09.15.2024
I’m in an optimistic mood so let’s talk about something that’s dear to me, St Louis and the Rust Belt.
I don’t often talk about St Louis, but it’s a subject that is always on my mind. I am deeply proud of my city and very concerned for it and the surrounding communities. There is a problem, of course, when it comes to the city and its periphery.
St Louis, East St Louis, and many other Rust Belt cities are losing people and very fast. Their economic opportunities are leaving and in their wake is a dilapidated infrastructure and a broken community. This is a big problem (for me). The rapid decline of these cities, cities where fates are tied, with good solid bones and beautiful architecture and storied institutions. The decline of these cities into near ghost towns is, to me, like the loss of the nations soul.
I love my city, I know others love their cities, and others yet yearn for a city to love. So what is there to do?
Let’s establish the goals first: the main issue to me is the rapid depopulation of these areas, leaving us with communities filled with lower-middle-class and lower-class households who cannot support the massive infrastructure of a city meant for thousands of more people than what it currently holds. Let us next establish that there are two types of communities in the Rust Belt that are affected and will be discussed here. Living Cities; cities with still sizable populations that are “just in a slump”, like St Louis, Cleveland, Cincinnati. And Dying Cities; cities with a rapidly declining population with nearly no ability for escape, like East St Louis, Gary, and formerly Detroit. My goals for the Dying Cities is to effectively refound the city on a new basis, since I see the former population of those cities returning as not an option. Rebuilding and recruiting a new demographic of people to fill the empty space. My goals for the Living City is to inject it with a mixture of new population, to fill the voids where suburbanites will not go, but also to create a community where suburban people will feel comfortable returning to. Building up the infrastructure to raise the quality of life across the board and also doing a marketing miracle by letting suburban people know that cities are livable, safe, and vibrant places and aren’t bombed out crackholes. In the completion of these goals I believe it would raise the existing population up out of stagnation, revitalize the city itself, and bring opportunity back to these communities.
Thats a lot of technical lingo, I do want to make it clear these aren’t real functional ideas, I am not a policy maker, I am not in urban design or development, I don’t know what really would work or if these would work or if these should be tried. I just live here and think, based on my own observations, that these ideas would help
Ok so now obviously I can’t just declare to the suburbs that cities are safe now, some work has to be done before that shift in thought happens, so what are the solutions to those two types of communities: I think they’re improving infrastructure and getting more people.
Improving infrastructure is kind of cheating, I think the best solution for this would be government aid. And I don’t mean just “fix the potholes”, I mean transit, I mean hiding freeways, I mean zoning laws, parks, new housing, &c &c. Improving infrastructure here means “make the city beautiful, and a place people would want to live in”. That takes a lot of money and it takes a lot of political willpower, but I think it not only can be done but should be done. Rather it be federal or state aid that pays for it, I think Cincinnati should have a subway, I think St Louis should hide more of 44, I think Pittsburgh needs to just build a shit ton of apartments, I think Cleveland should make a riverfront like Chicago and Milwaukee. I think a good start and a good investment is making cities places people want to be in, first. Not mazes or little islands divided by interstate overpasses, but real places that can meet people’s needs.
Increasing the population is more of an actual strategy, I think the best way to do this is to pull a Detroit: recruit immigrants. Send actual advertisements across the world publicizing your city as a perfect place to live if you’re looking for a new home in America. Once the ball starts rolling and you get a known community of immigrants from a certain background it will snowball. More people from the motherland will know of you, and they’ll come here and their neighbors will come here and the similar ethnic groups will come here. They will say, “there are many Muslims in Detroit, there are many Colombians there, many Yoruba - we can make our home there.”
This is the primary strategy when it comes to dying cities. Middle class whites may never want to return to Fairmont City, but you know who doesn’t have that stigma? Mexicans. If this sounds like replacement, it would be if there was anyone there for them to replace but unfortunately these communities are empty, they are not replacing whites, they are replacing the empty lots and I think that’s good that they’re doing that. St Louis’ whole north half is just such a place that is rapidly declining, neighboring East St Louis has fallen by thousands. Who better to fill these communities but New Americans. These are communities with good bones, walkable infrastructure, and they should be filled again.
When it comes to living cities this strategy works in tandem with repopulation from the burbs. These are bigger communities that can’t just be “started over” but immigrants are nonetheless industrious and good people, including them into a community I believe will raise it up and so their role in helping rehabilitate a city’s image is indispensable. Take for instance, Bevo Mill, in St Louis. A once dilapidated neighborhood became a real living space again after an influx of Bosnian immigrants in the 1990s. This has only strengthened the fact that south St Louis is still populated, still living. If we can recreate that environment in the north, we can open up a landing ground to convince the already present population to stay in those communities, and gradually raise the whole city up from poverty and stagnation. This same idea can be applied to dozens of cities and I think as an idea it should be tried out.
This is the strategy I think will work to revitalize St Louis if not every other rusting city, though obviously these ideas are modeled after my experience of living and interacting with people in the St Louis area, I figure though that the broad strokes are the same across the region.
I think a lot of the work being done right now is very good as a development, but I hope one day that East St Louis has returned to at least a functioning community, even if it may never reach the heights it once had in the 50s and 60s. I want to see East St Louis good again. It’s a subject I care a lot about.
I think these are good ideas, if you have any others, I would really love to hear about them, just shoot like a tweet to @Heliogabalus218 or something. :) Thanks a lot for reading this very quite long post.
Dont forget to bookmark so you dont lose me, thanks for reading! Stay golden.