forced to reduce services, one path forward is to find more ways to consolidate key city and county services,” Page's prepared remarks said. “The city could even re-enter the county as a municipality.” Page said the idea has “a lot of political support,” though he also described it as a proposal meant to spur public feedback rather than an immediate policy push.

Sadly this historic building--yes, seriously damaged but repairable--near Downtown St. Louis was demolished instead of preserved. 

“These are big ideas. They won’t happen this year. They will not happen while I am county executive,” he said. “But let’s look at the challenges the county and city are facing and tackle them together.”

Like Baltimore, the City and County are separate jurisdictions, and the City is not counted as part of the County.  

Like Baltimore, St. Louis is a once industrial and financial center that continues to shrink, with a population of about 280,000.  In 1950 the population was almost 3x, 860,000.  

It was the 8th largest city in America, without the County as part of its population.  The County had about 406,000 residents.  So today

Outmigration has been great for the suburbs ("The 16 Best Suburbs in St. Louis, MO," Gateway Realty Group), while St. Louis is  --and Gateway Realty Group is based in the suburbs, and "appropriates" the "Gateway to the West" tagline not to promote the city, but the suburbs.

Anheuser-Busch when it was very successful.  The decline in sales of mass produced beer has led the company to close three production facilities.  But not in St. Louis ("Brewery Closures Hit Anheuser-Busch Facilities In Three States," CRE Daily).

Broken by business mergers shifting headquarters to other states and countries.  St. Louis has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs because business consolidation.  

Once a major rail town, railroads in other cities became much bigger and St. Louis was relegated to a secondary position.  It was once one of the largest stockyards--meat producers--in the US.  No more.

May Company Department Stores became Macy's, newly headquartered in NYC.  Boatman's Bank became part of Bank of America, headquartered in Charlotte.  Anheuser-Busch still produces beer, but is now a subsidiary of a company in Europe. 

Not only did those companies leave, the ancillary jobs that served those firm like supply and logistics, advertising production, etc., left also.  These days, St. Louis no longer has a vibrant Downtown, although it remains attractive with an array of historic buildings.

Assets.  The city has assets: Washington University at St. Louis and St. Louis University as a couple of anchors.  It lost its pro football and basketball teams long ago, but still has baseball and hockey.  The Ballpark Village development around the baseball stadium is a national best practice example of "sports and entertainment districts" alongside stadiums/arenas.  Plus there is the Gateway Arch National Park, the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers--still a source of barge freight traffic, an acceptable but needs to grow light rail transit system, etc.

The opportunity for repositioning and a reenergized revitalization program.  The County's population is just under 1 million.  

Together they would be about 1.3 million in population, fighting with Dallas to be the 9th or 10th largest city in the US.  It would move up from 82nd.  And would allow for a big repositioning.  (Note that the combined population today is barely more than the population in 1950.)

"St. Louis was near the site of the 1804 Lewis and Clark Expedition launch, and the city later served as a gathering place for pioneers collecting supplies for trips to the American West, earning the city the nickname 'Gateway to the West.'"

A few years ago, a similar merger effort failed.  It's complicated, would require votes by the city and county and probably the State Legislature.  But it would make "the City of St. Louis" larger, with the ability for a new position beyond shrinkage.

I wrote two entries outlining what I saw as an ideal revitalization plan.

-- "St. Louis: what would I recommend for a comprehensive revitalization program? | Part 1: Overview and Theoretical Foundations"
-- "St. Louis: what would I recommend for a comprehensive revitalization program? | Part 2: Implementation Approach and Levers"

I ranked city/county consolidation as number one.  While Indianapolis and Jacksonville are also combined city-counties, and have leveraged this to great success--Indianapolis has an advantage of having some large corporations still like Eli Lilly and is the state capital, a combined St. Louis would be larger than both.

It might not be enough to turn the city's trajectory but it's a start.  By consolidating services it should save some monies, and allow for a higher amount of bonding authority.

I would introduce consolidation along with the vision of OKC's Metropolitan Area Projects program: Oklahoma City.  MAPS comprises the large infrastructure projects that have helped redefine Oklahoma City as a major city on the western side of the Midwest.  

Fans watch an entertainer at Scissortail Park before Game 2 of the NBA basketball playoff series between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the New Orleans Pelicans at Paycom Center in Oklahoma City, Wednesday, April 24, 2024. Photo: Bryan Terry/Daily Oklahoman.  

Over four tranches, plus two similar projects for the basketball team/arena that technically were separate from MAPS, projects include a streetcar, a pro basketball arena that landed the now Oklahoma City Thunder NBA team, which won last year's championship ("Big League City: Smaller Cities"), a water course on Oklahoma River that is internationally known, physical investments in schools (they needed to invest in programming too...), and a new community with a revitalized canal called Bricktown, among others.

