Susan Pendergrass speaks with Jacob Light, Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution, about his research on how artificial intelligence is reshaping higher education. They explore which college majors are most exposed to AI capabilities, why professors are largely not changing their syllabi or assessment methods despite widespread awareness of AI, and what students are doing in response to the uncertainty. They also discuss whether the backlash against AI on college campuses is real, what previous waves of technological change can teach us about the current moment, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00): Thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast. Jacob Light, Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution, talking about something that’s very timely right now in this college graduation season. I’m hearing that all the college students are having a backlash against AI. I don’t know if you would agree with that or not, but I want you to try to explain to people listening what first of all you’ve been looking at in terms of AI in college in general, and also what your findings have been, because I find them to be very interesting and somewhat surprising.

Jacob Light (00:31): Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to join the podcast today. I’m an economist who studies how universities respond to different forces of change, whether that be changes in the labor market, changing political conditions, and more recently, changing technology, which feels very central both as a former student and now as an instructor at a university, thinking about how AI is affecting the way that students interact with their courses. My work right now thinks about this problem of AI in higher education in two ways. First, where should we be looking for exposure of higher education to AI? Where do the skills that students are learning to develop in their courses overlap with the capabilities of artificial intelligence? The second strain of the research is how are universities adapting? How are instructors changing the way that they administer courses? How are students changing which courses they take? And how should we look at these movements as indications of how these two sides of this market are responding to this big shock?

Susan Pendergrass (01:39): So to be clear, you’re not just saying that ChatGPT becomes available and all the professors outlaw the use of AI in classes, but more so: are students continuing in 2026 to be taught skills that we know AI can do? And what’s the answer?

Jacob Light (01:57): Yeah, exactly. I think it’s important to contextualize that we teach students many skills that have already been automated. We teach students basic arithmetic and spelling, even though we have calculators and spell check. We have these tools that can perform a lot of the cognitive work that we teach students to do from a very young age, and yet we still think it’s important for students to develop skills in these areas. We still teach students to add and subtract both because those skills unlock higher order cognitive skills and also just because that exercise is useful to students. So what I do in my research is think not just about whether instructors are changing the courses they offer to reduce the weight on things that ChatGPT and large language models are able to do, but if we think it’s important for students to develop these skills even though AI can do them, things like analyzing data or writing essays, then it becomes important for instructors to modify the way they offer courses so that we still get information about how well students are learning to do the tasks that AI can potentially substitute for them.

Susan Pendergrass (03:13): I don’t want to minimize the effort you put into this, because it’s massive. You went through thousands of syllabi to really look at what’s being taught in a very specific way. You also included not just large language model AI but robots, and a lot of the skilled trades. I would imagine that the skills needed 10 years ago have changed now that robots can do a lot of that work. What are you seeing there?

Jacob Light (03:42): For this first part of the project, where I think about how different fields of study are exposed to artificial intelligence, I should say upfront that exposure here doesn’t necessarily mean that every computer scientist is going to have their job completely automated. What I’m thinking about is the degree to which students are able to use AI as a substitute for, or maybe even a complement to, their work in the classroom. The approach I take is to leverage a dataset that I’ve spent many years collecting of course offerings from a large number of US colleges and universities. For about 1,000 schools, I’ve scraped the course catalogs and course schedules, which gives me insight into every course offered at the school over a period of up to 30 years. I see course offerings, enrollment, titles, instructors, and course descriptions. I use these course descriptions to build a sense of what skills and tasks a student develops in, say, an economics class. The exposure measure is the degree to which what a student does in that class overlaps with the capabilities of artificial intelligence. To be very specific with an example: in an economics class, students are often trained to analyze data, use models, and evaluate policy. The intuition for the approach I use is that if we see AI is really good at analyzing data, using models, and evaluating policy, we would think of economics as a field of study that is highly exposed to AI. I think about exposure to AI in two different ways. For the broad capabilities of AI, I glean from patents related to artificial intelligence. I look at the overlap between the tasks that students do in their courses and tasks that AI technology patents say those technologies are capable of doing. And then very specifically at the capabilities of large language models, which I think of as a subset of AI.

Susan Pendergrass (05:21): Yeah.

Jacob Light (05:35): So I look at two measures of what AI can do: the broad range of AI capabilities, which I extract from patents, and then the specific capabilities of large language models. What I find is that when you compare the exposure of college courses to AI versus to previous types of technologies, such as robotics, we see that courses are much more exposed to the things that AI can do than to the capabilities of previous technologies. This is consistent with existing research that suggests highly skilled jobs, the types of jobs that college graduates flow into, are more exposed to artificial intelligence than they were to previous waves of technology. That’s the first order finding. But within college majors, there’s pretty wide variation in exposure, and it differs based on whether we think of exposure to the broad class of AI technologies versus just large language models.

Susan Pendergrass (06:55): What’s the most exposed? It looks like it’s computer science, right?

Jacob Light (07:00): Statistics and data science and computer science are highly exposed majors. Unfortunately, economics is also a highly exposed major. I should say it’s not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing to be exposed. On one hand, there’s a risk that students are not developing the same skills when they have access to these AI tools as they did in a pre-ChatGPT period. But also, we lower the barriers to entry into computer science and economics through the availability of these tools, because everyone’s vibe coding, and also you have bespoke tutors in your pocket that can help you navigate difficult courses and overcome barriers to entry. So it’s not obviously a bad thing.

Susan Pendergrass (07:35): Because everyone’s vibe coding.

Jacob Light (07:53): But to be specific, especially when we think about exposure to AI as represented by the capabilities of large language models, what seems to drive exposure is a combination of fields of study that involve data analysis and generating text. These are the two things we think of LLMs as being very good at. So the quantitative social sciences, economics, political science, even sociology, as well as fields that involve applied data analysis, including statistics and computer science, are going to be the fields where the skills that students develop overlap most with what AI is capable of doing.

Susan Pendergrass (08:31): So are professors changing their syllabi to reflect that? Are they dropping things that clearly could just be covered by AI?

Jacob Light (08:40): That gets to the second part of this project. Having documented that there is this concern that AI overlaps with what we teach students to do in their courses, and that students might be able to substitute AI for their own work, we might look specifically at these highly exposed fields as places where we want instructors to modify the way they teach as a means of ensuring that students are developing the skills they were developing before ChatGPT was released. We read a lot of these articles about blue books being back.

Susan Pendergrass (09:12): Using blue books? I feel nostalgic for the blue books. There’s something almost romantic about writing in a blue book versus clicking buttons on a Canvas quiz.

Jacob Light (09:12): Yeah, I don’t like blue books by the way, but using blue books, yes.

Susan Pendergrass (09:23): But isn’t that just working against an enormous tide? To think that requiring students to write in a blue book is going to force them to not use AI for the exam, but aren’t they using it daily in their coursework?

Jacob Light (09:53): Again, it’s not obvious to me that using AI in their coursework is a bad thing. So much of the work I did when I was a college student was pretty inefficient. I spent a lot of time writing code that didn’t work and writing essays that read very poorly. To automate some of those experiences might allow students to invest more in the types of higher order thinking and learning that are more valuable. But on the other hand, I think I became a better coder because I made mistakes through the process. Now I can distinguish good code from bad code because I’ve written a lot of bad code and I know what my bad code looks like. So we might think that even if we’re not changing the types of skills that students develop in their courses, that we continue to offer economics courses and computer science courses, the way that we assess whether students are learning the skills they need is going to change. There are certain types of assessments, like out-of-class essays and homework, where you just can’t get as much information about how much students are learning, versus in-class proctored exams, participation, and presentations where students have to demonstrate mastery through assessments where you can’t use AI tools. What I do is, for about 20 universities, I’ve collected a panel of syllabi covering both the pre and post-ChatGPT period, and I extract two pieces of information. The first is whether the syllabus has an AI policy or not. The second is the weights that instructors put on different types of assessments, such as half the grade being based on exams and 25% based on essays. I find two interesting things. The first is that following the release of ChatGPT, instructors became very aware of AI. We see a massive increase in the share of courses that have any AI policy, and most of those policies are restrictive of the use of AI. My own syllabus has clear instructions about when I want students to use AI and when I don’t. My students are very compliant and of course listen to everything I say, both when I’m lecturing and in the syllabus. So we see that instructors are aware of AI and think of it as a concern in the classroom.

Susan Pendergrass (09:12): You think they follow that?

Jacob Light (12:24): Sure, great, okay. But the second thing I extract is assessment weights, which allow me to assess whether instructors are changing the way they offer courses in a way that lets them extract more information about how much students are learning. What I find is that despite instructors being very aware of AI, we see virtually no changes in how much weight instructors are putting on the types of assessments where students can substitute AI for their own work, versus assessments like exams and participation where they can’t. We hear a lot about blue books being back. We hear anecdotal stories about how instructors are concerned about students using AI in the classroom. But I just don’t see this in the data.

Susan Pendergrass (13:23): That’s surprising to me.

Jacob Light (13:42): I think what’s interesting and informative is that there are two shocks in pretty quick succession over the last couple of years that push in opposite directions on the information that instructors can get from different types of assessments. During the pandemic, it became harder to offer in-person exams. There was a physical constraint that limited exams. What I see is a shift away from exams and towards homework, a gradual pre-pandemic shift away from exams that sharply accelerated during the pandemic, and that persists even in the years after in-person instruction resumes. We can use that as a benchmark: at minimum, instructors could revert back to the way they were weighting courses before the pandemic. What we see is basically nothing. There are very modest shifts away from homework and other AI-substitutable assessments, primarily essays. We’re slightly reducing the weight on essays and offsetting that with increases in participation and presentations. But we’re seeing very little movement at scale away from the types of assessments where students can substitute AI for their own work.

Susan Pendergrass (14:44): Maybe higher education just moves slowly. It’s an ivory tower. People get entrenched. Some professors use the same syllabus for 20 years. Maybe it just moves more slowly in reaction to this. I know some that are angry about the AI thing, but it’s up to them to figure out how to change it. In terms of what students are doing, how are they reacting to the changes in terms of what they’re choosing as majors? What are you seeing there?

