The city is suffering under a $55 million operating deficit. The mayor pointed out in a 2023 budget letter that “The demands of a City this size in square miles and infrastructure age far exceed affordable options for residents and available resources.”

What to do? The answer is obvious: dedicate more public tax dollars to private corporations. And not just baseball, but women’s soccer, too!

Kansas City leaders are once again proposing public subsidies for a sports facility. This time, the beneficiary is the Kansas City Current and the continued development of the Berkley Riverfront.

According to reporting by The Kansas City Star, the city may create a new tax-increment financing (TIF) district and issue up to $235 million in bonds to support expansion of CPKC Stadium and surrounding development. The project would increase stadium capacity from 11,500 to 18,000 seats and add parking, retail, and mixed-use development to the riverfront.

Why? Why is it the responsibility of taxpayers to fund this? Projects like this can be good. They can even be great! But it’s not on par with, say, public safety or infrastructure, or education—which will all lose money because of the subsidy.

Supporters of the proposal point to the team’s success. Lucas told Fox4 that Kansas City must position itself for future events such as a potential Women’s World Cup and noted that there are limits to what an 11,500-seat stadium can host. He also emphasized that the proposed financing would not come from the city’s general revenue fund.

Let’s be careful about that last point. TIF does not create money out of thin air. Without a deal, the Current owners would pay taxes on their development—just like you and me. The proposal is to change that and let them keep that money. Money that we are told the city doesn’t have enough of.

Perhaps the most revealing thing is that Lucas can’t even be bothered to make a coherent defense of this spending. When asked about public subsidies for the Current, he told Fox4, “We’ve been through this before with another professional team that plays in Kansas City.”

But in an April 17, 2026, live interview with the Kansas City Stack Substack, Lucas said about public financing for a Royals ballpark: “this is like the incentive arrangements that we’ve done in other places. Probably the most stadium-like discussion is the stadium we built on the riverfront for the Kansas City Current. That, of course, was an incentive arrangement where you had votes at city council at one of our incentive agencies, that being the Port Authority, and you had state participation. I expect that to be the same.” [3:36 mark]

In other words, we’re giving public money to the Current because we’re giving money to the Royals because we gave money to the Current. That’s his argument.

I was reminded recently of other reporting from Fox4 in which Lucas defended himself for accepting secret gifts from the Royals, among others, to pay for tuxedos and trips to the Super Bowl. He said, “my goal is always to save taxpayer dollars.”

Lucas may have lots of reasons for accepting gifts. But given his willingness to spend public funds on stadiums, it’s hard to believe he cares about saving taxpayer dollars.

The post Kansas City Mayor’s Circular Reasoning on Stadium Subsidies appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Kansas City Star recently published a story examining the city’s gun violence problem as Kansas City hosts matches during the World Cup.

The article raises a legitimate concern. Kansas City, Missouri, suffers from far too much violence. Recent shootings have again drawn national attention to a problem local leaders have struggled to address for years.

The Star largely frames that problem through the lens of Missouri’s gun laws. Missouri allows permit-less carry. It broadly preempts local firearm regulations. Legislative efforts to tighten gun restrictions have gone nowhere, even after highly publicized tragedies such as the Chiefs’ Super Bowl rally shooting.

Reasonable people can conclude that these policies contribute to violence.

But if we are serious about understanding why Kansas City experiences so much violence, there is an obvious question that deserves attention:

What about Kansas? The state line is not hundreds of miles away. It is literally a road.

Kansas has permit-less carry. Kansas does not require firearm registration. Kansas does not impose waiting periods. Kansas does not require universal background checks for private firearm sales. Kansas broadly preempts local governments from adopting their own firearm regulations.

In other words, Kansas and Missouri have remarkably similar firearm laws, yet the outcomes on violence are very different.

The Star notes that Kansas City, Missouri, averages roughly 30 homicides during June and July, compared with four in Kansas City, Kansas. That is a remarkable difference. Accounting for population, Kansas City, Missouri, still experiences roughly twice the homicide rate of Kansas City, Kansas.

If neighboring jurisdictions with similar firearm laws experience dramatically different homicide rates, serious observers should be interested in what else might explain the difference. They should certainly acknowledge it.

The question is not whether gun laws matter. The question is whether they are sufficient to explain the difference in homicide numbers. The Star asks the first question. It largely ignores the second.

The post If Gun Laws Explain Kansas City’s Violence, What Explains Kansas? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Let’s say this is an April election. What happens in the initial petition process is not that the City Council just sits around and twiddles its thumbs, right? We can pass ordinances just like broadly the public can through an initiative petition process. All of these words I’m saying is, no, this will not thwart development of Kansas City Royals stadium.

We’ve actually thought about all of this. We’re going to get the necessary deals done expeditiously to make sure that the Royals can be prepared to open the stadium by opening day of 2030. That requires, I think, dirt moving really by the end of this year at least on the demolition process or very early in 2027. And if you’re looking at it, it takes about 30 days to the election authorities anyway to get the election certified. So, you know, this is not a threat to that.

He made similar comments to The Beacon. It seemed weird to me that, once a petition has been validated, a legislative body like the council could just rush through all sorts of things before the vote, and then tell petitioners, “Hey, sorry. You’re too late.” I’m not alone in thinking this; Dave Helling wrote something similar on the Kansas City Stack.

And, if one cares about the Missouri Supreme Court, the court thinks similar conduct at the state level is weird, too. The Supreme Court didn’t just find it weird—it found it unconstitutional!

In February 2015, the court ruled in Earth Island Inst. v. Union Elec. Co. that the state legislature cannot tweak things to effectively eviscerate a pending vote. They wrote:

The only issue is whether the legislature may negate in advance an initiative petition that has been approved for circulation but prior to the time it is adopted by the people at an election.  It may not.  If a proposed initiative is adopted by the people at an election, then a statute enacted by the legislature during the interim between the initiative’s approval for circulation and its passage is impliedly repealed to the extent of any conflict between the two measures.

It would seem that if such a petition can repeal “a statute enacted by the legislature during the interim between the initiative’s approval for circulation and its passage,” then won’t it repeal a contract or financial agreement enacted by a city council in the same circumstance?

That same decision cited an earlier 1922 Missouri Supreme Court case, State ex rel. Drain v. Becker:

There, while the proposed referendum was pending but before it had been voted on by the people, the legislature purported to repeal the legislation that was the subject of the referendum and to enact a new statute that retained the essential terms of the former legislation. It then argued that this new statute could take effect, regardless of what the people voted on the matter referred, because it was later adopted and was not itself subject to the referendum.

This Court properly rejected this attempt at an end run around the referendum. It held that, once the right of referendum has been invoked, the legislature “is divested of all power in regard to the matter referred until the action of the people has been exercised by a vote upon same.”

That last sentence is the kicker. The court has held that, pending a vote of the people, the legislative body is powerless on that particular matter. So yes, Mayor Lucas, the council may be twiddling its thumbs while the petition process plays out.