Bricktown Canal.  Wikipedia photo by Kerwin Moore.

It's funded by an add on sales tax.  And the model of big deal infrastructure projects has also been used to fund major streetscape projects throughout Downtown ("Change isn't usually that simple: The repatterning of Oklahoma City's Downtown Streetscape").  

The process is discussed in the book Next American City: The Big Promise of Our Midsized Cities, and referenced in Big League City: Oklahoma City's Rise to the NBA, the story about landing the Thunder basketball team..

OKC is only the 20th largest city in the US, but it is fortunate to be a major city, secondary to Houston, in the oil and natural gas biz.

Conclusion.  A St. Louis MAPS program + Consolidation would be killer. 

The St. Louis brand once was strong, as indicated by the branded "City of St. Louis" streamliner passenger railroad train of the Wabash Railroad, which before multiple mergers, was based in St. Louis.

And at least political and business leaders in St. Louis have the vision and guts to bring up consolidation.  It's not really discussed much in Baltimore or Pittsburgh, two places that need that additional oomph from being larger.  Although compared to Baltimore, Pittsburgh is on a better trajectory ("Big Ideas for a Better Pittsburgh | and a point about world class cities").  

Revisiting St. Louis revitalization planning in the face of population shrinkage

 KMOX radio reports ("Here's what could happen if the population of St. Louis dips below 300,000") that St. Louis is depopulating still, with a risk of going under 300,000 population, which would render it ineligible for certain types of funding made available to larger cities.

In response to a feature in the Washington Post about Tishaura Jones, Mayor of St. Louis, in 2021 I wrote a couple pieces outlining what I would do were I in charge of revitalization planning there.

-- "St. Louis: what would I recommend for a comprehensive revitalization program? | Part 1: Overview and Theoretical Foundations"
-- "St. Louis: what would I recommend for a comprehensive revitalization program? | Part 2: Implementation Approach and Levers"

1.  A big point is merging the city and county, which would immediately increase the city's population, maintaining its eligibility for large city funding opportunities.  That's been sputtering for awhile ("City, county and residents weigh in on merging St. Louis entities together," KMOV-TV).

The population of the county as a whole is just under one million.

2.  And further investment in transit, which might be moving forward ("Reduce crime in St. Louis? Mayor looks to transit, investment in north side," St. Louis Post-Dispatch).

3.  Obviously, the city's number one priority needs to be neighborhood stabilization and resident recruitment to staunch the population losses.  Live Baltimore is one of the nation's best practice examples of how to do residential recruitment.

Later I wrote a couple of other relevant pieces on urban revitalization:

-- "Social urbanism and equity planning as a way to address crime, violence, and persistent poverty: (not in) DC," 2021 
-- "Black community, economic and social capital: the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago/Chicago," 2021
-- "Pontiac Michigan: a lagging African American city in one of the nation's wealthiest counties," 2022

Interestingly, Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago, who just lost her bid for reelection, had a revitalization initiative for the South and West parts of the city, called Invest South/West.

-- "Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s signature Invest South/West program is 3 years old. But some of its big projects were already planned when she took office," Chicago Tribune
-- "Invest South/West program remains mostly a vision, without a single project under construction after three years," Crain's Chicago Business 

Even though I wasn't particularly impressed by Mayor Lightfoot, the reality is that it takes a lot longer than three years to move a revitalization plan forward in significant ways.  

I'm not holding DC up as a great example, but it took about 20 years to start to see movement on the redevelopment of the Skyland Shopping Center, and H Street's revitalization hit in the 2000s once trends favored urban living, and after the city announced plans to add streetcar service to the corridor--leading to $1 Billion in new development--but the city had been working on revitalization of that riot scarred corridor since the late 1970s

Smaller cities lose out when it comes to business consolidation and headquarters relocation: WInston-Salem, North Carolina

Winston-Salem is a secondary city in North Carolina, second to Charlotte, the largest city in the state, and to Raleigh-Durham, home to universities and large research operations.  

 When US business was not so concentrated in major cities, it was home to a large number of firms including major corporate headquarters.  

These days, not unlike Caterpillar living Peoria for Chicago, and now to Texas, Winston-Salem is experiencing the loss of those corporations, especially as they further consolidate and relocate.  If firms stay in North Carolina, they are moving to Charlotte.

The Winston-Salem Journal has a really great article about this process, "Triad weathers corporate HQ departures with manufacturing revival."  It's super rare for a smaller newspaper to have such a thorough, detailed, well-argued piece.