Jacob Light (15:32): Yes, so I track changes in enrollment over the last 20 years using this course schedule data from a large number of universities. Similar to the relatively slow movement on the instructor side, students are moving pretty slowly as well. Despite stories about concerns about the viability of computer science as a major, and after a period of very rapid growth in CS enrollment, we’re only seeing a slight dip in CS enrollment and in other AI-exposed fields of study in the last couple of years. What I can show is that for the first time since around 2005, when CS enrollment began to take off, this current year, the 2025-26 year, we see a slight decrease in computer science enrollment. But it still remains elevated compared to the start of the pandemic and substantially elevated compared to 2010. In a way, perhaps this makes sense, because although there is greater uncertainty around the returns to developing CS skills, CS courses are now easier to take because you have tools that can help you with your homework and tutor you. One of the barriers to entry into CS courses previously was that they were hard, and these tools make more AI-exposed courses easier. I think the risk and the concern is that the same tools that can do your work in the classroom can also potentially do your job, and I don’t think we see students internalizing that risk yet.

Susan Pendergrass (17:12): Even though the Wall Street Journal has a layoff tracker and Meta is constantly seemingly laying folks off, and Amazon as well. We see a lot of thinning of the herd when it comes to software engineers. I just imagine it’s going to change. Is this generation of college students in a weird bind? They’re right between the pre-AI and post-AI worlds, spending a lot of money on college tuition at a time when the future of different types of work is very uncertain.

Jacob Light (17:54): I’m very sympathetic to college students who are navigating uncertainty right now of a form that I don’t think college students have had to navigate previously. During previous technological change, we’ve always looked to universities as the resource that we send people to upskill, with the promise that the skills you develop in college are going to have returns when you enter the labor market. I continue to believe that’s the case, certainly in the short term. But I recognize that the nature of work is changing quite rapidly as new technology can perform some of the tasks that workers are able to do. Economists often conceptualize occupations as a bundle of tasks, and when a new technology comes online, the technology is able to do some of those tasks while the human worker continues to perform others. The net impact on an occupation really depends on which tasks are being automated, and whether that means we need fewer people doing that occupation because the technology can do it for us, or whether the ability of technology to make workers more efficient actually increases the demand for people with those skills because now more firms will benefit from having a single software engineer on staff when it previously would not have been rational for them to have any. There’s a lot of uncertainty right now, and I think it’s difficult to navigate as a 19 or 20 year old.

Susan Pendergrass (19:37): What about this backlash? Eric Schmidt spoke at a college graduation and folks booed him, I think. Even Jonathan Haidt, who is sort of anti-smartphone and screen time. Do you perceive that? You work on a college campus. Do you see that age group wanting to turn away from AI?

Jacob Light (20:02): My perception is that the backlash is to the uncertainty that AI introduces. Many students are eager to use the technology when it makes them more efficient or when it allows them to substitute time they would spend solving problem sets towards leisure and other pursuits. But I’m sympathetic to the frustration that students are feeling, that this investment they’ve made and the promise of opportunity that college has previously offered is now at risk because of the changing technological landscape.

Susan Pendergrass (20:53): I was talking to a lawyer recently about AI and how they use it and how great it is for them. They said basically every lawyer now has their own legal assistant. And I was like, what does that do for legal assistants? Everyone’s got a research assistant, which is great. I use it all the time. But what does that do for people who used to start as a research assistant? It’s obviously changing things. I kind of remember, because I’m pretty old, desktop computers being the thing that was going to kill all these jobs, and it just shifted the market. It didn’t kill anything. It just dramatically increased productivity. I think people have a lot of dystopian views of this, but you sound like you’re a little more on the utopian side, and I think there could be a lot of positives that come out of it.

Jacob Light (21:38): I think that’s right. Economists are not in the business of making predictions generally, and I’d have to give up my PhD if I did. I take some comfort looking at previous waves of technological change, exactly as you said. Computers created more job opportunities than they reduced. Mechanized agriculture unlocked widespread growth in the economy despite reducing some employment in agriculture. My belief, if we take the past as precedent, is that we will see something like that with artificial intelligence as well. Some, perhaps many, occupations will be disrupted. Workers in those occupations will experience difficult consequences of this change. But there will be more and new opportunities available once this technology is more widely deployed. There’s a trade-off, and the transition is messy and painful. But I think on net, the precedent is that new technology is generally helpful for society.

Susan Pendergrass (22:57): AI spits out a lot of bad content and you still need a human, I think, to determine what’s bad and what’s good. I think that’s the skill set within the CS world. You can have AI code five versions of something, but somebody needs to know which one is good. So what do you think about that?

Jacob Light (23:22): I think that’s exactly right. The expertise becomes more valuable. In a way, it’s kind of a bummer that the parts of work where humans maintain their advantage are in evaluating quality rather than in generating. We’ve kind of taken the creative component of work away. I think it creates a less satisfying, perhaps less intellectually stimulating workflow. At this stage, certainly, we continue to need humans with expertise beyond the capabilities of AI to evaluate what AI is producing. I think that points to the crisis that higher education faces: if we are not able to produce these experts because students are not developing the skills we need them to develop in college, then how will we produce the next cohort of experts? Similarly to your point, if we don’t have legal assistants and research assistants who will eventually become lawyers and researchers, then we are not training people to preserve their comparative advantages over these new tools. I think that’s a big risk we face, and it emphasizes the importance of education right now more than ever.

Susan Pendergrass (24:56): So are you going to continue with this, scraping the data and looking at it?

Jacob Light (24:58): Yeah. It’s my maniacal hobby. I started this data collection in February 2020, and a month later the world changed. But I had a lot of free time on my hands, so it gave me something to do. This little hobby of mine became my pandemic hobby. It was my sourdough. This data gives really rich insight into how universities differ in ways that I don’t think researchers have been able to explore previously.

Susan Pendergrass (25:36): No, I think it’s great. That’s really cool. If people want to find out more, where can we find it?

Jacob Light (25:42): I’m a researcher at the Hoover Institution. You can go to my website at jacob-light.com. I’m always eager to talk about this work.

Susan Pendergrass (25:51): That’s fascinating stuff. Well, thanks so much. I’d love to see a follow-up in a year or two. I think it’s really interesting. Thank you so much.

Jacob Light (25:57): Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post AI and the Future of College with Jacob Light appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Aaron Renn, author and consultant, and David Stokes, Director of Municipal Policy at the Show-Me Institute, about the recurring debate over whether the city of St. Louis should rejoin St. Louis County. They explore what city county mergers have actually accomplished in places like Indianapolis, Louisville, Nashville, and Lexington, why a full merger in St. Louis would be extraordinarily difficult to pull off, and whether the benefits would even outweigh the costs. They also discuss St. Louis’s demographic challenges, what the Pittsburgh model might offer as a path forward, the cultural barriers that make it hard to attract and retain people from outside the region, and more.

You can find Aaron’s work here.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:05): Welcome back, Aaron Renn, to the podcast. So happy to have you and David Stokes, our own expert on cities and counties and all things municipal. I appreciate you coming on, Aaron. There have been murmurings around St. Louis again on a topic that we have revisited for probably a hundred years: should the city of St. Louis be a separate county from St. Louis County?

Before we get to that, I want to ask you something because I was reading the news this morning, and I know that you’ve written about city county mergers before, like cities that are kind of dying and then either pulling in parts of their closest suburbs to sort of make everything look better, broaden their tax base, make their crime numbers look better. I was reading something you wrote a year or two ago about that, and you said that Louisville is a failed example of that. Is that right, basically?

Aaron Renn (01:01): Yeah, I’m a little skeptical of how these things have worked out in practice.

Susan Pendergrass (01:05): Yeah, in terms of losing the flavor and the coolness of the city. Literally this morning I saw an article about how Louisville is having a renaissance and these young professionals are all moving there because they didn’t tear down all their beautiful old Victorian homes, so you can still get one for close to a million dollars. They’ve got a cool art scene and a bourbon scene. So it sounds like maybe Louisville did not lose its personal flavor in the merger. I would be curious to know what you think of that.

Aaron Renn (01:33): Well, I like to put St. Louis in context. I’m glad you mentioned Louisville because many of these river cities have similar characteristics. I like to look at St. Louis as well as three cities in the Ohio Valley: Louisville, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh. All of them heavily German Catholic in their demographics. All of them are very geopolitically fragmented with many small tiny suburbs throughout. They all have very fragmented neighborhood systems as well, where everybody has a strong sense of neighborhood identity. Where you go to high school is a big social marker. They all have phenomenal collections of urban assets and great historic buildings. They all still have their own unique character in a country where that has sort of bled away.

Aaron Renn (02:31): And they also have curiously underperformed demographically and economically in terms of growth. They’re slow growth places. So one thing I always encourage people is to pan back the lens and don’t just look at St. Louis in isolation. Look at it in comparison or dialogue with some of these other places and see what you can learn from them.

Louisville is actually a quite troubled city in important ways. From a white collar employment perspective it’s doing well, from a blue collar perspective less so. It’s one of the 10 least educated major metros in the country. I don’t want to spend too much time on Louisville, but I want to talk about the city county merger, which is distinct from recombining the city and the county. This has been considered urban planning best practice for 30 or 40 years. There was a book written by David Rusk called Cities Without Suburbs. The idea is that cities that were able to expand their boundaries through either annexation or city county mergers were prospering, whilst cities that did not, like the Clevelands, the Cincinnatis, and the St. Louises, were struggling. So the idea is we need big box government.

Indianapolis, where I live now, had a city county merger in 1970. Louisville did a city county merger, I grew up near Louisville. Jacksonville, Florida, Lexington, Kentucky, and Nashville, Tennessee did as well. What I would say is a few things. Merger is not necessarily bad. For Indianapolis, merger did prevent the city from essentially going down the tubes in important ways. So it really was a win in important ways.