The real impact of the petition, however, may not be on the council. I can easily imagine an attorney for a builder, lender, or investor advising their client to steer clear of the project until the petition matter is resolved either by a vote of the people or by months or years of litigation. What company wants to find itself attached to a financing package that voters may yet reject? And the city would be foolish to sign contracts that it may not be able to live up to because of the results of a vote.

It would not surprise me if, despite his dismissive language now, Lucas and the current council vote to put the petition on the ballot themselves, arguing that any delay will just add to the cost of the project. They’ll count on the Royals and their supporters to fund another political campaign. The question then becomes: Are John Sherman and the Royals ownership willing to risk another election defeat?

The post No, Kansas City Cannot Rush Royals Financing to Beat a Petition Vote appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

According to The Kansas City Star, the city has not yet formally applied for funding under Missouri’s Show-Me Sports Investment Act. State participation is a central piece of the financing plan, and city officials are already considering ways to secure up to $600 million in local support.

Negotiations of this scale are complicated. City, state, and team officials may simply still be working through the details. But the delay raises an obvious question. If the public financing package is as straightforward as supporters suggest, why are the numbers still unavailable? (The same could be asked of the Chiefs deal in Kansas.)

One possibility is that the arithmetic is becoming more difficult as officials move from press announcement to actual financing plans.

When the stadium was announced, the Royals indicated that roughly 60% of the project’s estimated $1.9 billion cost would come from public sources. That implies well over $1 billion in taxpayer support. Yet the Show-Me Sports Investment Act places meaningful limits on state assistance. As I noted previously, available estimates suggest the state’s contribution may be closer to $250 million than the much larger figures that have circulated publicly.

If state support is lower than hoped, the remaining public contribution would need to come from Kansas City taxpayers through various tax diversions and subsidies. It won’t be cheap.

The political environment may become even more challenging if voters get a chance to weigh in. Opponents of the project have submitted signatures seeking a public vote on the city’s participation. That effort remains uncertain, but financing proposals acceptable to elected officials may not be acceptable to the public—as we learned in 2024.

To make matters more confusing, the Star previously reported:

Mayor Quinton Lucas told reporters that the city has projections for how much tax revenue a new stadium could generate based on what Kauffman Stadium in the Truman Sports Complex produces now — which city officials say is roughly $5 million a year.

That $5 million is currently going into the city’s coffers and used to fund police, infrastructure, and other public goods. Moving the team downtown and then returning that money to the Royals is not a wash—it’s a $5 million hit to the budget each year. And that does not include the cost to the city if the stadium fails to generate enough money to cover the bond payments—because the city will issue the bonds and back them up.

This project is bad for taxpayers and bad for the city. The delay from the city and the state in providing financing details suggests that elected leaders are beginning to understand exactly how bad it will be.

The post Kansas City Mum on Royals Ransom appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

When Missouri and Kansas agreed to a border war truce in 2019, the agreement was widely celebrated as the end of an expensive and counterproductive competition.

After spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars moving jobs back and forth across State Line Road, both states agreed to stop subsidizing the relocation of existing employers within the Kansas City region.

The agreement, which consisted of legislation on the Missouri side (which sunset last year) and an executive order from the Kansas side, was a good idea. But I argued at the time that Kansas Governor Laura Kelly’s executive order contained a glaring weakness. Specifically, I questioned how Kansas would define “net new jobs” and whether companies could continue receiving incentives by combining a relocation with a modest expansion.

Seven years later, Governor Kelly has provided the answer.

Defending Kansas’s $125 million incentive package for Lockton’s new headquarters in Leawood, Kelly argued the deal does not violate the border war truce because “We will not incentivize the move of current jobs. If a company is going to move and expand, we’ll talk.”

That is almost precisely the scenario I described in 2019: “Could a growing Missouri firm already planning to make a few new hires take that plan to Kansas and seek incentives—using those ‘net new jobs’ as leverage?”

The company is expected to move roughly 1,500 existing jobs from Missouri to Kansas while adding approximately 500 new positions. Under Governor Kelly’s interpretation, those additional jobs are enough to distinguish the project from the type of incentive-fueled relocation the truce was intended to prevent.

But the transaction looks familiar. Thousands of jobs move across the state line. Taxpayers provide substantial subsidies. Public officials attend a groundbreaking and celebrate job creation.

The fundamental question is whether those additional jobs would have been created anyway. It is a difficult question to answer from the outside, yet the system incentivizes businesses to claim the growth is due to the incentive.

A real economic border war truce is worth crafting. But unfortunately, the 2019 truce isn’t that.

The post The Border War Truce’s Predictable (and Predicted) Problem appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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The post Keeping Kansas City Safe During the World Cup with Dimitrios Mastoras appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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While guest-hosting Mundo in the Morning on KCMO Talk Radio, Patrick Tuohey is joined by Elias Tsapelas to discuss the Missouri legislature’s effort to begin eliminating the income tax. They break down why Missouri’s tax climate is holding back economic and population growth, how a gradual phase-out could work, and why concerns about sales tax rates may be overblown.

The post Missouri’s Path to Eliminating the Income Tax with Elias Tsapelas appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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On June 5, Patrick Tuohey, senior fellow at the Show-Me Institute, guest-hosted Mundo in the Morning on KCMO Talk Radio, where Terrence Wise of the Missouri Workers Center announced the organization had collected over 4,500 signatures, more than double the roughly 2,000 required, to force a public vote on any taxpayer subsidy of the proposed downtown Royals ballpark. The city clerk has 10 days to validate the signatures, after which the city council has 60 days to act, with a public vote expected in November.

Listen to the full show here. 

The post Kansas City Voters May Get a Say on the Royals Downtown Stadium appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

One of the most common mistakes in public policy is assuming that because one event follows another, the first event must have caused the second. Crime declines after a new program is launched, so the program gets credit. Crime rises after a policy change, so the policy gets blamed. Often, the evidence for either conclusion amounts to little more than timing.

The KSHB story quotes Jackson County Prosecutor Melesa Johnson, who said she believes SAVE KC is playing “a real role in the success that we are seeing.” Perhaps it is. The problem is that belief is not evidence.

Violence rises and falls for many reasons: gang conflicts, police deployment, prosecution decisions, demographics, economic conditions, and the churn of individual offenders. A before-and-after comparison cannot isolate any one cause.

That is why researchers do not determine whether a program works by simply comparing crime rates before and after implementation. They look for evidence that the intervention itself produced measurable changes that would not otherwise have occurred. Jackson County’s COMBAT program has long suffered from this same problem: public claims of success without rigorous evaluation.

To its credit, SAVE KC has been careful to acknowledge on its website that multiple factors influence violence trends; it does not claim sole responsibility for recent declines. That’s a welcome departure from what we’ve seen before. But public officials are already drawing connections between the program and declining violence. That may ultimately prove justified. But Kansas City has heard similar claims before.