I've written a few entries on this topic in the past year and over the years: 

-- "Next Level Clustering of Business away from the Midwest," 2022
-- "Boeing to move "headquarters" to Northern Virginia," 2022 
-- "How the closure of a Pfizer research center in Ann Arbor, Michigan led to the development of a biotech sector there," 2021
-- "Why do Rust Belt rivals Cleveland and Pittsburgh have diverging economies?," 2021 
-- "Crystal City Arlington as Amazon one-half of HQ2 | Part 1: General + Housing impact," 2017
-- "Part 2: Leveraging Amazon's entrance for complementary economic development improvements," 2017

Ten smaller businesses versus one big business: which is better?  And a point in the WSJ article dovetails with a point made in the article about Ann Arbor and biotechnology, that Winston-Salem needs to recognize its place in the business ecosystem and focus on smaller businesses, and that for example 10 businesses, with more of their functions handled locally, has more impact than one business with the same number of employees, and fewer locally-based business functions, and is less dependent on any one business.

R&D functions and manufacturing proximity.  It also illustrates another point although the author doesn't mention it per se, about "doing versus coordinating."  Corporate headquarters or at least research and development for manufacturers--with Boeing being a big exception--tend to stay proximate to major manufacturing clusters.

Airports.  A key point mentioned is airports and the number of destinations served.  International companies like Caterpillar can't rely on a local airport for simplified connections.  Same with firms in Winston-Salem.

--  "Do tax incentives pay off? : Illinois; Tennessee; Rosslyn + "The Airport Access Factor"," 2017

Education.  The article mentions the importance of higher education in particular technical education and engineering, something that Greensboro, a peer city, has been particular good at.

-- "Universities as elements of urban/downtown revitalization: the Portland State story and more," 2014

-- "Naturally occurring innovation districts | Technology districts and the tech sector," 2014

-- "Better leveraging higher education institutions in cities and counties: Greensboro; Spokane; Mesa; Phoenix; Montgomery County, Maryland; Washington, DC," 2016

-- "Revisiting past blog entries: College Park as a college town and economic development | PG County and Amazon,," 2018

-- "University President Freeman Hrabowski and an agenda for urban universities," 2021

-- "The other George Miller idea: creating multi-college innovation centers in (cities) Philadelphia | Creating public library-college education centers as revitalization initiatives," 2021

Technological change can redistribute business location.  And while I haven't written about it, how quantum technological change within an industry can change its location patterns.  

For example, now that the auto industry is moving from gasoline engines to electric motors, the new firms and their suppliers are increasingly located outside of the Midwest.  It's not that Michigan and other states aren't landing some of the business, but so are states like Georgia, Oklahoma, Texas, etc., shifting supply chains and where added value is developed.

Interestingly, oil interests are fighting this in Republican-led states ("Georgia judge's incentives ruling threatens Rivian EV plant," Atlanta Journal-Constitution).  It's positioned as fighting corporate welfare, but it's really a different type of corporate welfare attempting to ward off competition.

St. Louis: what would I recommend for a comprehensive revitalization program? | Part 2: Implementation Approach and Levers

-- "St. Louis: what would I recommend for a comprehensive revitalization program? | Part 1: Overview and Theoretical Foundations"
-- "St. Louis: what would I recommend for a comprehensive revitalization program? | Part 2: Implementation Approach and Levers"

Forgot that I had most of this written, but was trying to read the ABCD report Leading by Stepping Back: A Guide for City Officials on Building Neighborhood Capacity, on creating ground up civic engagement programs in Savannah, Georgia, before publishing..

This post was spurred as a response to an article in the Washington Post about Tishaura Jones, the recently elected progressive left St. Louis mayor, and thinking about what I would try to do were I in her shoes. 

The first piece, published on August 2nd, suggested creating a program built on foundational points:

1. Transformational Projects Action Planning
2. Social Urbanism
3. Poverty Reduction through equity planning, social infrastructure creation, and a focus on community economic development 
4. Civic Engagement

The second piece, this one, outlines a more specific program.

Implementation approaches and levers

1. City and county consolidation would reposition the city-county as the tenth largest city in the US, changing the conversation and focus away from St. Louis' constant population loss.  (Other cities like Baltimore City and County, Detroit and Wayne County, and Pittsburgh and Allegheny County need to do this too.)

This would provide a consolidated and bigger tax base.

Although this will be extremely difficult to pull off, because St. Louis city is seen as an economic laggard along with race issues, among others (e.g., "CLAIMING IT WOULD “DIVIDE US”, STENGER OPPOSES NORTH-SOUTH RAIL TRANSIT," NextStL).

Successful consolidations in Louisville and Lexington, even Indianapolis are models that can be referenced.

Another problem is the politics of city and county.  It could be that the county electorate which is larger than the city, is more conservative, and a city-county consolidation could merely be another way to oppress the city.  Both Toronto, with Rob Ford, and London, with Boris Johnson, have had this occur in the recent past.   (Plus, the County Council has 7 members, while the City Council has 28!)