But it did not prevent the historic city from going into the exact same demographic decline as St. Louis. The historic city of Indianapolis has lost almost exactly the same share of its population since 1970 as St. Louis has. Secondly, these are very politically difficult to pull off. They take enormous effort. They often fail multiple times. Louisville had multiple failures.

The most precious resource is always management time and attention. Is this where you want to put all your political chips? And in order to get it passed politically, what happens invariably is that most entities are actually not consolidated. In Louisville, none of the existing incorporated suburban governments were in fact merged. In Indianapolis, the school districts weren’t merged.

This means you don’t necessarily get all of the benefits you think from consolidation, because many things are excluded. And then unlike a corporate merger, where there’s typically a lot of downsizing and cost rationalization, in city county mergers nobody ever loses their job and salaries and benefits might even be harmonized upward to the high watermark. So don’t expect it to save any money. Personally, city county merger might have some benefits for St. Louis. I’m not saying it would have no benefits, but in my opinion it’s not going to be a needle mover and most likely it would be extraordinarily politically difficult and uncertain to pull off.

Susan Pendergrass (06:00): Yeah, no question. It’s been very politically difficult. People don’t want to do it. However, we do have these little tiny school districts and police districts. We have, I don’t know, 28 911 systems. We have a lot of what looks like bureaucratic waste and red tape. To the extent that doesn’t get resolved in a merger, then what’s the point? But I do think, you know, we’ve been talking about the demographics of St. Louis. There were over 800,000 people in the city once. Now there are maybe 280,000 and declining, and we’re in the death spiral of more people dying than being born. We’ve been in that for a while. And I guess it brings up the question of what is St. Louis to do if we are in this death spiral? We’re not having the babies. We’re having fewer babies than we did 15 years ago. So school enrollment is only declining. What is the prescription in that situation?

I’ve been to Cincinnati quite a bit. They’re trying to get people downtown with sports stadiums. It doesn’t really work. Louisville has sports stadiums downtown. I don’t know if people really want to move down there. I don’t see it working in St. Louis. So what is a city in that situation to do?

Aaron Renn (07:18): It’s going to be challenging in a sense because your problems are a little over determined. St. Louis was once a regional capital city, much like a Dallas or an Atlanta or a Denver or a Minneapolis. And it lost a lot of those functions. Many of its headquarters have left. It used to have a lot of professional services firms like ad agencies that did business all over the country, not just for the local market. Now St. Louis, although it’s still bigger than Indianapolis, looks a lot more like an Indianapolis or a Columbus, Ohio, where you have fewer corporate headquarters and most of the service firms are just there to serve the local market. St. Louis has essentially shrunk a little bit in relative importance, and it’s hard to get that back.

The demographics are also quite difficult and create a situation where it’s hard to attract business when you have a shrinking labor force, weak demographic growth, and a weak ability to bring people in from the outside. So it’s a very complicated situation and I don’t think there’s any silver bullet for St. Louis.

Susan Pendergrass (08:39): That’s what I’m asking you for. You have the answers. What’s the silver bullet?

Aaron Renn (08:43): So here are the things I would look at if I were in St. Louis. One of the clear issues that affects all of these river cities is that their wonderful, unique local cultures come with a downside, which is an extreme parochialism that has two negative effects. One, it makes it difficult for the communities to cohesively work together, which I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. City-suburb divides tend to be bigger. In Indianapolis, regional leadership is mostly all on the same page about the big issues. Same with Columbus, Ohio. Secondly, it makes it very difficult to attract people from out of town because they come there and they can’t make friends, they can’t penetrate the social networks.

Susan Pendergrass (09:15): 100%, yes.

Aaron Renn (09:40): You hear it over and over again in places like St. Louis, Cleveland, even Minneapolis, Minnesota. There are some sayings there. If you want to make friends in Minnesota, go to kindergarten, because that’s when everybody makes their friends. Or Minnesotans will give you directions anywhere but their house. They’re never going to invite you over. St. Louis has that reputation. I don’t think it’s just a reputation. And I know you just had Ness Sandoval on.

Susan Pendergrass (09:53): Yeah.

Aaron Renn (10:08): He’s talking about you need to get better on migration. Migration isn’t going to improve if migrants are not going to be able to join the social networks here. And that’s not even just international migration, that’s domestic migrants. So I think that’s a huge issue for the city. Cultural issues are hard to solve, but maybe less intractable than infrastructure.

The other thing is looking at Pittsburgh as a sort of model. Pittsburgh hasn’t solved really most of its problems by any means, but it has been able to regenerate in the city a sort of high value economy around Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. It’s done quite well. Many Silicon Valley firms have set up shop there. What’s happened in Pittsburgh, although it’s still a demographic decline story, is there’s been a demographic transition in the city. Pittsburgh went from one of the least educated cities in America to now one of the youngest and most educated. Part of it is old people moved and died off and young educated people replaced them. So the total number of people in the city was declining, but there was a churn happening underneath. And the same thing is already happening in St. Louis.

Susan Pendergrass (11:13): How did they do that?

Aaron Renn (11:33): College degree attainment in the city is now well north of 40%. So the people who live in the city of St. Louis are very educated. That demographic churn has raised educational attainment and thus incomes in the city a lot. Now Pittsburgh was different because it was an almost entirely white city. There’s a racial divide in St. Louis and gentrification concerns become more salient. But St. Louis is now an educated city. This is not an old post-industrial blue collar city. The city of St. Louis itself is very educated. And also being very small, it doesn’t necessarily need a massive change to move the needle. In Indianapolis we have a population of over 900,000. Moving that behemoth takes a lot. St. Louis now being smaller has a situation where there could be a big impact from lower numbers of things. So I think a knowledge economy built around Washington University and your medical centers has some possibilities, somewhat similar to Pittsburgh.

Susan Pendergrass (12:45): So much medical.

Aaron Renn (12:58): Carnegie Mellon’s engineering and computer science areas will be a little different. I might also look at Vanderbilt, what’s going on there? What are some peer schools you could watch to see what’s going on? But I think there are actually some reasons to think that the city of St. Louis, believe it or not, could be sort of turning a corner. It has now demographically renewed itself to a higher educational attainment state. Being small, it probably doesn’t have that much further to fall, and you can start building from there. Obviously there are governance challenges, but looking at the Pittsburgh model, studying similar complexes around peer schools, and addressing the culture issues is where I’d look.

David Stokes (13:33): Hopeful.

Susan Pendergrass (13:47): So as a spokesperson for St. Louis, what do you see for the future?

David Stokes (13:52): Well, I would be curious to get Aaron’s thoughts on that size question, about how the city of St. Louis has in fact gotten so small. It’s about 10% of the metro area. How does that affect the pros or cons of any type of a merger? These would not be a merger of equals. St. Louis County would almost subsume St. Louis City into it. How do you think that would affect things for better or worse?

Aaron Renn (14:28): Well, that was the critique of the Louisville merger by two academics at the University of Louisville. I mentioned the book Cities Without Suburbs. They wrote an academic paper called Suburbs Without a City, which basically said if the merger passed in Louisville, it would essentially mean the suburbs take over the city, not the city taking over the suburbs, because the old city of Louisville only had about 260,000 people and the suburbs would numerically dominate. The same thing would certainly happen in St. Louis. If there were a merger, suburban St. Louis County would control the city in essence.

Another consideration, and this is a Cincinnati issue, I interviewed about 15 years ago the mayor of Cincinnati, John Cranley. Here’s what he said, and I think this is an important point. He said, 30 years ago, city county merger was the thing because cities were in decline and you wanted to tap that suburban tax base to fund the city. But now it’s reversed. Now the cities are coming back and it’s the inner suburbs that are actually going down the tubes. And so in Cincinnati today, we have all the corporate headquarters, we have the universities and the medical centers, and we don’t have to share our tax revenue with anybody. If we were merged with the county government, we’d have to prop up all these failing suburbs. And so I think you’re in a similar situation in St. Louis, where the high value activity, not all of it is in the city of St. Louis because of Clayton and so on, but the St. Louis County suburbs are mostly places that are themselves on negative trajectories. Merging the city, which may be on the cusp of being able to bottom out and turn around, with all of these still declining inner suburban areas, might actually be an albatross around the city’s neck.

Susan Pendergrass (15:16): What would that mean?

David Stokes (16:37): I just think one of the differences between St. Louis and Cincinnati, and I don’t know the property tax base of Cincinnati, is that so much of the city of St. Louis is tax exempt right now. Between Washington University, Saint Louis University, and all the government entities, there’s just so much of it. I say that as somebody who supports property tax changes to make them pay something towards it. But I just don’t think the Cincinnati argument applies to the city of St. Louis right now. That property tax exemption part is a huge factor because the most growing, thriving part of it is the entire giant Barnes-WashU-Cortex complex, and the amount of property taxes they pay is miniscule.

Susan Pendergrass (16:38): Hmm.

Aaron Renn (17:26): Well, some of that is a planning issue. And I think the reality is, when you have a complex like that, are all these people going to move to St. Charles? Maybe not. I’ll tell you, I live in the suburb of Indianapolis named Carmel, and a lot of the hospitals and things have been opening facilities here. When these nonprofit hospitals come up here, we will not approve zoning changes for those hospitals unless they agree to make payments in lieu of taxes. You want to come up here and you want a zoning change, you’re going to have to pay. We were actually quite prescient in that one of the local hospital chains opened a for-profit hospital. As part of the approval deal, we said, if you ever convert to nonprofit status, you will continue paying property taxes. And we did that.

So I think there probably is leverage from the city over some of these entities. You don’t have a lot of leverage over a corporation deciding where to put their office, but that’s not a tax exempt situation. The stuff at Cortex is probably not going to leave if you make them pay a little money the next time they come to you for a zoning approval. I think you need to start looking at how to get more money out of these entities that are nonprofits in name only. These universities and hospitals are effectively gigantic hedge funds. Their executives are extremely well compensated and billions of dollars are flowing through there. Undoubtedly the better solution there is to figure out how to tax them rather than figure out how to tax the soon-to-be-dead mall in the suburb over the border.