The Kansas City No Violence Alliance (KC NoVA) offers a warning. KC NoVA was once praised as an innovative violent-crime strategy. But a U.S. Department of Justice review found no statistically significant effect on homicides, group-member homicides, or aggravated assaults after two years.

In 2014, city leaders were celebrating the lowest number of homicides since 1972. Public officials were quick to claim credit. “We’re making progress,” proclaimed then-Mayor Sly James, citing targeted police work, community engagement, and anti-crime initiatives for the decline. But after homicides continued to rise in subsequent years, Mayor James’s confidence disappeared.

The lesson is not that violence-reduction initiatives never work. The lesson is that confidence should follow evidence, not precede it.

Rather than asking whether a new program coincides with lower crime, reporters should ask what evidence exists that the program caused the decline. Has an independent evaluation been conducted? Are outcomes being measured against comparable groups? What metrics are being tracked? How will success be defined? What would constitute failure?

Lower homicide numbers are worth celebrating. But celebration is not evaluation. Before officials claim victory, and before reporters repeat the claim, Kansas City deserves evidence that the program worked.

The post Crime Is Down in Kansas City. That Doesn’t Prove SAVE KC Worked appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Even after reinstating fares, the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority (KCATA) is warning of route reductions because the agency says city funding will fall short of maintaining current service levels. KCATA estimates it needs more than $100 million to preserve existing operations, well above the city’s proposed contribution.

The immediate concern is fewer routes and longer waits for riders. But the larger issue is institutional: KCATA is confronting the long-term consequences of policy decisions that weakened its financial position and eroded confidence among regional partners.

Those problems did not emerge overnight. For years, KCATA relied on temporary funding, emergency appropriations, and optimistic revenue assumptions. Pandemic-era federal aid masked those weaknesses but did not resolve the structural imbalance between operating costs and recurring revenue.

The clearest example was KCATA’s heavily promoted fare-free transit initiative. Supporters argued eliminating fares would improve mobility and reduce barriers for low-income riders. But even at the time, research and the experience of other cities suggested the policy was financially unsustainable.

Fare-free transit eliminated one of the system’s few direct revenue streams while increasing dependence on taxpayer subsidies. Transit fares rarely cover operating costs, but they still provide revenue and impose some fiscal discipline. When federal pandemic aid expired, KCATA faced familiar financial pressures with even fewer tools available to address them.

Acknowledging that reality, KCATA recently announced fares will return next month. Restoring fares amounts to an acknowledgment that the model was not sustainable.

The consequences extend beyond Kansas City itself. Regional transit systems depend on trust among local governments—trust that erodes when the central agency faces recurring fiscal problems.

Some regional governments have already moved to retain greater operational control over their own transit services. In 2022, Johnson County, Kansas, ended KCATA management oversight of its transit operations while continuing limited coordination through the RideKC brand. More recently, several suburban municipalities—including Gladstone, Grandview, and Raytown—have reduced or ended participation in RideKC service.

Obviously, public transit serves a purpose. Many Kansas City residents still rely on buses to reach work, school, and appointments. Like transit agencies nationwide, KCATA is operating in a difficult post-pandemic environment shaped by inflation, labor shortages and changing ridership patterns.

But those challenges make competent governance more important, not less. Municipalities are hesitant to rely on an agency caught in recurring fiscal crises driven by its own policy failures. Fare-free transit generated national attention, but reality eventually intervened.

KCATA’s budget problems are not simply the result of this year’s funding gap. They are the cumulative consequence of years of policy decisions that weakened the authority’s financial position and damaged its credibility.

The post KCATA Is Still Paying for the Fare-Free Experiment appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I’ve argued for years that Kansas City’s lavish subsidies distort the market while failing to deliver on economic promises. New reporting from the Kansas City Business Journal suggests the process itself may be just as broken.

Reporter Thomas Friestad reconstructed negotiations among Kansas City Public Schools (KCPS), PortKC, and Gillon Property Group over incentives tied to Country Club Plaza. The emails, obtained through an open-records request, depict a rushed and opaque decision-making process worthy of public distrust.

The original proposal reportedly included roughly $309 million in incentives over 30 years. KCPS officials objected not only to the size of the package, but also to shifting valuation methods that obscured the true public cost. The district also sought protection for voter-approved bond revenues and more time to evaluate major revisions before approval by PortKC.

That timeline is the real story.

The emails show negotiations continuing until the night before a scheduled PortKC meeting. KCPS officials argued they were being asked to evaluate a substantially revised proposal in just two business days. One consultant for the district described the timeline as “concerning even with the highest level of independent analysis.”

This is a recurring problem in Kansas City’s incentive culture. Complex tax arrangements are negotiated behind closed doors and then presented to affected taxing jurisdictions with little time for meaningful scrutiny. The result is confusion over the true public cost and distrust among taxpayers expected to finance these deals.

Kansas City has seen this pattern before. Similar concerns surrounded the Power & Light District and continue to emerge in discussions over a proposed downtown ballpark. Political machinations routinely take precedence over transparency and accountability.

Notably, KCPS did not oppose subsidies outright. District officials simply asked for clear terms, accurate projections, and adequate time to evaluate a deal that could affect school finances for decades. The fact that negotiators appeared unwilling to provide sufficient time to evaluate the deal speaks volumes.

Kansas Citians have grown understandably skeptical of these taxpayer-funded deals. Too many projects promised economic transformation and delivered little beyond long-term public cost. The Country Club Plaza negotiations are, at best, an example of rushed incompetence. At worst, they suggest an effort to push a massive subsidy package through before taxpayers and public schools could fully evaluate it.

The post Country Club Plaza Subsidy Deal Reveals What’s Broken in Kansas City appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This is a good thing. My colleague David Stoked submitted testimony in favor of the effort in January and again in early April.

HB 2069 sets up a statewide framework, largely by adopting industry definitions from the Society of Automotive Engineers and clarifying how existing traffic laws apply. For example, it treats an automated driving system as the legal “driver,” while requiring operators to meet standards regarding certification, safety, and financial responsibility.

The legislation also sets baseline operational rules, including how law enforcement deals with car accidents and registration requirements. Importantly, it also sets up how driverless cars can be employed as taxi cabs.

One point of contention is that the bill pre-empts local governments from imposing their own additional restrictions or taxes. But recent history on ride-sharing tells us that Kansas City and St. Louis would likely bow to local pressure groups whose revenue might be challenged by the new technology. And Missouri’s preemption language is consistent with the approach taken in states including Florida, Texas, Nebraska, and Utah, which likewise centralize authority at the state level and prohibit local governments from imposing their own additional regulations.

The benefits of driverless technology in Missouri—and especially our cities—are immense. It will impact not only private owners, but could revolutionize how we provide public transportation, making it much cheaper and more convenient to users.