The Next American City by Mick Cornett, former mayor of Oklahoma City, describes the Metropolitan Area Projects program.

[2.  Some of the smaller communities in St. Louis County should consolidate into the city, like how there is an initiative in Wilkinsburg borough in Allegheny County to merge with Pittsburgh ("Wilkinsburg group seeking merger with Pittsburgh delays action," Pittsburgh Tribune-Review) although this wouldn't be an issue for the Mayor of St. Louis to pursue, but to support.]

3.  Create a master community economic development plan incorporating the relevant initiatives cited below.  Some measures were identified in the plan developed by Rollin Stanley (The future of shrinking cities: problems, patterns, and strategies of urban transformations in a global context, starting on page 127 (better formatted pdf version).

In the early 2000s, I came across an urban revitalization approach outlined in the Black Commentator website, called "Wanted: A Plan for Cities to Save Themselves," which was a more community-based approach counter to typical neoliberal approaches.  It's been a long time since I've read it, but it would be a good document to start with.

-- Part 2 of this series.
-- Part 3 of this series.
-- Part 4 of this series.
-- Part 5 of this series.

Along the same lines, in the Guardian, Malaika Jabali has a provocative article, "What Ice Cube's collaboration with Trump – and critique of Democrats – reveals," about Ice Cube's "conservative" black economic development program (Ice Cube's Contract with Black America), that Candidate Trump claimed to support.  

From the article:

The fact of the matter is, Black Americans defending and criticizing Ice Cube both have valid concerns. Neither major political party is working for Black Americans economically. The Black-white wealth gap is alarming, with white households holding 11.5 times more wealth than Black ones, and the gap continues to widen. Black homeownership is at a record low. More Black people are being imprisoned than in the 1960s. And both parties have contributed to these policy failures while letting big business off the hook for practices that exploit and harm our communities. This includes encouraging manufacturing jobs to leave for cheaper, deunionized labor in sectors that were disproportionately occupied by Black men; failing to adequately regulate big banks who profited from subprime mortgages targeted to Black communities; failing to assist Black Americans when the economy crashed on their backs; and enabling corporations to make astronomical profits off the disproportionately Black and Latino workers working in essential jobs during Covid.

Although, St. Louis city is about 45% black and 45% white, while St. Louis County is 68% white and 28% black.  Still, these kinds of proposals need to be considered in the context of communities where clearly the ordinary ways of approaching community improvement aren't working.

4.  (Re)Branding and identity.  There are many ways to think about the city's brand and identity.  This article, "How Treating Cities as Products Creates Real Change," points out that you don't "create" identity so much as burnish it, as a city's identity has been created by the sum total of its exchange.  From the article:

City branding isn’t about inventing something new, it’s about discovering what’s already in the city. Cities are made of the ideas and the people that sculpt its identity and vibrancy. The brand of a city are the attributes that distinguish one place from another, placing a unique value and transforming the city from a location into a destination. An effective city brand strategy has to accommodate all of the stakeholders’ demands, from investors to officials to residents, in order to strengthen the city’s overall competitiveness. All in all, city branding is an emerging agent for urban socioeconomic development. A number of cities are already involved in creating a new brand or regenerating their existing one in aim to revitalize, secure, and make the city a more prominent place on the map.

Logo for the Lambert International Airport.

Pieces on design ("PL #7: Using the Purple Line to rebrand Montgomery and Prince George's Counties as Design Forward"), transit as a design product ("Branding's (NOT) all you need for transit"), and usability ("World Usability Day and urban planning"), and tourism marketing ("Orlando's "Discover Your Urban" promotion campaign" and "Area tourism development")  illustrate different elements of identity, city branding, and marketing.

OneSTL is the brand for the sustainability plan for the St. Louis metropolitan county of governments. 

That would have been an awesome brand for a City-County consolidation.

But there are ways to do something even better, inspired by the RVA branding program in Richmond, which was created by students at Virginia Commonwealth University, working with local agencies (RVA Creates, "For the RVA brand, 'No' turned to 'Go!'," Richmond Times-Dispatch, "Three little letters become big business," Richmond BizSense).

Image by Matthias Miller using the RVA Creates logo.

5.  Organize a St. Louis City and County Metropolitan Area Projects program.  To implement a transformational projects action plan, a program on the scale of the Oklahoma City Metropolitan Area Projects should be developed. 

Besides OKC, which although a city is as large as many counties, Hennepin County, Minnesota and Minneapolis is a pre-eminent model too.  Consolidation would be great for tax harmonization and greater revenues

Money and program.  If the city and county were economically intertwined, the county would be motivated, like Hennepin County was in the 1980s, faced with property tax revenue decline from a shrinking Minneapolis, to engage in a program of focused investment on infrastructure and quality of life improvements.