David Stokes (19:24): Well, yeah, and that’s sort of the trade off, unfortunately, is that they do pay earnings tax. The employees, many of them very highly compensated, pay the earnings tax. And that’s what makes the city more dependent on local income taxes, not less, because they’re either tax exempt or in the case of Cortex, have tax abatements that make them essentially tax exempt.

Susan Pendergrass (19:25): We do have earnings taxes, right? So the folks who work there have to pay an earnings tax.

Aaron Renn (19:53): Yeah. Again, I don’t know exactly the fiscal architecture there. But I would say you don’t want to do a merger simply to do a tax dollar grab. The lesson of Indianapolis is we did that. We grabbed suburban tax dollars and we used it to rebuild our downtown successfully. But here we are 50 years later, and now we have enormous tracts of decayed suburbia that are an enormous problem. Our entire core county is now in a sense the inner city. We have big challenges because we were not able to invest in ways that allow those suburban areas to retain their allure over the long term.

And I’m not saying that’s impossible, but any short term juice you get, cities always rise and fall. Core cities have proven more resilient and more able to regenerate themselves than suburbs. Part of it is because state governments cannot afford to let their state’s largest city or major urban center go down the tubes.

Susan Pendergrass (21:06): Yeah.

Aaron Renn (21:16): Missouri cannot let St. Louis and Kansas City implode. Michigan cannot just write off Detroit and say who cares. But these suburban areas have proven a lot tougher to save. We don’t have a good model. We’ve spent decades thinking about how to rebuild cities and build districts. There are certain things you can pull off in a city around conventions, civic events, gathering spaces, museums, and government that are very hard to translate to suburban settings. So there’s not a great playbook, especially in declining markets, for renewing suburbs. The playbook for suburban renewal, if you want to call it that, is places like Carmel, Indiana, which are growing and affluent, and therefore can build large mixed use centers, new urbanist developments, trails, and parks. The suburbs of St. Louis County are probably tremendously deficient in infrastructure as we would understand it today.

So again, there may actually be some benefits in having St. Louis City rejoin the county in a sense, because then the county functions are spread and amortized across a larger population.

Susan Pendergrass (22:45): It would immediately improve our murder rate because we would be mixing it in.

Aaron Renn (22:48): Yeah, there is some of that. The murder rate is an artifact of the size of the city more than anything. There are places in Chicago with higher murder rates. A former colleague of mine at the Manhattan Institute, Rafael Mangual, did an analysis of Chicago. He said there are areas on the South Side of Chicago that are larger and have more people than St. Louis with far higher murder rates than St. Louis.

Susan Pendergrass (22:56): We get called out because of the small denominator.

Aaron Renn (23:17): And so there is that. The other thing is Chicago is a good example. New York City was essentially a city county merger. In 1898, the five counties that are the five boroughs of New York were consolidated into one city. Philadelphia was also a city county consolidation from the 19th century. But what happens when you create a very large city of say a million people or more is you really have to scale up your government. You have to have a government that operates at that scale.

What happened with Indianapolis was we merged city and county government, but we didn’t really have a government that could effectively manage this new larger territory. It never built out the infrastructure in the suburbs. In New York, the Bronx has subways, great parks, everything built out with proper infrastructure, because it was part of New York and New York had to expand governance to become a city of eight million. Chicago got big in the 19th century and built a city government that could run a city of three million people. And some of the stuff that gets critiqued there, for example, is a lot of city services were organized by ward or city council district. There are 50 city council districts and every city councilor is sort of a little mini mayor of their district. The alderman essentially has veto power over any zoning changes. It’s called aldermanic privilege. So there are a lot of constraints there.

But if it’s just one mayor and one city council trying to think about a huge city of 77 neighborhoods and three million people, they can’t keep that much in their head. All they can think about is downtown. And that’s what happened in Indianapolis. The mayor and city council can really only think about downtown. We should have built out structures in townships throughout the city so that you had leadership focused on that area and money focused on that area. That’s what made the suburbs work really well. A suburb like Carmel is basically township sized. We have 100,000 people, big enough to do things, but not so big that our mayor and council can’t keep the whole city in their head and plan and manage the whole city.

So if you merge with the county government, you’re going to have to create an entirely new government structure that allows you to essentially manage every sub area of the whole thing and bring it all up to a standard of services. That’s the other thing they often did in Louisville and Nashville. They merge, but they have a two tier service system where there’s an urban services district for the old city which gets more services, and then the others get less. They didn’t do that in New York. There’s one standard of service in New York, one in Philadelphia, one in Chicago. So if you can’t commit to a single standard of service, you’re basically creating a bogus merger in my opinion. If you’re going to do a merger, you need to obliterate every government and entity in St. Louis County and city, merge them all into one with one standard. That’s not going to happen.

Susan Pendergrass (26:35): That’s not going to happen. What do you think, David?

David Stokes (26:37): Yeah, that’s not going to happen.

Aaron Renn (26:43): So you end up with a lot of problems. Louisville didn’t merge any fire departments. Imagine a city that doesn’t have a consolidated fire department. Imagine a city without a single police department. That was actually Indianapolis. When we merged, the Indianapolis Police Department still patrolled the old city, but the new parts of the city that were consolidated in from the county were still controlled by the sheriff.

Susan Pendergrass (27:13): That is 100% what would happen in St. Louis. Everyone would retain their school system and their police department and their fire department. I lived for a long time in Fairfax County, Virginia, which is a single county government. It’s massive, 150,000 students in their school system. It seems to function with a single police department and fire department. But I don’t think you can backwards engineer that into a place that for hundreds of years has been operating as it has been operating.

Aaron Renn (27:43): Lexington, Kentucky worked pretty well because one, the schools were already consolidated, as in the South it’s typically county school districts. Secondly, there were no other government entities, no township governments, no other incorporated municipalities. So it merged everything. And they were sort of able to solve the urban services district issue because the outer areas of Fayette County were horse farms. They actually put in a kind of green belt rule, you can’t develop out there, because they wanted to protect these scenic landscapes. So there was actually a good reason to treat that differently, because it was a very unique American landscape. Lexington, I think, was pretty successful.

Susan Pendergrass (28:15): They are. I appreciate it when I drive across Route 64.

Aaron Renn (28:39): Lexington was pretty successful and wasn’t especially controversial when they did it, in part because there weren’t all these entrenched interests like there are in other places. If you look at places that did the mergers, they weren’t the Cincinnatis and Pittsburghs. They’ve been talking about consolidation in Pittsburgh forever. It was very hard. And Louisville did it, but it was one of the least consolidated so-called consolidated governments. What the Louisville merger functionally did was dissolve the city of Louisville and reorganize county government. The county government now has a mayor and a council instead of the old fiscal court with the judge executive and all that.

Susan Pendergrass (29:21): That’s kind of what would happen in St. Louis, right?

Aaron Renn (29:36): That’s essentially what they did. They basically dissolved the city and the county government was reorganized, but nothing was merged.

Susan Pendergrass (29:43): Did you have a question?

David Stokes (29:45): I want to get back to the fire district point. We’re talking about why this would be so hard. There’s actually a law in St. Louis that only applies in St. Louis County that makes it impossible to consolidate fire districts. Even if a modest mid-sized suburb annexes an unincorporated part of town, they’re not allowed to provide fire services to that new annexed area, or they can, but they have to pay so much to the old unincorporated fire district that it makes it impossible to do so. That’s just one example of how even if you wanted a full scale merger, it would just be impossible to actually carry through.

Susan Pendergrass (30:34): Why do you think people float this idea, David? Why does it come back every couple of years?

David Stokes (30:38): You know, it’s the old line. I remember a study I read about Pittsburgh and St. Louis many years ago. The question was, are the St. Louis and Pittsburgh areas really inefficient with all the fragmented government? And the conclusion was, well, you would never design a metro area like this, but they’ve both made it work over the last century better than you would think. The conclusion was that St. Louis and Pittsburgh aren’t actually as inefficient as you might assume when you run the numbers.

I think people have trouble accepting that. People look at so many small municipalities, many of them dysfunctional, many of them until recent times funded themselves primarily with traffic tickets, which is a terrible way to fund local government, and that’s not even an exaggeration. And there’s just this fundamental belief that if you can just plan it better you’ll create a better place. I just think it fails.

One of the reasons it would fail, going back to what Aaron led this conversation off with, is that if St. Louis County and St. Louis City joined together, they’re not actually going to lay any government employees off to save any money. St. Louis City government is not going to fire city employees. It’s never going to happen. So you’re not going to save any money and it’s all just going to collapse.

Aaron Renn (32:12): Yeah, New York City and large governments are not more efficient.

I look at it and say, look, I think merger is a solution for failed states, if you want to call them that, in the St. Louis suburbs. Take some micro-suburb that’s a complete scam or is bankrupt and merge it in with its neighbor. Do some consolidation like that, that probably needs to be led by state government, almost like a receivership sort of thing. That’s just kind of good government as you work through it. But I just don’t think the benefits you would gain from trying to do a complete governmental merger of St. Louis City with St. Louis County would outweigh the opportunity cost of how much time and effort you spend on it, when you could be spending that on other things that I think will actually move the needle more.

The downsides are arguably as high as the upsides. There’s no guarantee it’s even net positive in this environment. The time to have merged was when Indianapolis did it in 1970, not in 2026. Nashville did it in the 60s. Jacksonville did it a long time ago.

And then I think it doesn’t fix the fundamental issues around the culture. You’ve got to take a hard look at that and say, it’s maybe very difficult to change. The idea that people who aren’t from here have to be able to move here and get connected and feel like they belong in the city. There’s a couple we know who lived in St. Louis. The wife taught in St. Louis public schools. They’re big urban people. The husband was from St. Louis, and they moved here to Carmel, Indiana.