It may also finally encourage us to abandon our inflexible, expensive, and inefficient light rail and streetcar systems. As I wrote years ago, “the rail system that is being built likely will be abandoned by the hip urbanite core that it is meant to attract as soon as something sexier comes along  . . . like a Google car.”

Driverless cars are the future of transit; Missouri needs to get in.

The post Missouri Considers Going Driverless appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Missouri House Speaker Jonathan Patterson suggested to Fox4 news in Kansas City that Missouri’s contribution to a Royals stadium could reach around $700 to $900 million. Patterson said:

“I think if you look at the numbers, and there was an audit in 2023, the teams generate almost $60 million, and so if you take half of that, then it would be $30 million, then times 30 years, it could be that number. I think those are good estimates that you’re working with.”

That number is way off.

In 2025, during a special legislative session, the House and Senate passed, and the governor signed, Senate Bill (SB) 3, the Show-Me Sports Investment Act. While the bill does not specify a bonding formula, it does set limits: that state spending “shall be no greater than . . . baseline year state tax revenues,” that appropriations may “not exceed thirty years” and that “the net bond proceeds . . . shall not exceed fifty percent of the total costs of the project.” In setting those boundaries, the bill also limits revenue to that “derived directly from the facility.”

Patterson’s estimate of stadium revenue is from a 2023 Jackson County Sports Complex audit, which reports $55 million in tax revenue generated by both teams (the Chiefs and the Royals). But that figure includes all tax revenue collected by state, county, and local jurisdictions. Of that $55 million, only $34,929,233 went to the state—which is what SB 3 covers.

But SB 3 further limits potential support for the Royals to revenue generated only at Kauffman Stadium. Let’s assume half that number, $17 million, is from the Royals’ Kauffman Stadium,* which aligns with estimates provided by Governor Mike Kehoe. If that entire amount were bonded at 6% interest over 30 years, Missouri would be able to give the Royals $234 million.

Another news outlet assumed a 4.5% interest rate over 30 years and concluded the state would be able to give the Royals about $274 million.

Either way, it’s a far cry from $900 million.

There is a lot more to learn about this deal, but SB 3 provides real constraints on what can be counted and borrowed against. Based on the legislation, the 2023 Jackson County audit, and different interest rates, Missouri could contribute roughly $234 to $274 million toward a downtown ballpark. That’s a lot, but only a small portion of what many believe to be a nearly $2 billion project.

*Note: Although the Royals play more games at their stadium than the Chiefs, Arrowhead Stadium has a larger capacity and also hosts concerts for musicians such as Taylor Swift.

The post By the Numbers: What Missouri Might Give the Royals appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Now that the champagne corks have popped at Crown Center over the plans to build a ballpark there, it’s worth considering what comes next for Missouri and Kansas.

On the Missouri side, Kansas City ordinance 260339, passed on April 9, instructs the city manager to move ahead on all sorts of things regarding the deal. Section 7 provides for up to $250,000 for, among other things, “professional services, including but not limited to economic advisory services, financial advisory services, bond advisory services, legal services . . .”

That means the city is going to seek professional opinions on the deal’s feasibility. Who the city hires will tell us a lot about how committed it is to protecting taxpayers. As one person told me, “if they hire an architectural firm, we’ll know they’re not serious.”

The city has a history of relying on conflicted organizations to conduct studies, as it recently did with the World Cup. In 2016, the city paid CDFA—a trade group formed “to promote the common interest of Development Finance Agencies with respect to public policies and programs”—to measure the effectiveness of Kansas City’s subsidy culture. The laughable conclusion was “each incentive dollar invested generated $3.83 in additional tax revenue.”

In Kansas, taxpayers are still waiting on two things. First, they don’t know how big the STAR bond district will be. Previous reporting was a 293-square-mile district encompassing Wyandotte County and the western half of Johnson County. But it could be much, much bigger to make the deal pencil out. Once the district is set, the secretary of commerce is empowered to make it larger whenever he would like (see page 1) to capture more tax revenue.

Second, taxpayers are also waiting on Kansas to determine the base year, which is the year in which the state sales tax revenue is fixed, diverting every additional dollar within the district to the Chiefs’ developments. You might expect the base year to be 2026, when the legislature endorsed the measure, or whenever the project breaks ground. Or perhaps 2025, when the deal was agreed to.

But the deal actually allows the secretary of commerce to set the base year whenever he wants (see page 22). It could be set at 2015, meaning every state sales tax dollar generated over the amount collected in 2015 would go to the Chiefs.

In a deal this expensive for Kansas, the size of the district and the base year are likely to reignite howls of protest from all quarters.

As elected leaders in Topeka and Kansas City throw themselves self-congratulatory parties, the rest of us are faced with the bar tab. And the hangover.

The post Next Up on Chiefs and Royals Stadium Saga appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I wrote recently that in the lead up to the public vote, even earnings tax defenders could not defend the earnings tax. Despite urging yes votes, they conceded many, if not all, of my claims that the tax makes for bad policy.

Now we might be seeing this story repeat itself with stadium subsidies. It’s being reported that Kansas City’s package of subsidies for a downtown baseball stadium includes bonds issued by the city—and backed by them. This means that if the stadium fails to generate enough revenue to pay the bonds, city taxpayers will make up the difference. This is exactly the type of deal that requires the city to direct over $10 million each year to cover Power & Light District debts.

The Kansas City Business Journal reports city leaders are aware of that same risk with a downtown ballpark for the Royals. They concede:

. . . estimates for Power & Light District sales and economic activity tax generation proved “spectacularly wrong.” The entertainment hub’s annual bond gaps have required about $10.5 million a year from the city’s general fund and $199 million total to date.

City leaders now say they’re being more careful — even as they plan to support as much as two times the district’s original debt for a stadium at Washington Square Park.

How times have changed. Twenty years ago then-Mayor Kay Barnes told a columnist for The Kansas City Star, regarding her deal on the Power & Light District:

“We’re going to look like geniuses” in five or 10 years, Barnes said. The city is paying low interest rates for projects that are capable of paying off the debt, she added.

Barnes could not have been more wrong. (Though she was named the 2018 Kansas Citian of the Year by the Chamber of Commerce, which says more about the chamber than it does Barnes.)

Public subsidies for private interests such as a baseball stadium is still bad policy. They don’t benefit taxpayers. But it’s some comfort that at least Kansas City leaders are capable of learning from their mistakes—right?

Right?

The post Another Policy Concession from Kansas City—Kind of appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I’ve argued for the removal of parking mandates, and the logic is straightforward: when cities require developers to build a fixed number of parking spaces, they raise costs, limit design flexibility, and often crowd out the very investment they say they want to encourage.

Kansas City has also taken steps to streamline development through its use of pre-approved housing plans—also something I have advocated. By offering a set of ready-to-use designs at no cost, Kansas City reduces one source of expense in the building process. For small builders and homeowners, eliminating the costs of repeatedly checking in with city staff can make the difference between a project moving forward or not.

