Planners? Planners do not chart the course of history. Money and power charts the course of history.

St Louis changed dramatically in 1968, the year I turned 11 years old, the year that every other kid in my upper middle class private elementary school had a big nickel bag of pot stored somewhere.

What precipitated this change? Well, its hard to ignore the 1965 Voting Rights Act which gave African Americans the right to vote in America. 1965.

Shortly thereafter, possibly per the tale told in ‘American Gangster’, massive waves of debilitating drugs swept through the African American neighborhoods and the universities–and the private elementary schools. Overnight, cardigan wearing coeds adopted peasant wear and jeans. Some fee paying college student threw a firebomb at the on-campus ROTC building in May of 1970 and burned it to the ground in a 100 ft bonfire.

In 1968, huge bags of $5 pot were available in the city and in the inner suburbs–and purchased by everyone between the ages of 11 and 30. Drugs were incorporated into young lives. Overnight. Ask yourself how that happened. It wasn’t the bloody planning commission that allowed that massive influx of marijuana.

The situation in the African American communities was that much worse. As pot and hash swept through the upscale neighborhoods around WAshington University, heroin and concaine swept through the inner city and inner suburb neighborhoods of the African Americans. Newly emboldened and hopeful with the right to vote, their whole society was rocked back on its heels. The collapse was almost instantaneous. Crime surged and so did the reporting of African American crime.

In 1969, cousins and neighbors began clearing out of the beautiful inner suburbs–fleeing for the bland gypsum board boxes 45 minutes west. White flight. Fear of the crime in the African american neighborhoods.

Once the white professionals took flight, they brought their offices with them and within a decade, St Louis city was no longer a vibrant city. Restaurants lost customers, pedestrian traffic died, Clayton started a building boom.

White flight on the back of a surge in violent crime, on the back of a mysterious influx of drugs, on the back of the Voting Rights Act.

I lived through it, a block away from Washington University and that’s how it happened.

Part of the flight from the cities is that as much as we all like the services you get in a city, we can’t abide the attitude that urbanites have.

That holier-than-thou, freeways are bad, poor people are more noble than rich, and the belief that, on the one hand, just a little MORE government control will make things better, when that’s what causes the problem.

Then turning around and claiming the Arch is a monument to driving indians off their land is really just the icing on the cake.

In response to your comment:

“Of course, Jacobs supporters would opt for strong intervention and zoning to avoid sprawl where there is a lack of natural boundaries, but this type of planning restricts supply, increases prices and makes moving out of cities even more financially attractive. Of course, Jacobs was a “tenants rights” advocate, whose solution to this problem was rent control… a topic for another day… suffice it to say that if you’ve tried to rent an apartment in San Fran, NYC, or Toronto, you know the effect of rent control.”

Jacobs’ solution wasn’t rent control, it was subsidized rents for those who couldn’t afford housing. She argued that the benefit was that it would promote new supply because property owners would in fact be paid market rates. The amount of subsidy could be adjusted based on a person’s income and the owner of the apartment could eventually also rent to tenants who don’t need a subsidy. New York and Toronto didn’t take her notion that the government should not be a landlord and maintained their public housing.

Freeways weren’t solely responsible for St. Louis’ decline. Poorly planned housing projects which replaced more neighbourhoods probably played a role. Freeways and neighbourhood clearance likely exacerbated racial tensions and destabilized urban communities, encouraging white flight. It became harder to get mortgages in older parts of American cities and at the same time, governments started to facilitate suburban living. All in all, I think Jane Jacobs’ writing is quite relevant in understanding why cities like St. Louis declined the way they did in the postwar period.

Thanks for the reply, I now realized I left out any thoughts on the chicken-and-egg scenario. I think highways are most likely a result, not a cause, of the suburban sprawl we see today. Looking further back into St. Louis history, the CWE was actually a country retreat for many of St. Louis’ elites. Many of the houses were built before cars and even before streets were paved with brick. Over the next hundred years, highways caught up to other developments and neighborhoods as they progressed West, Southwest, and Northwest. Of course, its a bit of a post hoc fallacy, I suppose, and I don’t have a time line to point to that proves my development first theory…

Mainly, I think its necessary to remember that unlike Manhattan, St. Louis and cities like Chicago and LA lack natural boundaries which made expansion (for any reason) much easier, especially after the invention and mass production of the automobile. Supply and demand takes over and it becomes cheaper to move away from the city, eventually the highway catches up and then its convenient too. For example, in the 90′s, areas in St. Charles were being developed despite being a 10-15 minute drive to a major highway, now that highways like 370 have been built to meet demand the drywall boxes are being built 10-15min away from 370… low land costs and the ability to build to spec presumably being major motivations.

Of course, Jacobs supporters would opt for strong intervention and zoning to avoid sprawl where there is a lack of natural boundaries, but this type of planning restricts supply, increases prices and makes moving out of cities even more financially attractive. Of course, Jacobs was a “tenants rights” advocate, whose solution to this problem was rent control… a topic for another day… suffice it to say that if you’ve tried to rent an apartment in San Fran, NYC, or Toronto, you know the effect of rent control.

Anyway, a couple more reasons for St. Louis’ sprawl:

Interestingly, the CWE was also segregated by religion early in its history, as the gated mansions on the east side of Kingshighway (Pershing, for example) were built in response to the gated mega-mansions on the west side of Kingshighway being off-limits to Jewish families. (The “original” white flight?)

Pollution played a major role, especially while coal was the dominate heat source (the pink granite Couples House on the SLU campus, was pitch black before it was restored) . There is also a theory that the north/south divide was partially a result of many downtown lakes (including Chouteau Lake, which is now the rail yard that passes under Grand just south of SLU) were so polluted that in the summer months, the southern winds made the smell in the north unbearable.

Sorry if this post is a bit all over the place, its a great topic.

Jane Jacobs moved to Toronto in 1968, where she played a key role in stopping the construction of the final portion of the proposed Spadina Expressway
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spadina_Expressway). Instead, of being the location of a freeway slicing the downtown Toronto core in two, the two halves of the Spadina area is the location of some Toronto’s most vibrant and beautiful urban neighborhoods: starting north and moving south toward the lakeshore, there is the University of Toronto’s stately main campus and the crowded communities surrounding it, including the Annex, a gentrified enclave of Victorian rowhouses, a huge Chinatown, revitalized in recent decades by an influx of capital from Hong Kong, the multi-ethnic Kensington Market, the Italian and Portuguese communities of College St. West, and finally, Queen Street West, defined by it’s cafes, boutiques, artists, and writers.
Completing the Spadina would have been tantamount to plunging a dagger into the heart of the city. Toronto, while far from perfect, offers a vision of what the St. Louis of an alternate quantum universe might be.

Instead of creating scarcity with borders, create scarcity with centralized infrastructure. Consider Davis Square, which gentrified over the last 30 years. In 1985 Davis got a subway station connecting it to key parts of the Boston higher education, startup, and financial industry. The resulting gentrification has spread out from the subway station radially. The neighborhood doesn’t have sharp borders, but the farther you are from the subway the harder it is to claim your property is “in” Davis. At the same time, the development of Davis has spurred development in other parts of Somerville, such as Union Square, as people are priced out and look elsewhere.

If your city has a declining population, sometimes you may need to create scarcity. But consider what happens if you succeed at attracting a steady stream of people. Will they have room to expand?