Susan Pendergrass (33:47): Tell me more about that.

Aaron Renn (34:10): Basically they said, man, people are just so much friendlier here. They make better eye contact, they engage more. It’s just so much more welcoming than it was in St. Louis, even though they were actually in a sense connected because the husband was from there.

So when even people who lived in St. Louis and liked it notice a difference when they leave, that is a killer when you’re already struggling demographically. I had a guy who owned a business in Cleveland who said to me one time, I learned the hard way never to recruit anyone from out of town to work for my company unless that person or their spouse is from Cleveland, because otherwise they will never stay. When that’s where you are as a place, that is just rough. I think that is one of the killers for these river cities.

Susan Pendergrass (35:16): Yeah, what’s the fix for that? I don’t know what the fix is.

Aaron Renn (35:38): I think the optimistic case for St. Louis, and I actually tweeted this a year or two ago, is that St. Louis City educational attainment is really high now. In a sense, it’s a small, highly educated city that is probably going to continue growing more educated. So I think the Pittsburgh option looks viable in St. Louis.

Susan Pendergrass (36:00): And certainly great medical care. I know that the average age is getting older in St. Louis. I think within 10 years, one in four people will be over the age of 65. But we also have an Alzheimer’s research center and access to medical care, which as you get older gets more important. I do think there’s an opportunity to lean in to the medical services that are available, as the country as a whole gets older. I think St. Louis looks more attractive for that reason. So I think you’re right that with universities and medical centers, there’s an opportunity.

Aaron Renn (36:35): Yeah, I think if America’s demographics keep on this trend, a lot of other places are going to get to where St. Louis is. And the thing to be careful of is that when you’re in a declining market, that often prompts centralization of activity and population. What happened with Japan is that once Japan’s population started falling, everybody started moving to Tokyo. It’s Tokyo and a handful of other cities where everything is concentrated, and they literally have ghost towns there.

I don’t think it’s any accident that Indianapolis’ growth really took off once the Rust Belt era and deindustrialization hit the state. Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio have grown in large measure through drawing people out of the rest of the state as those states declined. Huge numbers of people move from Cleveland to Columbus every year.

Missouri is a little different than that. One of your challenges is that St. Louis does not draw people from rural Missouri. When I looked at the data, it’s not like there’s a massive flow into St. Louis from the rest of the state. So you don’t have that siphon bringing people in.

Susan Pendergrass (37:55): There are public safety issues around that, but yes.

Aaron Renn (38:00): And the issue we have is that we’ve now eaten our seed corn. There’s not going to be next generations of children in the towns I grew up in in rural Indiana to move to Indianapolis anymore. The cohort sizes are going to be smaller. So that pump, even Tokyo is declining now in population. That siphon is draining the water table. We can only rely on that so long.

But I think this is the risk for St. Louis in that kind of environment. People with opportunity might avoid or flee St. Louis and go to Austin, Texas or Nashville. They go to the handful of places in America that are really still growing. That’s a threat even for Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio. In a declining market, it’s very hard to get people to want to come to a shrinking city because the opportunity space is shrinking. St. Louis’s opportunity space has been shrinking because you’re losing corporate headquarters and your working age population is declining. That dynamic is really going to be a challenge. But within that, the city of St. Louis might end up doing okay. Again, being small actually helps it here.

Susan Pendergrass (39:25): Any closing thoughts on that, David?

David Stokes (39:27): Just that the part of Missouri that is definitely still growing, and that probably is attracting those young rural people who are moving to a city, is going into southwest Missouri, the Springfield-Branson area. That’s absolutely the growing part of the state. And even Kansas City is growing certainly more than St. Louis is.

Aaron Renn (39:48): Yeah, it’s not a culturally cohesive state. Springfield and that area are definitely growing, and growing despite the fact that they have nowhere close to the urban assets of a St. Louis. It’s interesting to watch, and we’ll just have to see what happens.

Susan Pendergrass (40:05): It is. I think about it a lot. I’ve been talking about this in terms of school enrollment for years and years, where you could see the biggest kindergarten cohort was after the Great Recession of 2009. You know that that’s the biggest kindergarten cohort for the last 15, 16, 17 years. We do nothing but build schools and hire teachers. We are slow to catch on to these things happening. But I think your perspective is certainly very interesting. On the question of the merger, it’s not worth the cost for whatever benefits there might be. But it still gets talked about, so I appreciate you coming and giving us your thoughts on it. Maybe we’ll have to have you back to talk about it again.

David Stokes (41:02): And Aaron, I want you to come back. I want to find out how we get more roundabouts in Missouri. I love roundabouts. I go to Carmel it seems like once a year for these gigantic youth sports tournaments up at Westfield, just a little bit north of you. My kids’ sports take me there. And I love the roundabouts. You cannot get enough of them.

Aaron Renn (41:09): I’d love to talk about that. My favorite topic.

Aaron Renn (41:24): Yeah, it’s great. We hardly ever have to stop. There are barely any stoplights or stop signs left in our city. It’s amazing. We’re one of the few growing places in America where traffic is better today than it was 20 years ago.

Susan Pendergrass (41:32): They’re awesome.

David Stokes (41:45): People don’t realize how good that is for air quality and everything. You just keep moving along, not stop and start. We need 100 times more roundabouts in this area.

Susan Pendergrass (41:55): Are you pretending that people stop at stop signs in St. Louis? Because let’s be honest, people don’t stop at stop signs.

David Stokes (42:00): Well, they roll them, but it’s still wrong when they roll them. Maybe all the people blowing red lights on Kings Highway at 50 miles an hour are just being environmentally conscious. I need to give them more of the benefit of the doubt, I guess.

Susan Pendergrass (42:12): That’s exactly right. All right, thanks so much. I really appreciate it.

Aaron Renn (42:19): Thank you.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The St. Louis City-County Merger with Aaron Renn and David Stokes appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with J.S. Onésimo “Ness” Sandoval, demographer and professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Saint Louis University, about what the data says about the future of the St. Louis region. They discuss record low birth rates and what they mean for school enrollment, why St. Louis is among the top regions in the country for deaths outnumbering births, how the region compares to Pittsburgh and Cleveland, and why suburbs like Chesterfield and St. Charles are aging faster than most people realize. They also discuss the role of housing supply, school choice, crime, and domestic migration in whether St. Louis can attract and retain young families, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00): Well, certainly not the first time we’ve spoken, Dr. Sandoval. At St. Louis University, you are such a fascinating demographer of the region, and I’ve been following your work as new census data has been released. You’ve been writing about it and creating what I think are really cool mapping tools that folks can look at to see how the St. Louis region is impacted. Thanks for coming on to talk about that. But first I want to sort of expand our view, because pretty sure that I read within the last week that the number of babies born in the United States was at an all-time low. Is that right?

Ness Sandoval (00:35): Yeah, so every year the United States will probably be breaking records. The data coming out for 2025 is a record low, and the data coming out for 2026 is even lower. The first few months of 2026, the provisional data that’s out shows even fewer. And this is what we expected. We call this a demographic shock, because in 2026, whenever you create an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear, rational people do not have children until they understand that their job is safe, there’s not a recession coming, and we’re not at war. When you create this sense of fear, young people do the rational thing and don’t have children. We saw this in 2020 with COVID. We saw this in 2008 with the Great Recession. Anytime there is uncertainty, young people will postpone births. And that’s what we’re seeing. This started in November. We started to see the decline in births, and it’s continued from November, December, January, February. And so this is what we’re going to see.

Susan Pendergrass (01:51): So next year is going to be lower. And when you look at the state of Missouri, I’ve been saying this ad nauseum for years that our K-12 school enrollment is declining and will decline because of that sort of peak in 2008, just before the Great Recession. So our biggest kindergarten class was around 2012, and our kindergarten classes have by and large declined ever since. And so those kids are moving through the system. You can project that we will just have fewer and fewer kids enrolled in our K-12 system in the state of Missouri.

Ness Sandoval (02:06): No, we peaked in 2008.

Susan Pendergrass (02:11): By and large declined ever since 2012. And so those kids are moving through the system. So you can project that we will just have fewer and fewer kids enrolled in our K-12 system in the state of Missouri.

Ness Sandoval (02:24): Yeah, this is true, and we have a pretty good chart. We make these for every city. We’re replacing very large cohorts of children who were born. I have a son who was born in 2007, just before the recession. That cohort that graduated in St. Louis was 40,000 students. The baby birth cohort is now 27,000 students. So that’s just in that one year a 13,000 decline. And it’s going to decline every year for the next 15 to 18 years, because we don’t know what the bottom is yet. It has not reached the bottom.

Susan Pendergrass (03:01): Right. People say where are the kids going? I’m like, they’re not going anywhere. They weren’t born. The St. Louis region, like Clayton is declining, Ladue was, I mean, all of these school districts, I think almost everyone in the county has fewer kids today than they had 10 years ago.

Ness Sandoval (03:07): They weren’t born. Yes, and it’s not just St. Louis County. St. Charles County is experiencing this. There are some parts that are growing, in the Wentzville area, O’Fallon, but if you look at the old St. Charles areas, they’re experiencing decline. Families with children are declining in those areas. We had made an interactive map that I think shocked a lot of people, of seniors outnumbering youth. People could not comprehend this. Like, my gosh, this is not 2000 where youth were dominating these neighborhoods. I live out here in Chesterfield. The entire Route 64 corridor is senior citizens dominating the youth in Chesterfield. People are shocked. More seniors lived in Chesterfield than youth in 2010, and that’s only grown since. This is happening throughout West County.

Susan Pendergrass (04:14): Wow. And your maps actually go down to the zip code, right? You have very granular data.