These changes may not seem significant, but housing shortages are often the cumulative result of small policies. Pre-approved plans will not transform the market alone, but they can help at the margin by making it easier to build modest infill housing in neighborhoods that can benefit from it.

Kansas City’s pre-approved plan program is relatively limited, both in the number of designs offered and in its role within the city’s broader housing strategy. The city has not abandoned its interventionist framework that relies on subsidies, mandates, and planning requirements to shape outcomes.

Overland Park’s “Portfolio Homes” program, for example, is more ambitious. It pairs a larger number of pre-approved designs with zoning flexibility, fee reductions, and streamlined approvals. The emphasis there is not just on providing plans, but on reducing the regulatory barriers that make housing difficult to build in the first place.

Nevertheless, these changes are good news and suggest Kansas City’s leadership is beginning to absorb some important lessons. The city also stepped away from its cost-prohibitive energy codes.

Expanding housing supply will require not just targeted reforms, but a broader understanding of how regulation adds costs. City leaders still want to tinker with the market; they need to get out of the way altogether.

The post Kansas City Takes Steps Toward Better Housing Policy appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The U.S. Department of Justice has joined a lawsuit alleging race and sex discrimination against the Missouri State High School Activities Association (“MSHSAA”), and rightfully so, because if reports are correct, the MSHSAA’s rules are indeed discriminatory.

According to reporting from the Missouri Independent, MSHSAA’s rules require two of its 10 board members to be “candidates representing the underrepresented gender of the current board or an under-represented ethnicity.”

Supporters view the rule as a tool to promote fairness and inclusion.

It isn’t. The problem comes when a position becomes vacant. If eight of the remaining nine board members are all men or all white, for example, the rule would indicate that the candidate must be a woman or an underrepresented minority. This effectively bars candidates based on sex or ethnicity.

The Constitution protects individuals, not categories. However well intended, policies that distribute opportunity based on identity rather than merit raise immediate equal protection concerns. It demeans people to reduce them to nothing more than an identity marker, and it undermines government efficiency to exclude large numbers of candidates for a position because of their race or sex.

We’ve seen this dynamic play out in other contexts. In Arkansas, for example, a prospective member of a state licensing board was effectively barred from consideration because state law required the board to meet racial composition targets. He sued, and the Arkansas Legislature repealed the law. Lawmakers made clear what should have been obvious from the start: public appointments ought to be based on “experience and expertise, not the color of their skin.”

What remains to be determined is whether the MSHSAA is a public institution. It is organized as a private non-profit, but its employees are eligible for the Missouri state employees’ retirement system.

At its core, the matter can be reduced to whether institutions should discriminate based on sex or ethnicity. Given the MSHSAA’s broad mandate, it should not.

The post When Diversity Becomes Discrimination appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But what if that weren’t the case? What if the government only assessed the value of your land—and not any improvements you put on it?

That approach is called a land tax, or land value tax (LVT). By separating land from improvements and taxing them differently, governments can encourage property development. In downtown areas, often dotted with parking lots or undeveloped parcels, owners would be incentivized to build or to sell to someone who will.

This need not be an increased cost to owners. Taxes on improvements and land could be set at different rates (ideally zero for improvements) to ensure there is no net increase.

Show-Me writers have argued in favor of this approach for years:

• 2010: A Land Tax Is Preferable to the Earnings Tax
• 2010: Great Article About the Land Tax in the Kansas City Star
• 2012: Kansas City Should Expand, Not Remove, Land Taxes
• 2012: Kansas City Land Tax Should Be Expanded, Not Eliminated
• 2015: Land Taxes and Columbia
• 2026: It’s Time to Phase Out the Earnings Tax. Honestly, Nothing Else Has Worked . . .

The legislature in Kentucky, our neighbor to the east, is considering a bill that would, among other things, allow cities to separate property taxes into land and improvements.

In Missouri, such an effort likely would require a change to the Constitution. Currently, Article X, Section 3 states, “Taxes may be levied and collected for public purposes only, and shall be uniform upon the same class or subclass of subjects within the territorial limits of the authority levying the tax.” Later, Article X Section 4 defines real property as a single class with limited subclasses.

This could easily be changed, perhaps by inserting into Section 4, “Land and improvements upon land may be classified as separate subclasses of real property for purposes of taxation.”

Every city wants to spur development. The structure of our taxing system often serves as a disincentive to build. A land tax is a way for cities to encourage building and development without increasing taxes and without offering taxpayer subsidies. And it’s simple to understand and explain.

As Missouri and its cities look to encourage population growth and development, adopting a land value tax is a simple and straightforward way to do so.

The post Land Taxes: Will the Grass Be Greener in the Bluegrass State? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Last week in The Kansas City Star, I argued the earnings tax is harmful. The responses suggest the Show-Me Institute is winning the argument, regardless of the vote’s outcome. What’s striking is that even those who acknowledge the tax’s flaws remain unwilling to act on their supposed principles. (St. Louis will also be voting on the earnings tax.)

I argued that the tax is regressive, drives workers and businesses away, and fuels the city’s subsidy culture.

David Hudnall, a reliably left-of-center columnist for the Star, urged a yes vote but largely conceded my points. In a column titled, “Just hold your nose and vote for Kansas City’s earnings tax,“ he agreed the tax is regressive and supports lavish subsidies for wealthy developers.

Weirdly, Hudnall then lamented that the tax requires a public vote in the first place. But he wistfully concluded, “I’d welcome a little more fiscal discipline at City Hall.”

The Star’s Editorial Board also endorsed a yes vote but conceded the tax is regressive and “economically harmful”—a significant admission. The piece further conceded, “The earnings tax is not the best way to fund such a large proportion of our city services.” Another notable concession. The piece closed not with a demand for action, but with little more than meek, wishful thinking:

We hope to see future City Council candidates campaigning on a pledge to reform the system. We also hope to see council members who vow to keep the basics of what makes a city hum fully funded—and ratchet back the incentive handouts.

Back in 2021, the last time Kansas City voted on the earnings tax, the Editorial Board urged a yes vote after admitting the tax was regressive and fed the city’s incentive culture. (They even admitted that the sales tax was too high.) Yet they feared reform would be worse.

In 2015, another reliably left-of-center columnist for the Star, Yael Abouhalkah, lamented that the city has neither explored alternatives nor held a meaningful discussion about the tax. He also observed that the tax is regressive and hits the poor hardest.

The problem, then as now, is that city leaders have no incentive to explore alternatives or discuss a 10-year phaseout of a tax widely acknowledged as harmful. Why? Because rather than demand better, the Star’s opinion class and business leaders reliably fold at the slightest scare tactic.

Hand-wringing about Kansas City’s flawed tax structure is not enough. We need city leaders, including those at the Star, to live up to their principles. Otherwise, what is the point of having a platform?