--"A County and Its Cities: the Impact of Hennepin Community Works," Journal of Urban Affairs 30:3, 2008

And like Oklahoma City's Metropolitan Area Projects program, they could use a sales tax add on (and other sources) to fund programs ("Change isn't usually that simple: The repatterning of Oklahoma City's Downtown Streetscape).  

The City and County have passed various sales tax add ons to fund various projects, such as Proposition P in 2013, for parks and trails, for transit, and for economic development in 2017, among others.

This should be done at two scales: (1) at the city-county scale and (2) the neighborhood scale within St. Louis.  

At the same time, based on the findings in Ferguson ("How municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty," Washington Post) and knowing that there are other similarly positioned communities within St. Louis County, a similar revitalization program needs to be developed for St. Louis County, using the same approach.

Creating Knowledge Locations in Cities, full text pdf

6. Seed an innovation district to foster broad scale startup support and business development.  Which is already happening ("A Core Commitment: What’s Next for the Downtown St. Louis Innovation District," EQ).

-- "Naturally occurring innovation districts | Technology districts and the tech sector"
-- "Developing creative quarters in cities: policy lessons from 'Art and design city' Arabianranta, Helsinki," Urban Research & Practice 6(2):211-218, 2013
-- "Helsinki as an example of creative industries driving urban revitalization programs"

Kansas City on the other side of the state, aims to develop around agrosciences and technology and biotechnology ("THE KC ANIMAL HEALTH CORRIDOR: LEADING THE WORLD IN ANIMAL HEALTH").  Certainly St. Louis has strengths of its own?

7.  For St. Louis (and suburbs as needed but that isn't the job of the Mayor of St. Louis), Neighborhood and commercial district revitalization.  

Residential.  Although not every neighborhood can be revitalized, at least not all at once, neighborhood plans need to be created to outline a focused program for new investments should be developed, using the Elm Street approach for residential improvements, at first focusing on those areas that have the greatest potential velocity for improvement: 

-- "The need for a "national" neighborhood stabilization program comparable to the Main Street program for commercial districts: Part I (Overall)"
-- "To be successful, local neighborhood stabilization programs need a packaged set of robust remedies: Part 2"
-- "Creating 'community safety partnership neighborhood management programs as a management and mitigation strategy for public nuisance programs: Part 3 (like homeless shelters)"
-- "A case in Gloucester, Massachusetts as an illustration of the need for systematic neighborhood monitoring and stabilization initiatives: Part 4 (the Curcuru Family)"
-- "Local neighborhood stabilization programs: Part 5 | Adding energy conservation programs, with the PUSH Buffalo Green Development Zone as a model" 

And there needs to be a residential recruitment program, along the lines of Live Baltimore, which along with the Healthy Neighborhoods program which invests in neighborhood improvements, helps to attract new residents to the city.

Commercial districts using the Main Street approach, focused on retention of historic buildings and the support and/or development of independent businesses:

-- "Basic planning building blocks for urban commercial district revitalization programs that most cities haven't packaged: Part 1 | The first six"
--  "Basic planning building blocks for urban commercial district revitalization programs that most cities haven't packaged: Part 2 |  A neighborhood identity and marketing toolkit (kit of parts)"
--  "Basic planning building blocks for urban commercial district revitalization programs that most cities haven't packaged: Part 3 | The overarching approach, destination development/branding and identity, layering and daypart planning"
-- "Basic planning building blocks for "community" revitalization programs that most cities haven't packaged: Part 4 | Place evaluation tools"

Also see "The soft side of commercial district revitalization" (2006).  There is an existing Main Street initiative in the Dutchtown neighborhood of St. Louis.  

(Oakland County Michigan utilizes the Main Street model to work with communities across the county for commercial district revitalization.  St. Louis County has a Great Streets program as part of the MPO.  The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission had a program called Classic Towns that focused on suburban towns. The Northeast Ohio First Suburbs Consortium focuses on inner ring suburban revitalization.)

Along with urban design and placemaking improvements:

-- ("Walkable community planning versus pedestrian planning"
-- "Five examples of the failure to do parks and public space master planning in DC"
-- "Extending the "Signature Streets" concept to "Signature Streets and Spaces""
-- "Diversity Plaza, Queens, a pedestrian exclusive block"   

Programs like Walk Boston, Walk Denver, Feet First in Seattle, and Starkville in Motion (Mississippi) are great examples of "walkable community planning" even though they wouldn't call it that--it's about using walking and biking as a way to better connect people to their communities while improving the quality of life in those places.  