Ness Sandoval (04:27): Across into Illinois, yes. The only way you can turn this around is young people from across the United States deciding that they want to make St. Louis their home, have a family there, create a business there. This is what I promote. We have to get younger. We really should have a preferential option for families with children. And that’s a hard message for a lot of people because they’re like, wait a minute, we grew from 1970 to 2020. And I’m like, but all of that growth was driven by babies born. Over 1.8 million babies were born. And I tell people, just do the math. 27,000 babies per year times 50. That’s the back of the envelope for what’s coming over the next 50 years. Unfortunately, that’s not what’s going to come. It’s going to be a lot lower than that. People are starting to get it. We’re not going to have 1.8 million babies born over the next 50 years.

Susan Pendergrass (05:33): Yeah, and I think about things like individual school systems building new elementary schools when there have got to be a lot of buildings that are empty. And also, won’t there be more competition for public resources between children and older people?

Ness Sandoval (05:49): Yeah. At my previous job at Northwestern, we did a project on this in one of the suburbs because we were studying seniors. There was a debate about how to spend public money. Was it for transit for seniors or transit for children? This was 2006, and this was the debate happening in Chicago. How do you provide paratransit for senior citizens when that number is increasing? We’re just having this discussion because St. Louis is leading. We’re in the top three of regions. Pittsburgh leads the country, Cleveland is second, and St. Louis is third, tied with Tampa. More people dying than babies born. We simply don’t have the number of babies born for the size of our population. And it’s because we’re a very old region. We’re the ninth oldest region in the country.

Susan Pendergrass (06:58): Yeah, I mean, we used to have 800,000 people in the city of St. Louis, right? And now we’re 280,000 or something.

Ness Sandoval (07:05): Yeah, and I was just looking at the numbers. It is very possible within two years that Kansas City will have more babies born in absolute numbers than the St. Louis metro region. That’s how few babies. I’m talking about the region. Indianapolis is about 700 babies behind St. Louis. Nashville is about 800 babies behind. All of these smaller regions are having lots of babies, and young people are moving there. Your future depends on the number of children born. And when you look at population projections, I kind of know what this looks like. When you fall below Kansas City in number of births, at some point Kansas City will be larger than St. Louis. We can project this out. We’re talking absolute births, not birth rates. We had lots of babies born 10 years ago. We were fine 10 years ago.

Susan Pendergrass (08:09): Yeah, wow.

Ness Sandoval (08:29): We can go back and talk about what happened since 2010.

Susan Pendergrass (08:35): Yeah, please. I’m curious what did happen. I know you call it the death spiral when there’s more deaths than births, but how did we get into this?

Ness Sandoval (08:41): So I moved here for the Great Recession. I moved in 2008 to start my job at SLU. And there was hope when I got here. There was some positive momentum happening. I think the region took it for granted that it didn’t have to do anything. We just have to be St. Louis. We don’t have to do anything. Unfortunately, Nashville came on the scene. Then you started to see regions change. Regions thinking we need to get young. And St. Louis absolutely did nothing. Since I’ve lived here, there’s been a lot of resistance to economic development in the region. Nashville, I think it was the popularity of being young, being pro-development. I went to Nashville to actually look at it, like why are young people there? And I went to Vanderbilt. And I saw this really interesting integration between the city and Vanderbilt University. That does not exist here in St. Louis. Making it a vibrant, cohesive, urban experience.

Susan Pendergrass (09:47): Yeah. Right. Now you step off campus at SLU and you’re in an area you don’t want to walk at night.

Ness Sandoval (10:00): Yeah, and even if it was WashU, right. And then you can talk about the Loop. It never recovered from COVID, traffic is down. I think the region has really struggled to attract young people to stay here and live here.

Susan Pendergrass (10:13): Well, we’ve been looking into the issue of crime in St. Louis quite a bit, and I know it’s down and everyone’s celebrating that fact, but I’m not sure when you survey people and ask how they feel walking alone at night, that it’s changed all that much. Even if the number of murders are down, I don’t know that people feel safer walking alone at night, and that’s got to have an impact on whether you want to stay in St. Louis after you have kids.

Ness Sandoval (10:47): Yeah. I think in the city you move out to the suburbs. The challenge is they work and you live for affordability. So many suburbs are against new development, even though they can develop. We see these debates in Chesterfield, that debate in Creve Coeur, several debates out in St. Charles. They don’t even talk about Jefferson County, because they’re celebrating voting down housing. My point is if you don’t want to build housing, Indianapolis is going to build it. Columbus is going to build it. Nashville is building it. We are no longer in the top 50 in new housing permits in the country. We’re 58th.

Susan Pendergrass (11:34): Why though? Is it because there’s not demand, or is supply being constrained?

Ness Sandoval (11:42): Supply is being constrained. Part of it is, when I speak to people, they say it’s going to hurt my home values. People want supply down. But you understand there’s a consequence to this. And home values are always good in St. Louis. But again, we always say there’s a city that we can look to that’s our future, and that’s Pittsburgh. If you really study Pittsburgh and look at it, you’re like, wow, there’s a lot of things we can learn as a city, and say this is not what we want to be. Pittsburgh leads the country in discounted rates on home sales. When people offer their price, most people do not get the price that they want. It’s a significant discount because the demand’s not there. We are about 20 years behind Pittsburgh.

Susan Pendergrass (12:25): Wow. I think a lot, in what I do, about the educational offerings in the region. Before we were recording we were talking about Texas. Texas, number one, doesn’t have an income tax, and also you can pick your child’s school from the get-go. They have hundreds, if not thousands of charter schools. And now they have a private school choice program that I think 250,000 families apply to. And Missouri has an extremely limited private school choice program, maybe 6,000 or 7,000 kids in the state, and not even the ability within St. Louis County to go outside of these tiny little districts. You can’t even go from Clayton to Brentwood. People really feel strongly about this and fight the idea of opening up the county and letting kids go within the county to any school district, and then the legislature fights it every year. And I’m like, we are just becoming less and less competitive.

Ness Sandoval (13:36): I don’t think people understand. I do a lot of work with schools now. We’re going to lose at a minimum 100,000 children under 15 by 2045. This loss is built into the system based on 27,000 births right now. The numbers are starting to show up in kindergarten. We have a smaller kindergarten class, a smaller first grade class coming in. And so a lot of schools are like, wait a minute, what’s going on? This is just starting. You have another 20 years, because we have these large cohorts that were still born after the Great Recession that are going to be replaced by smaller cohorts coming in. And there is no significant migration of children coming into the region.

Susan Pendergrass (14:28): So there are going to be difficult staffing decisions, and people don’t want to hear it. Like, we cannot continue to hire more teachers.

Ness Sandoval (14:32): You have to close schools. You have to close schools, have to merge schools. I’m doing some work in Parkway. People should not be surprised. Parkway is having meetings this month about what Parkway looks like going forward, and people are discussing consolidation. Rockwood is talking about a 15% decline in 10 years. Go out another 10 years, Rockwood will be talking about school consolidation. St. Charles will be talking about school consolidation in the old St. Charles area, the city of St. Charles. This is coming. Everybody focuses on the city and says the city needs to close schools. But you will see a discussion, I think, between Clayton and Brentwood.

Susan Pendergrass (15:06): For sure. Clayton had 2,500 kids. Now they’ve got closer to 2,000. I mean, that’s teachers, that’s buildings. And I know in Indianapolis, I’ve talked to a superintendent in that area. All parents can pick a public school. And he was like, I had some under-enrolled elementary schools and it was great for me because I put a language immersion program in one to bring parents in. I think the resistance to this idea is all about not wanting kids who aren’t paying property taxes, but I think it’s going to flip. Then you’ll be like, we’ve got to fill these seats. We’re paying the same teacher for 18 seats that we could pay for 22 kids. At some point they’re going to have to start laying off teachers. So I think there are some very difficult decisions ahead that you can see now, and there are things that could be done now, like at least not filling open positions.

Ness Sandoval (16:16): I think universities are seeing this, because many of them are relying on tuition and those dollars are not coming in. A smart university has to make cuts because it doesn’t get any better next year or the following year. There will be fewer students coming in. So universities that want to survive are making necessary cuts to survive.

Ness Sandoval (16:45): Again, we don’t know what the bottom of the birth decline looks like. We just happen to live in a state and a region that has seen a significant decline in children. I keep saying we’re modeling the future for people, either as a good or bad thing. They’re like, we want to be like St. Louis, or we don’t want to do what they did.

Ness Sandoval (17:13): I think a lot of people are starting to understand this. It’s like, we’re letting our children go, and we’re not doing a very good job of trying to keep them here. When you had 1.8 million births, you had enough to let children leave your region, leave the state. You don’t have that luxury anymore. Our models show the region should have anywhere between 1.3 million to a million births coming in over the next 50 years. We hope it’s not a million births, because that means you have an 800,000 decline in your population under 50. Or it’s 1.3 million births, which is only a 500,000 decline. But that’s coming.

Susan Pendergrass (17:43): How does immigration factor into it? Because I remember the last time we talked, you said that St. Louis is not very immigration friendly. And of course, the current national environment is not very immigration friendly.

Ness Sandoval (18:03): Missouri and St. Louis cannot rely on immigration to save it. It’s not a state that immigrants are going to come to in large numbers. They’re going to go to Florida. Miami leads the country. Even though domestic migration has people leaving, international migrants are going there as their top destination. They’re going to Philadelphia, they’re going to New York. We get immigrants who come here, but it’s a very small number, like 6,000 a year. We’re not even in the top tier as a top 25 metropolitan region. And Missouri is not either. So Missouri has to rely on domestic migration.

The data will show that probably for the decade, there will be more people dying than babies born in Missouri. Missouri will start to have from a natural perspective more people dying than babies born. And 91 counties across the whole state will have more people dying than babies born. So Missouri will become dependent for growth on domestic migration.

Susan Pendergrass (19:29): Or do we just accept that we’re not going to grow anymore? What’s the impact of that?

Ness Sandoval (19:33): Again, it’s going to be specific. I do think the Springfield area is going to grow, the Branson area, there’s growth. Part of this is retirement, I think. Kansas City is growing.