The Mayor and Council have failed to address these issues. There is no reason to expect that will change until voters demand it.

The post Earnings Tax Defenders Unable to Defend Earnings Tax appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass and Patrick Tuohey join Zach Lawhorn to discuss their new report, The Public Safety Climate in the City of St. Louis. They explore what the data actually show about crime trends over the past two decades, how St. Louis compares to similar cities like Cincinnati and Memphis, why crime perception lags so far behind the data, the challenges facing the 911 system and police staffing, why public disorder in high-traffic neighborhoods may be doing as much damage to the city’s reputation as violent crime itself, what it would take to make residents actually feel safer, and more.

Download a copy of the report.

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Episode Transcript

Zach Lawhorn (00:00) Welcome to the Show Me Institute podcast. I’m Zach Lawhorn from Show Me Opportunity, and today I’m joined by Susan Pendergrass and Patrick Tuohey from the Show Me Institute. Today we’re going to be talking about some work that the two of you have done on public safety and crime, specifically in the city of St. Louis. But before we get into the project, I want to talk to you both about your perception of crime as people who have both lived in and frequently visit the city of St. Louis. So Susan, I want to start with you. Before you started this project, before you started looking at the data, when someone said “Is the city of St. Louis dangerous?” what was your perception before you started this project?

Susan Pendergrass (00:38) I only moved to the city of St. Louis in 2015, so there’s a long period of time before I lived there. I was in D.C. for part of that, and my perception before I moved there was that it was dangerous. The Ferguson incident had just happened and I knew that there was a lot of crime. But then when I moved to St. Louis, my husband and I decided to live in the city itself and we loved our neighborhood. It was the coolest with this super cool house built around the time of the World’s Fair. It was amazing. But I never felt really safe. We started leaving our car doors unlocked because our cars would get rifled through. We had a smash-and-grab right within two weeks. I called to report the smash-and-grab and was told that they don’t take reports on them. That was new for me. We had to keep a lot of lights on outside. We didn’t really walk our dogs after dark. I felt like lots of times I would go by police cars sitting on corners idling, but it didn’t necessarily make me feel safer because I wasn’t sure how much they were doing. I also realized people run stoplights, run stop signs, use the right parking lane to pass, and that was all new for me. So I got this feeling that the rule of law wasn’t enforced very well in the city, and that just doesn’t feel good as somebody who has bought a house there and lives there.

Zach Lawhorn (02:06) Patrick, as someone who lives in Kansas City across the state, two questions. What do you think the perception is over there on the western half of the state? And then as someone who comes into St. Louis regularly, what was your perception of the safety situation in the city?

Patrick Tuohey (02:22) A lot of the issues that Susan and I explored in this paper bore out here in Kansas City. I’ve lived in cities my whole life. I understand that every city is going to have the parts you don’t want to go to, the parts that are rougher than others. Kansas City certainly has that. I’ve had my car broken into here in my driveway a number of times, no real damage, and it’s not something I reported to the police. As far as traveling to St. Louis, I’ve been going to St. Louis since the late nineties. Before I lived in Kansas City, I was in Washington, D.C. And I loved St. Louis. I still do. I would visit Creve Coeur, the Central West End, sometimes stay at the Westin downtown. But living in D.C. and growing up in D.C., I understood that every city is going to have the places that you don’t want to go. I understood that St. Louis often gets ranked higher than it should because the city’s footprint is so small. But it never felt to me that what was going on in St. Louis was way outside the normal limits of what we see in U.S. cities. There are those dangerous parts and you generally know not to go there. There is kind of an urban decline, which can be seen in a lack of services, graffiti, uncut grass. But I didn’t navigate St. Louis or think of St. Louis any differently than I thought of Kansas City, Washington D.C., Boston, or any other place I had been.

Zach Lawhorn (04:03) Yeah, and I’m glad you brought up the population of the city, the MSA. It seems like when there are national or even local news stories written on crime statistics in St. Louis, people will point out that if you’re not talking about the larger metropolitan area, you get down to actually a pretty small population number for U.S. cities. So for this work that we’re going to be talking about, can you define what area you guys looked at? When we say murders are a certain number, what area are we specifically talking about?

Patrick Tuohey (04:38) We looked at the city of St. Louis specifically, just those few square miles. We did not look at the metropolitan area and we did not look at the county. It is fair to want to combine all that data into one region, but oftentimes I think people want to do that to mask the seriousness of homicide and violent crime and property crime in the city. And that’s what we wanted to talk about. What is true in St. Louis is not unique to St. Louis. Kansas City has a crime problem that is not reflected in our metropolitan area. That’s true in Washington D.C., Atlanta, Los Angeles, everywhere. So I understand why people who live in St. Louis feel that you can cook the numbers by just looking at the city, but that’s true in every urban environment.

Susan Pendergrass (05:30) We also compared St. Louis to four other cities, and one of them in particular, Cincinnati, ended up being very similar. We wrote a paper and at the back of the paper there’s a table with variables on which we compared them. Similar size, similar poverty, similar median income, very similar. So to say that St. Louis is this very unique outlier and is the only city in the United States that has this situation where, essentially 100-plus years ago, St. Louis was so much better and more metropolitan and forward-thinking than the rest of the state of Missouri, and safer and wealthier, that they drew a line around the city of St. Louis and said we are going to be our own thing and we’re going to have our own police. It was called the Great Divorce. Now that line, the arrows are sort of pointing different ways, where St. Louis County isn’t necessarily excited to absorb the city of St. Louis and its services, systems, police departments, and 911 systems, because it is a uniquely crime-ridden area in parts. So while it would be nice to, as Patrick mentioned, just water down all the numbers by mixing them into a safer pot, it would really mask what’s going on.

Zach Lawhorn (06:47) Susan, you used the word “unique” there to describe the setup. Patrick, does that genuinely make it harder to talk about this topic? In the last few months you’ve had some public events, and we’re going to talk about those in a minute. But as you’ve gone through this process, do you think the unique setup has made it harder? Is there more throat-clearing and definitional work that goes into it?

Patrick Tuohey (07:12) I don’t know that what St. Louis is dealing with is unique. Yes, the city has a particularly small footprint. It is as if you drew a line around just the bad neighborhood in your community and tried to use that small footprint to describe the whole area. I get that argument. But if it’s true by a matter of degree, it’s not uniquely true of St. Louis. And it’s something that the city needs to deal with and understand rather than try to paper over. As Susan said, there are real problems in the city. Their population decline is only exacerbating those problems because there’s less revenue. And frankly, the history of the city going back decades has been that the image of the city is dysfunctional, and not just on public safety, on lots of issues. So although I understand that people say they don’t just want to talk about the city when it comes to crime, St. Louis, while it’s got lots of opportunities and strengths, doesn’t do itself any favors by combining all this stuff and whistling past the graveyard. People in this country know that St. Louis has a crime problem. You don’t solve it by redirecting people.