And Safe Routes to Schools program support urban design improvements that go beyond school children (School Walk and Bike Routes: A Guide for Planning and Improving Walk and Bike to School Options for Students, State of Washington DOT).

Festivals, house tours and special events.  Communities should be supported with funding for the development and operation of community building events such as festivals, farmers markets ("The layering effect: how the building blocks of an integrated public realm set the stage for community building and Silver Spring, Maryland as an example," 2012), community walking and bike tours, historic preservation house tours, cultural events like studio tours, arts walks, and coordinated "Open Doors" program ("DC should create an annual city-wide Doors Open event," 2019).

Neighborhood elements within city-wide marketing and wayfinding systems. As part of overarching branding and identity systems, cities should be sure to include neighborhoods as an element within the system, and provide support for wayfinding signage, banner programs, bus shelter communication systems, community information kiosks, cultural and historic markers, residential and commercial district brochures, etc.

Tax increment financing as a funding source.  An example of an opportunity for additional funding for neighborhood development would be the Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program, a 25 year long initiative, where tax increment financing bonds were sold to fund neighborhood improvements as developed by residents through consensus-based planning, working with the schools, parks, and other city and county agencies.

Although I would say that because so many of the districts are distressed, emerging, and at best early transitioning, 25 years isn't long enough, probably TIF as a funding stream needs to be a 40 year period.

8.  Entrepreneurship and Microenterprise development.  The biggest reason why neighborhoods and their commercial districts are failing is that at the micro scale, their economies are failing.  

Key points in Temali's book are developing the community workforce, creating good neighborhood-based jobs and microenterprise development as a way to create jobs.

A couple decades ago I read a paper on business plan contests, which said you need scale to succeed.  

As part of entrepreneurship and microenterprise development, have an annual business plan competition, with technical assistance to the participants, with winners getting resources to open their businesses, including in the various neighborhood commercial districts.

Also see "Why ask why? Because" (2007) which discusses subsystems of retail business operation, "Independent retail business can succeed and thrive" (2008) about systematic approaches to business identity, and "Retail and Restaurant Check Up Surveys" (2009).

Also see the Baltimore Sun article, "Healthy Howard Row: 5 new Black-owned businesses take root on a single Baltimore block," about the development of a row of black-owned businesses on Howard Street.  Coherent concentration of businesses is important for success.

Do this for other types of startups too. And for community investment and participation in local real estate development, such as that being piloted in Allentown ("Lesson from CNN story on Allentown, Pennsylvania").

More innovative forms of business organization (business cooperatives, social enterprise businesses run by nonprofits, market spaces as entrepreneurship spaces, etc.) may need to be created in order to seed success in neighborhoods with broken micro-economies ("In lower income neighborhoods, are businesses supposed to be "community organizations" first?," 2012, "Ground up commercial revitalization and the Skyland Town Center project" 2016).  

An interesting approach is offered by the Maryland-based real estate development firm Structures Unlimited.  In Cleveland, named the Madame C.J. Walker Center, they're creating a "community hub" with a credit union as the anchor, and adding a small grocery store and space for neighborhood shops  ("New business center coming to Cleveland's Hough neighborhood," WKYC-TV) in a 16,000 s.f. building.

I think a business development space, like the shared workspaces of places like WeWork, but on a nonprofit basis, with partnerships with business development programming (banks, SCORE business consulting from the Small Business Administration, local universities, city, county and state economic development organizations, etc.) ought to be created as part of these initiatives.  Paired with financing assistance.

Fortunately, the Metrolink system is in a rebranding process.

9.  Transit, urban design, and sustainable mobility/Transit as economic development. St. Louis has an east-west light rail line that serves St. Louis, St. Louis County, and East Saint Louis and St. Clair County, Illinois.  

In a full-blown revitalization program for the city and county, transit expansion should be prioritized. 

As an example, light rail has been key to the revitalization of Minneapolis-St. Paul, although those cities are not consolidated with their respective counties.

Hennepin County used light rail as a key element of its economic revitalization planning, and Minnesota has tax harmonization measures in place which provide some of the benefits from city-county consolidation in other places.

But it needs to be a network rather than a couple lines, especially in St. Louis City in order to draw renewed business and residential interest.  There are various expansion studies, in particular a North-South line adding stations within the city, but mostly north and south of the city in the County. 

It's being looked at currently ("St. Louis plans to take hard look at north-south light-rail line," Railway Track & Structures), while 5 years ago, the County Executive was not favorable.

A big focus of such a program should be providing fixed rail transit service to more parts of St. Louis city, as a way to foster revitalization, development intensity, and recruitment of new residents, the way that in DC, the Metrorail system has worked in the core of the city.