Susan Pendergrass (19:42): Why Kansas City more than St. Louis? What’s attracting younger people to Kansas City that is not happening here?

Ness Sandoval (19:49): Kansas City is a younger region. St. Louis is a fairly old region. Kansas City is a lot younger and it has a large Latino population, and that’s the largest growing population in the country, birth-rate wise. Latinos are now the second largest population in Kansas City. They surpassed the Black population, which I think even shocked me, because we thought we knew this was coming, but we thought this was going to be post-2030. The fact that it already happened shows just how many Latinos are moving there. And then you have an exodus of Black residents leaving Kansas City as well as St. Louis. I always tell people, when you have young Black families leave or young Black adults leave, those children ultimately leave too. And so that’s part of the story.

Ness Sandoval (20:48): When young people leave, the children that traditionally were born to those young people are now being born in Charlotte, Atlanta, Houston. The number one challenge for St. Louis and the state is the decline in births. If that doesn’t change, then you’re going to see that decline start to show up in five to ten years in our schools.

Ness Sandoval (21:17): And the private schools will simply go out of business because that’s dictated by the private market. Or they’ll do what many of the Catholic schools are doing. They think, we’re going to have middle school now, or we’re going to be K through 12. But then what about the parochial schools? There’s no growth. They’re just taking children out of other schools and putting them in their school system.

Ness Sandoval (21:45): And so again, I go back to Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is about how do we manage population decline? The city is growing a little bit, but 100% of the growth in terms of the losses is in the suburbs. And that’s going to happen in St. Louis. When this loss starts to show up in the demographic accounting, most of the loss is going to be outside of the city of St. Louis. It’s going to be in the Chesterfield areas. It’s going to be in St. Charles.

Susan Pendergrass (22:18): So what could be done from a policy perspective? Chesterfield is trying to have this arts and entertainment district. They put in Topgolf and the concert venues. They’re trying to attract younger people there. Is it working?

Ness Sandoval (22:34): It’s not working. I mean, they have the same slight increase. I just posted this yesterday. People are shocked. The growth is in non-family households in Chesterfield. If you look at the new development, I call it downtown West Chesterfield. These are million-dollar homes, very expensive. Very few families with kids are there. These are empty nesters or dual-income, no-kids households. It’s very expensive for young families to get into Chesterfield today, when your entry-level home that was $170,000 in 1980 is $600,000 today. These are the challenges.

Susan Pendergrass (23:23): So build more starter homes?

Ness Sandoval (23:32): You need more entry-level homes. I’m not even going to use the word affordable. You need attainable homes for two incomes. And they can be built. But what I’ve heard is that a lot of cities do not want these homes. They want the $600,000 to $700,000 homes because of taxes. And so there is this tension there.

Ness Sandoval (23:56): Parkway and Rockwood are going to look very different in 30 years. They were very attractive amenities for young families with children. But I look at the data, and my kids are in Parkway. These schools are under-enrolled. You go and objectively look at the classrooms, you’re like, there should be 30 kids in these rooms and there’s 15. It’s great for me as a parent. I’m glad there’s only 15 kids for my fourth grader. One of the classes in Parkway Central, in the middle school, in his math class, there are eight students. I love it as a parent, but as someone who looks at the data, this is not sustainable.

Susan Pendergrass (24:45): Yeah, lots of one-on-one. Yeah. I’m just trying to figure out what would cause a renaissance in St. Louis. It doesn’t feel super safe. It has some great amenities and a great food scene and now MLS soccer. What would it take? Well, number one, you do have the school system problem where the St. Louis public school system is kind of a dumpster fire. So people want to move out if they have small children.

Ness Sandoval (25:32): Yeah, the decision to move out is made within the first three years once the baby’s born. We can see that in the data. When we moved from Chicago, because we lived in the city of Chicago, we wanted to live in the city of St. Louis. I think most people who move from Philadelphia or Boston are living in the city. We thought the city of St. Louis would be offering the same amenities. Because of the Great Recession, I came a year before my family, and we soon realized the city of St. Louis was not the city of Chicago in terms of amenities. And so we ended up in St. Charles. And I think most people make that same decision.

Susan Pendergrass (26:25): Yeah, my husband and I moved right into the city.

Ness Sandoval (26:27): We see it in the data. People are moving into the city from Philadelphia, from Boston, from Houston. But then, like me, if you have children and you’re not going to pay for private school, because that’s a tax in many ways, they’re going to exit out. And then with the Catholic schools closing in the city, there are going to be fewer options.

Susan Pendergrass (26:50): Yeah. But the public transportation is no good. I mean, there are things.

Ness Sandoval (26:57): And it’s interesting. We did see a kind of experiment during COVID. When COVID happened, the Catholic schools in the county opened up. A lot of families wanted their children in face-to-face instruction. So they left the city. They did not stay. So we had kind of a quasi-experimental design there. Education was very important.

Ness Sandoval (27:26): A lot of people left the city because of that and never came back. And that started before COVID. But I think this idea of school choice is something where parents want it. We have enough anecdotal evidence. When Normandy closed, the school system closed, families moved to Normandy to get their kids into Francis Howell. There’s enough evidence to show that families want to make these decisions. The question would be, would Parkway accept all of the students that would want to be in Parkway?

Susan Pendergrass (27:56): Yeah, the law would have to say that they would have to. You couldn’t let them pick and choose.

Ness Sandoval (28:15): Yeah. And so the question is, you have a lot of people who would love to be in Parkway. I gave a talk at Marquette and I was shocked because a good percentage of the students there were saying those public school students, but the parents had left to get out to West County for their children. So the question is, do you just let the private market dictate this? Those who can leave the city will ultimately leave the city and get out to West County.

Susan Pendergrass (28:50): There’s movement out. And I think in terms of domestic migration, to get parents to move in, you can go to our northern border, Iowa. The state pays for private school tuition. Oklahoma to the south, the state pays for private school tuition. Kansas, you can go to any public school in the state. It’s 100% open enrollment. Arkansas is one of the strongest for school choice, both public and private. I think we’re going to be surrounded by it and just have our arms folded across our chest. Because Parkway doesn’t want all those kids coming, or Rockwood doesn’t want all those kids coming. Parents are simply going to move across the border to a state where they can pick any public or private school. I’ve talked to some parents who have reached out to say, I’m thinking about moving to the region, is it true I can’t pick a school? And I’m like, it is true. You cannot pick a school. And I think they’re like, forget it. I’m not going to make this big decision on where to buy a house. I think if we don’t do things that are family friendly, and if we don’t get crime under control in some way, or have a 911 system where when you call somebody responds, I think it’s interesting that St. Louis will become this example for the nation of what a dying city looks like.

Ness Sandoval (30:08): We have three examples today: Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and St. Louis. Tampa is kind of unique because it is a destination for retirees. The Wall Street Journal has an article today on Cleveland, the renaissance of downtown Cleveland. And Detroit too, it’s a renaissance.

Susan Pendergrass (30:29): Wow. What about Detroit now? So St. Louis hasn’t figured out our renaissance yet.

Ness Sandoval (30:49): And to be honest with you, I think it will be hard. I’m not pro anything, but I find this whole debate about the city and county interesting. I’m not from here, so I don’t have this history of growing up here. But I think objectively, when I look at the budget of the city of St. Louis and compare it to Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh is a little bit bigger. It’s got 25,000 more people. But their budget is significantly smaller than St. Louis City’s budget. Part of me wonders, because the city is both a city and a county, it doesn’t have enough people or revenue to operate as both. And this is what’s helping Pittsburgh out. This is what’s helping Cleveland out, because that county revenue is spread among more taxpayers. In St. Louis City, the county functions are spread among a dwindling number of taxpayers. The city probably cannot be a county anymore. There’s just too few taxpayers to provide both city services and county services.

Ness Sandoval (32:08): I looked at these budgets and I’m like, my gosh, why is St. Louis’s budget so much more? I’m talking not a little bit more, a lot more than Pittsburgh’s budget. Pittsburgh is having trouble. And I don’t see the long-term fiscal situation turning around for the city because it’s got to provide all of these services. The tax base is going to decline. The next three years are probably going to see population loss in the city. The numbers just came out in March, but we’ll get the numbers in May. It’ll probably lead the country again in population decline for large cities.

Susan Pendergrass (32:58): Are we still a top 20 city? We’re number one in population decline, but what about in population size?

Ness Sandoval (33:01): We’re number one in decline. Last year, St. Louis City was number one. We’re declining. We’re not in the top 20 yet, but we’re very close. If we go back to 2020, we’re smaller than we were in 2020. The only reason we’re not number one in decline is because we had so many immigrants that offset our domestic migration loss. But this will be an interesting 2030 census, because it’ll be the first time the region will go into a census with more people dying than babies born. In the last census, we had about 75,000 natural growth. We’re looking at about 25,000 to 30,000 natural decline going into this census without any domestic migration. I tell people that this story is just starting. We have 74 years of the century left.

Ness Sandoval (34:18): I’m just trying to get people to move from the mindset that this is 2010 St. Louis. You don’t have 36,000 births anymore. You have 27,000 and it’s declining, one of the fastest declines in the country. Because of it, we’re aging very fast, and so we have to shift. The region has to make a choice that we start to organize our economy around senior citizens. There’s lots of money to be made from senior citizens, but we will never be viewed as Nashville or Austin as a place for young people.

Susan Pendergrass (34:52): Absolutely. That Route 64 corridor is just going to be all retirement homes.

Ness Sandoval (35:04): We won’t be talking about single family homes anymore. We’ll be talking about senior housing. We’ll be talking about a workforce that’s going to work with seniors instead of a workforce for children. And there is money to be made in that economy. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing. But again, we can look at other parts of the country where this transition has happened. Local government spending is being consumed by senior citizens, the healthcare of senior citizens, the paratransit of seniors. Seniors will lose their ability to drive. That cost typically gets covered by local governments. And so you will not be providing buses for children. You’ll be providing paratransit to get seniors to their doctors. Churches will have to think about being accessible to seniors. I go to Church of the Ascension and they are not prepared. At Easter, one of the Masses, one-third of this section was senior citizens in wheelchairs. The churches are simply not prepared for a parish that’s going to be 50% of the population at 70 years old and older. Restaurants have to think about this.