Zach Lawhorn (08:30) Okay, and let’s talk about that crime problem. Susan, when we use the word “crime” in this context, what are we talking about? Murders? Car break-ins? Lay it out for us.

Susan Pendergrass (08:42) We have violent crime and property crime. Violent crime is murders, aggravated assault, and robbery. Property crimes are larceny and motor vehicle thefts. In our report, we break them all out separately. Murders are the one crime area that the media likes to focus on: how many murders, which city is the murder capital, did we have 150, did we have 200, are they down? They are certainly down in the last two years, to be clear. Murder rates are down. Aggravated assault rates are not down by as much. And sometimes the difference between aggravated assault and murder is how fast the ambulance drives. We still have a lot of violent crimes against people happening. We certainly have a lot of motor vehicle thefts. That’s an area of crime that spiked during COVID, particularly for Kias and Hyundais, and it’s come down, but it’s still a very high number. While it is wonderful that crime has come down across these areas in many cases, the numbers are still pretty high, particularly on a per capita basis, which is how we translate all the crime rates so we can compare them with other cities.

Zach Lawhorn (10:00) So you said crime is down. Is it fair to classify it as it was really bad and now it’s just bad? It was terrible, now it’s just bad. How would you summarize what you found with the drop in crime?

Susan Pendergrass (10:13) Crime’s been dropping since the 80s, so we had much worse crime decades ago. It’s been dropping, it spiked during the pandemic, and it is continuing basically down. Now, when you look at the murder rate per capita in the city of St. Louis, it is still on a slightly upward trend, the number of murders per people, and that could be driven by the fact that Missouri is losing population at a pretty good clip. We have more deaths than births. So on a per capita basis maybe not quite the same, but in terms of actual numbers, crime has been coming down for some time. Crime overall peaked in the late 80s and 90s.

Zach Lawhorn (10:58) Patrick, we talked about your perception and the relevance of many other cities. Did that surprise you, the finding that crime is down? Or was that kind of what you expected?

Patrick Tuohey (11:09) No, the data showing that crime in St. Louis was down wasn’t a surprise. It’s certainly been nice to see that it’s been down year after year. This doesn’t appear to be just a one-off good year. And I’ve known that the mayor and the police chief have been talking about these positive numbers for a while. What I was really interested in with this paper was perception of crime. That’s what I’ve really wrestled with, both at events in the city and in the county. It is a difficult problem to overcome because you can have good numbers like St. Louis has and yet people still rely on that decades-old impression. That’s not something you can address just by waving away the numbers downtown. You have to wrestle with it. You have to admit it, and you have to figure out how do you get people to accept good news, and then how do you make them confident that that good news is going to continue? It’s so easy these days, especially with cities, to just be a pessimist and to say that things are down and won’t ever continue to go down. It is a problem that St. Louis has, but St. Louis isn’t alone in having it. The news on crime is good all over the country, yet perceptions about crime all over the country are still very much with us.

Susan Pendergrass (12:43) There’s a survey question that’s often asked: do you feel safe walking outside alone at night? And those numbers aren’t down. As Patrick mentioned, you have graffiti and trash not being picked up and panhandling and homelessness. Those numbers aren’t necessarily down. But we did look at St. Louis on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, and it is true that out of 16 neighborhoods, four or five have basically no crime, they’re crime-free. But then there are some other pockets that have most of the murders concentrated in one neighborhood. So it isn’t equal across all the neighborhoods. There are some that have very little crime, but it’s hard to convince folks of that when they drive through the ones that have public disorder and still don’t feel safe.

Zach Lawhorn (13:29) Susan, as a researcher trying to ultimately figure out why things happen, you mentioned that crime is down across the country. Would it be easier if it was just a few select cities, so you could actually go and say what is Boston doing different, what is Memphis doing? Does it make it harder to find the “why” since it seems like it’s kind of across the board?

Susan Pendergrass (13:45) Yeah. There have been other periods of time when crime has gone down and then gone back up again. I personally believe, and this is not based on any research I’ve done, that cameras being absolutely everywhere makes it harder to commit crimes. You cannot basically travel through the world anymore without being on a camera somewhere. Police body cams probably make it harder to commit crimes too. I feel like we’re getting into more of a surveillance state, and maybe that’s what’s bringing crime down. I’ve heard that Detroit has brought crime down faster than other cities, that Pittsburgh is feeling safer, Chattanooga is feeling safer, Memphis feeling less safe. So it would be worthwhile to look into some of these differences. But I don’t think our research has yet pointed to a clear reason why it’s happening.

Patrick Tuohey (14:41) Let me follow up on that because Susan’s exactly right, and I think your question gets to that point. Crime is down nationwide, down in all cities if I remember correctly, and we don’t really know why. And it’s not just Susan and I that don’t know why. Susan has spoken with public safety and crime experts from all over the country, and that’s really frustrating from a public policy research point of view, because you would love to have that outlier, that one city, maybe Boston or Omaha, that tried something novel and got results unlike everybody else. But crime is so difficult because there are so many contributors. Some people want to point to the availability of guns. Some people want to talk about root causes. Some people want to talk about the number of police, the severity of crime, the clearance rate, population growth, new development, basic services like picking up the trash and making sure the streetlights work. And all of those things are right, all those things contribute. So it’s really difficult to figure out which one is driving the change. And sometimes, as Susan pointed out, you may just get a dip and there’s no explaining it. In 2014, in Kansas City, our mayor and police chief at the time came out and had a press conference because they were so proud of the homicide drop the previous year. There was a lot of back-slapping and self-congratulation. Then when the homicide rate went back up the next year, you couldn’t get those guys to answer a basic question. Policymakers are, and maybe rightly so, really shy about claiming credit, because they don’t want to be called to task a year later when the numbers reverse. The good news is that the numbers are trending down, and that’s always good. The frustration is it’s very difficult to figure out why and then make recommendations. We’re all kind of scratching our heads. Although again, this is a good problem to have. The numbers are heading in the right direction and we ought to be happy about that.

Zach Lawhorn (16:58) Patrick, to get a better idea of the perception side, you did the hard work of going to the people. In January and February you moderated events. We had one in the city of St. Louis and one in St. Louis County. There are full recordings of the events available at showmeinstitute.org. You had a panel of experts and spent a lot of time getting feedback from attendees who lived in the city and the county. What were your takeaways? Are they buying that crime is getting better?