A transit expansion program should also be accompanied by "smart city" initiatives incorporated by Kansas City in its streetcar program, including sensor networks, wifi service, and smart kiosks (Smart City Emerging Technology Initiative, "New Smart City links: Data ‘chatter’ in streetcar corridor creates connections," Kansas City Business Journal).

Image: St. Louis Business Journal.

With regard to sustainable mobility and urban design, St. Louis has a number of initiatives already, such as Design Downtown St. Louis, a St. Louis Great Streets program for the Metropolitan area, etc.  

The most important thing is to integrate and coordinate the various transit initiatives into one integrated master plan.

10.  Schools revitalization.  The second phase of the OKC MAP program was MAPS4Kids.  OKC is served by 20+ school districts, but the core of the city is in one district, which had been underfunded for decades and the schools were in bad shape.  

The "bad schools" in the core of the city hurt the city's image and ability to recruit new business and residents.  They decided to use the second iteration of the MAPS program to rebuild schools in the core--70% of the funding went to the core school district, and 30% to the other school districts serving the city.  The total funding was $700 million.

This helped stabilize the core school district, and led to spillover improvements and economic development in the neighborhoods served by the schools.  But a failure of the program was to focus on bricks and mortar improvements, and not programmatic transformation  ("Maps for Kids wraps up," Daily Oklahoman).  Academic improvement has lagged physical improvement.

A St. Louis City MAP4Kids program could be a way to position school improvement, combining physical improvements to schools with programmatic improvements.  

While there have been many failures in urban school reform, there are a number of positive examples also ("Surprising gains in 5 school districts you’ve never heard of, plus Chicago," Washington Post), usually involving the use of AP and International Baccalaureate programs for high schools, and magnet and other programs for elementary and middle schools.  

Additional resources for Title I Schools, Co-operative High School (one of my ideas), Summer School, Year Round School, Pre-K 3-5, etc., should also be included in transformational programmatic improvement ("Successful school programs in low income communities").  From the Washington Post article "America’s most accelerated math program blasts through pandemic":

The Pasadena public schools, where most students are from low-income families, have had a mediocre reputation for decades. But in recent years its administrators have created strong AP and International Baccalaureate programs with high levels of participation. It has established magnet schools and dual-language immersion classes.

The "Schools as Community Center" approach should also be used, whereby schools are expanded through the co-location of other civic assets such as libraries ("Update: Neighborhood libraries as nodes in a neighborhood and city-wide network of cultural assets"), public health clinics, etc.  (In DC, Briya Charter Schools have a co-location agreement with Mary's Center clinics, a couple elementary schools in Salt Lake City have public health clinics.)

-- Cincinnati Public Schools Community Learning Centers approach

Note that like with urban revitalization, which takes decades, most school reform efforts are wrecked by short terms of office of leaders and political meddling ("How clueless principals and superintendents ruin great schools," Washington Post).

11.  Public safety and criminal justice.  There are a lot of different issues concerning public safety.  "Defund" is more about warrior policing and mass incarceration.  

At the same time, crime is still a problem and we need police to address it.  Although maybe the way we're using police resources to suppress crime isn't working.  For example, we need a lot more resources put into investigation so that criminals can be apprehended.  

At the same time, the Defund movement is raising important issues about the appropriateness of police as first responders to many types of incidents where they might not be the right approach ("The opportunity to rearticulate public safety delivery").  

St. Louis has an opportunity to re-articulate public safety in a transformational way.  

Better yet would be to do this at the scale of most if not all of the proposed consolidated city-county, and create a new "metropolitan" police department, not unlike what Camden, New Jersey did ("Camden, the city that really did abolish the police," Politico), at least to "hoover up" micro police departments like Ferguson's and to completely reposition and rebuild police service delivery.

Note there's plenty going on in terms of police reform in St. Louis City and County already and I wouldn't claim to be particularly informed about it ("Protesters Descend on St. Louis, and Police Respond: ‘We’re in Control’," NYT).

-- Forward Through Ferguson
-- "In homicides, there are two cities of St. Louis," MetroSTL

CPTED, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, and Community Safety Partnership approaches ("Creating 'community safety partnership neighborhood management programs as a management and mitigation strategy for public nuisance programs") should be part of the approach, as part of shifting mental health homelessness response away from police.

In To Protect and Serve: How to Fix America’s Police, former police chief Norm Stamper suggests citizen involvement in policing in a direct way.  I haven't yet followed up with him to see what he means exactly, but it's definitely a way to rebuild the order and trust relationship within communities and with police.

12.  Civic engagement.  After finding that top-down community improvement programs weren't successful in terms of retaining and attracting residents, in the late 1980s, Savannah began developing an approach to community improvement that complemented city improvement and nuisance abatement programs by engaging citizens as "designers of neighborhood programs and producers of community change," assisted by financing, capacity building and technical support from the city government.  

It's comparable to the point Rolf Goetze makes in Building Neighborhood Confidence, that the point of government assistance in revitalization isn't to foster dependence, but to provide the spark and help to get the community back to the point where it is (re)investing in itself.  

This is the reverse of how many city governments approach community improvement, and it is recommended that St. Louis adopt a civic engagement centric approach to community revitalization as part of this proposed program.

What Savannah did is described in detail in Leading by Stepping Back: A Guide for City Officials on Building Neighborhood Capacity, published in 1999. 

Ward Halls/Democracy House.  St. Louis has 28(!) wards and an Alderman for each.  I'd argue that given the population decline, they should shrink their Council.

This has been proposed for Cleveland ("What would Cleveland look like with nine wards? Dramatically larger wards with diminished neighborhood identities," Cleveland Plain Dealer).  Imposed by the Province (political payback by someone who lost election for mayor but then became prime minister of the province), Toronto went from 47 wards to 25 in 2018.   Baltimore reduced the number of City Councilmembers by 3 in 2002, moving from six 3 member districts to 14 districts with one councilmember each and a Council President elected city-wide ("Too many districts? Not enough? Another bill introduced to reshape Baltimore City Council," Baltimore Sun).

In any case, in "Outline for a proposed Ward-focused (DC) Councilmember campaign platform and agenda," calling it "Democracy House," I suggested that ward offices be created (not unlike ward/precinct halls in cities "back in the day") and that as part of the function, space and resources be provided to community groups involved in ward-specific activities.  Ward Democracy Houses should also include at least one annual "community organization fair" which could also serve as a volunteer recruitment event.

Funds for small projects.  A fund for small projects should be created for each ward, and the Participatory Budgeting process should be used to allocate funds ("An update on Participatory Budgeting practice in New York City," 2018).

Savannah's "Grants for Blocks" program was aimed at micro projects, providing micro grants ($500 was the maximum, today it would be about $1,000, with inflation), supporting house and community improvements without a great deal of bureaucracy.

Each year a "Neighborhood Convention" unveiled the projects to the community.

London has a similar grants program for sustainable mobility improvements.  Toronto used to have a program providing small grants to "Bicycle User Groups" to promote cycling as transportation

Citizen engaged planning practice.  (These are just some examples.)  What distinguished the Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program program is that it was citizen-led.  

Neighborhood groups had to come together to come up with and implement a program of community improvements.  The city developed a capacity building and training infrastructure to support it.

In DC, a great example is community-initiated urban design improvement planning by the Bloomingdale Civic Association in their Bloomingdale Village Center Project, which stepped in amidst the failure of the DC Office of Planning and Department of Transportation to pursue transformational planning approaches despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on community planning.

In Calgary, where neighborhood recreation centers are run by community organizations, the Federation of Calgary Communities provides technical support and an extensive schedule of training classes for community groups, including having urban planners on staff to assist neighborhoods dealing with difficult problems and new development  ("Community association planning committees a hidden gem?," Calgary Herald)

The Seattle Department of Neighborhoods sponsors a variety of programs where citizens undertake community projects with financial and training support from the city.  Unlike DC's "constituency service" programs by Councilmembers and the Mayor's Office, these initiatives are designed to support DIY self-help efforts driven independently of elected officials.  While out of date in terms of current programs, the book Neighbor Power describes the first couple decades of the program.

Models for technical assistance and capacity development

• Decades ago, there was an organization called the Nonprofit Support Center, which provided training in a number of cities, including DC.
• Dallas Public Library has an Urban Information Center with special information and publications on urban issues.
• The Massachusetts Citizen Planner Training Collaborative is a statewide training program for members of planning and zoning boards, but this concept can be extended to civic engagement more generally 
• The 1970-1980s Citizen Involvement Training Project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst produced training materials and workshops (not unlike the ABCD Institute
• The Project for Public Spaces produced a workbook, now in a second edition, called How to Turn A Place Around, which they also offered as a workshop.  It's a great model for urban design focused workshops for neighborhoods that can also be used as civic engagement training.
• Community Design Centers were a 1960s and 1970s initiative to provide urban design assistance to neighborhoods.  Funded by HUD, and typically based at universities, many communities still are served by such programs, as well as urban design studio programs for architecture and planning schools.
• The Chicago Bungalow Association is a great example of a historic preservation initiative focused on stabilizing neighborhoods through historic preservation.
• Park Pride, the city- and county-wide park support organization in Atlanta, sponsors an annual conference for park professionals and advocates (they need to do more to get park advocates to participate), which is a great way to communicate best practices and build the knowledge-base of the park community.  They also have a small grant program for friends of parks groups.