Patrick Tuohey (17:33) No, in a word, they don’t. We gave them a short survey before the event. A lot of them believed that crime was important, certainly, but they didn’t necessarily believe that crime was getting better. They weren’t necessarily optimistic that crime was going to be better in St. Louis City in the next five years, and that was certainly true in the county. I wanted to press these audience members: what would it take for you to believe this good news? And I think sometimes they just didn’t want to believe anything. We got the frustrating line: “there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” That’s a cute thing to say, but it really doesn’t help you explain your own view. If you’re just going to say you believe it’s bad and always going to be bad, that doesn’t get us anywhere. We were happy to have representatives from the Circuit Attorney’s office at both events, and they struggle with this too. They can do a better job. They can prosecute more and different cases, they can do it faster. The police can certainly improve their clearance rate. But public policymakers in those cities, in every city, are going to have to realize that they may have to continue that grind, doing the hard work of lowering crime, and they’re not going to get the attaboys from the people in their city or the communities around them. That’s just a reality. One of the panelists talked about how perception of crime is often a lagging indicator. When crime goes up, people feel it immediately. But when crime goes down, it may take a few years. The tough news for the people who lead St. Louis City is you may have to keep doing this for another 10 years before you get any credit for being successful. And that’s really tough in politics because people want that immediate payoff, that immediate

Susan Pendergrass (19:15) You

Patrick Tuohey (19:31) applause, that immediate press conference and support.

Susan Pendergrass (19:34) Patrick and I have been thinking about the things that could happen that could make a difference, that could maybe make people feel safer. Number one: when you see a crime happening, you need to be able to have faith that you can report it and somebody will respond. And that is not happening right now in the city of St. Louis. We’ve called several times about crimes and nobody showed up. You need to have faith in the 911 system, and the 911 system needs to function. We have about 28 different systems in the county. They’re building a new 911 center in the city that’s going to consolidate services, but it’s not finished. It’s going to be some time before it’s fully functioning. We also need to know that the police will be able to solve these crimes. They need resources. They need to be able to do DNA testing and rape kits and DNA. They need money to do those things. They need detectives. We need to know that these crimes can get solved, and then we need to know that the crimes are prosecuted. I think if these pieces on the front end, not just the “lock them up” approach, but on the front end, people would feel safer if they felt like they could call somebody and somebody would respond and something would happen. I’m not sure that’s happening right now. And until it does, people, especially when they start having small children, are probably going to move out.

Patrick Tuohey (20:59) What we’ve known since at least 1961, when Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is that you sometimes just need eyes on the street. Shop owners, pedestrians, people walking around. Cameras can reduce crime, but they’re kind of abstract and tucked in corners. When a street is vibrant, when it’s got people living there, when you’ve got kids playing in the street and families on the porch, there’s that sense of being watched, being seen. But because St. Louis has been in this population spiral, how do you bring people back into the city? The city talks about economic development subsidies all the time, but that’s about bringing in amenities and employers. Maybe what the city needs to do is figure out how to bring in people. And oftentimes it’s the non-crime-related policies, the housing policies, the regulations, the tax structure, that keep people out. Crime is one of those, but the city could open itself up to urban homesteaders who want to come in and rehab these old houses. What has struck me about St. Louis for the decades I’ve been going there is just the absolutely beautiful old neighborhoods, the incredible housing stock. Susan talked about living in a house that was built for the World’s Fair. There are gorgeous neighborhoods in St. Louis, and it’s the barriers to entry, red tape and government regulation, that are keeping people out, I have to believe. Crime is one of them, to be sure. But I am confident there are people who would love to move into those old houses and revitalize those old neighborhoods, because they’re just so gorgeous and so walkable. And it’s been done in other cities. DuPont Circle in Washington D.C. was a slow process of rehabbing neighborhoods block by block, and now 30 years later it is a vibrant community.

Zach Lawhorn (23:03) Susan, you mentioned the 911 system. I know in the report you don’t get into specific solutions, and I know we’re still kind of in the measuring-the-problem stage and trying to figure out next steps, but beyond the 911 system, are there any areas you’d consider low-hanging fruit worth considering moving forward?

Susan Pendergrass (23:25) The legislature passed and the governor signed a violent crime clearance grant program last year that cities like St. Louis could apply for, funding to hire detectives, do DNA testing, collect data, and other activities directly focused on solving crimes. The legislature has not appropriated any money for that program. If they did, St. Louis could apply for those funds. We also have, and I don’t know the exact number as I say this, but at least 100 open police positions in the department. Those are hard to fill. The policies that have been tried, like no longer requiring officers to live within the city and across-the-board raises, none of those have really made a difference. So we need recruitment and retention policies that could actually work. And as I mentioned with the 911 system, triaging calls and making sure the correct agency responds when a crime has been committed. There are community violence intervention programs that have been tried in some places, and using neighborhood-by-neighborhood data to focus in on where crimes are really happening. Those are all things we’d like to explore further: what is the cost of these programs, what is the likelihood that they’ll improve things, and what are some feasible ways to get them done.

Zach Lawhorn (24:54) So there’s the PR part of it. The city’s got a PR problem. There’s the need for more cops. We need people to be able to call 911. We need people to actually be prosecuted for crimes. That all seems doable.

Susan Pendergrass (24:58) Yeah.

Zach Lawhorn (25:06) Where do you think the city of St. Louis is at right now? Are we in a good place? Are we in just an improved place where it could still be a few years? How are you feeling about public safety in the city of St. Louis right now?

Susan Pendergrass (25:21) I don’t want to be a wet blanket. I love the city of St. Louis and I want it to succeed wildly. But I’m concerned that they’re going to say murders are down and these other crimes are down, but people are still running stop signs and stoplights, there are still panhandlers, and trash still isn’t being picked up. They’re not really fixing the small things that make people feel safe. They’re sort of focused on these big numbers. It could be like a school improving ACT scores. You have to be really careful if you’re just focusing on one aspect, because these big crime numbers being down could be hiding a lot of other stuff that really needs to be done and focused on. So I’m cautiously optimistic, I guess.

Patrick Tuohey (26:05) I’m optimistic because crime is going down everywhere, and I think it will probably continue to go down at least for the next few years, for reasons that may have nothing to do with the management of St. Louis. Part of it is because Susan and I have been reviewing the research for the last few months, and there is so much out there, primary research on crime and secondary, that talks about exactly the things Susan hit upon: the environment, picking up trash, cleaning up graffiti, fixing sidewalks, making sure the streetlights are lit. We know so much more about what drives crime, or at least what can ameliorate it, that even if we don’t know the specifics of what’s going on now, city leaders and state leaders are much more aware of what they can do to make communities not just safer but feel safe. And again, it is frustrating because you can say the numbers are down, but until people feel safe and want to go downtown and take advantage of what the city has to offer, we’re not going to see that public perception change. So yes, I think the public perception is accurate in as much as that is what people feel, but I don’t think it reflects what’s actually going on in St. Louis or in the county.

Zach Lawhorn (27:20) And we will leave it there. The report, The Public Safety Climate in the City of St. Louis, is available at showmeinstitute.org. If you want to watch the full recordings of the events that Patrick moderated, those are available right now at showmeinstitute.org. Susan, Patrick, thank you very much.

Susan Pendergrass (27:36) Thank you.

Patrick Tuohey (27:36) Thank you.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

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