Susan Pendergrass (36:30): Wow, that’s crazy. Well, interesting stuff. I hope you’ll come back and talk about this more. And certainly I’m very interested in reading everything that you write about what St. Louis can do. We need to figure out a renaissance.

Ness Sandoval (36:51): We’ve got to get younger. The kids are giving us a try. They’re coming to school, they’re coming here because they have hopes. We just have not responded the way we need to. A lot of companies are starting to recognize this. I talked to the mayor and said, you need to be a more proactive voice on this. But the region, this is not a city of St. Louis issue. This is a St. Charles issue, a Jefferson County issue, a Chesterfield issue. Most of the people live outside of St. Louis city. The loss we’re projecting is going to come from the suburbs. And that’s what’s happening in Pittsburgh, that’s what’s happening in Cleveland. 100% of the demographic loss is in the suburbs.

Susan Pendergrass (37:21): Yeah. Wow, that’s crazy. Well, fascinating. Thank you so much for explaining it. I don’t want to be depressed about it, but it’s not super optimistic. We’ll find a silver lining. Thanks, Dr. Sandoval.

Ness Sandoval (37:59): All right, thank you very much.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post St. Louis Demographics and the Future of the Region with Ness Sandoval appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Todd Davidson, Vice President of Programs at the State Policy Network, about how artificial intelligence is reshaping the think tank world. They explore what AI is good at and where it falls short, how organizations like the Show-Me Institute can use it to become more productive without losing their edge, why face-to-face relationships will only become more valuable as AI-generated content floods the internet, how a Hawaii think tank used an AI agent to help fire victims submit legislative testimony, what good policy looks like in an AI-driven energy landscape, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00) Great, well, thanks so much for joining us this morning. Todd Davidson of the State Policy Network, to talk about the topic du jour: artificial intelligence. Thanks so much for coming on to talk about it. I’m afraid to even say anything out loud about AI because by next week it’ll be…

Todd Davidson (00:11) Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Susan Pendergrass (00:18) Nothing really ages — it changes so fast. But I did just read that Mark Zuckerberg has an AI agent who is performing his CEO duties for him. Did you see that? Why not, right?

Todd Davidson (00:28) I saw that, yeah. And then he can just kick back, go down to his Hawaii bunker and just let Facebook run itself.

Susan Pendergrass (00:37) Yeah, I mean, I still haven’t really dabbled in agentic AI, but I know it’s right there and I’m going to want to do it soon. We’re going to talk about AI in the think tank world, but I have to check legislation and hearings and see how those things are going every day. I can well imagine an AI agent doing that for me.

Todd Davidson (01:01) Yeah, if it’s properly trained. So ShowMe Institute, to give the audience broader context, is a member of State Policy Network, and we have sister organizations like ShowMe in states across the country. The Libertas Institute, which is based out of Utah, did exactly what you’re talking about. Connor Boyack, the CEO, built a legislative tracking system that then feeds into their scorecard where they keep track of legislation. He said it took him about eight hours of work to code the agentic AI, but now it does the work automatically. Of course it needs fine-tuning and always has a final human observer that verifies everything, but it’s being used for those purposes right now across the country.

Susan Pendergrass (01:59) So we’re in the think tank world, and it’s probably more of an art than a science at the state level. Tracking the policies — first of all, thinking about the policies that we think would be best for Missouri, then doing a bunch of research on those policies, then creating content on those policies, then trying to talk to legislators and hope that they see our point of view, and that they enact actual laws that reflect those policies. That’s a really labor-intensive job. Which parts of that could you see being picked up by AI?

Todd Davidson (02:33) I’m by no means an expert on AI, but I work with someone who is. What has been explained to me is that AI is very good at synthesizing information. It’s very good at predicting — it essentially predicts the next word. It takes all these inputs and predicts the next set of words, which comes out to us as sentences. So if you are able to give it certain inputs — say, I want you to look at these bills, I want you to look at these things — and give it a sort of walled garden, it can then be prompted to produce any type of analysis that you want. The reason you want that walled garden is because AI can still hallucinate. It can make stuff up. Actually, this just went viral last week: a lawyer down in Georgia went before the Georgia Supreme Court and had AI produce her entire argument. It cited five fictitious cases, and the judges called that out. So you have to give it constraints and say, here are the data inputs, now summarize this for me. And it can get you a pretty solid first draft of that summary. Of course, you’re still going to need a human to go through and edit it and add voice and texture to it. But summarizing that data, saying tell me which of these align with our principles or does not align with our principles — it would be very good at that kind of thing. What it’s not going to be able to do is the creative part. When you think about what is the policy that we want to design for Missouri, what does Missouri need — it’s not at the stage where it could do that. That’s where you would still want Show-Me Institute experts to be crafting those kinds of things. But if something’s already out there and existing, you can summarize it and score it based on criteria pretty easily.

Susan Pendergrass (04:35) So given how quickly firms are moving towards AI — and in fact mandating AI because it’s such a time saver and productivity increase — how does a think tank position itself in that world? There’s so much talk about AI just replacing all of our jobs. Maybe it does replace my job — I don’t know. I’ve heard podcasts generated by AI in my voice, so it could be doing this job right now. I would like to think it wouldn’t be as great, but how does a think tank position itself? What’s our value add in that scenario?

Todd Davidson (05:12) Start by going back to what your mission and objective is. ShowMe Institute — and by the way, I am a resident of Missouri and a big fan of the Show-Me Institute, both from my SPN perspective and from my Missouri resident perspective — we have principles: free markets, a robust civil society, a thriving economy. We want the feds to get out of the way in a lot of cases. We want the government to get out of the way. And then how we execute that mission is through policy change, mostly at the state level, though I know you also work at the local level. So state and local policy change is the objective. How do we go about that? We produce research and then we advocate — in some cases talking directly to policymakers, communicating out to the public through op-eds and things so that the public then talks to lawmakers. And ultimately we get policies passed that lower the income tax, reduce barriers to work, and provide more options for kids in schools. So what AI is going to do is make research and content much easier to produce. By research, again, I mean that summarization kind of research — it’s going to make that kind of stuff extremely easy for folks to produce. Everybody’s going to have a research assistant. What AI cannot do is personal relationships. It will never be able to do that. What it also cannot do is tour the entire state of Missouri, know all of the history and relationships and connections of people throughout the state. So I believe Show-Me Institute and all of the affiliates across the country that are state and local based are going to have an advantage because you’re in your community. You know people, you know policymakers, you know community leaders, you know people that are affected by your policies. And that’s something AI is not going to be able to do. AI can look at the statistics and arguments and academic literature, and it could put together a brief, and that could be useful. It would make your job more efficient — you’d be able to produce those things in a fraction of the time you do right now. But then with that extra time, I would use it to go out and build stronger relationships in the communities, and then use those relationships towards policy change.

Susan Pendergrass (07:51) What about grassroots? More grassroots-type stuff?

Todd Davidson (07:55) Grassroots very much. AI is going to have an interesting relationship with grassroots. In one way, it actually makes it easier for grassroots individuals to engage their legislature. On the other hand, it’s going to create a flood of grassroots engagement digitally. So face-to-face grassroots engagement is going to have more impact. I’ll tell you a story: Hawaii had the terrible fire that destroyed Lahaina a few years back. Hawaii has terrible building codes — it’s incredibly hard to build homes there. That town was completely destroyed, so the state needed to relax its building codes in order for homes to be rebuilt. Well, they weren’t making this change. Show-Me’s sister think tank, called the Grassroots Institute of Hawaii, built an AI platform that allowed individuals to submit testimony to the legislature. Testimony has a higher bar, right? You can email your lawmakers pretty easily, but testimony goes into the legislative record and has to follow a certain format and be structured in a certain way. That’s not something that grassroots individuals were very equipped to provide. So a think tank would typically provide the testimony and then get grassroots supporters to send emails to lawmakers. What Grassroots Institute of Hawaii did was build an AI agent so that an individual could say, “Hey, my house was burnt down, I need these things,” and the AI agent would turn that into testimony and submit it directly to the legislature. It resulted in a skyrocketing number of testimonies being filed. Because of that, the legislature said, “Wow, we’ve heard from 500 constituents — we’ve never heard from that many constituents before.” So they relaxed their regulatory regime, and now homes are being built in Lahaina much faster.

Susan Pendergrass (09:48) Did they know that AI was doing it? Were legislators thinking, okay, this is AI?

Todd Davidson (10:12) That is why they went through testimony. Legislators’ email inboxes — they’re not reading their emails anymore, right? They get thousands of them. But through testimony, the AI was not making up the stories. The people had to fill out the content and explain their story. The AI was just structuring it in a way to make sure that it got submitted as testimony. I do think that is a bit of an arms race. At some point the same thing that has happened with email will happen — there will just be thousands of pieces of testimony and you won’t be able to read all of them. So there was a bit of a first-mover advantage. And once that becomes ubiquitous, I do think what you predicted is going to happen, where legislators just say, well, this is AI-facilitated. And that’s where it’s going to have to go back to face-to-face, bringing those people in.

Susan Pendergrass (11:08) I think you’re absolutely right. As more video content comes out and we all realize it’s AI — I just don’t really believe that any videos are real anymore. I don’t really believe pictures are real. I don’t really believe music is real. And it doesn’t necessarily bother me that much, but I think because of that skepticism and unwillingness to believe in digital content, things happening in real life right in front of us are going to take on higher and higher value, so that we know for sure that if I’m speaking to a legislator, it is me saying it and what’s coming out of my head. That’s about the only way we’re going to know if something is real — or the default is just going to become AI-generated.

Todd Davidson (12:01) 100%, I absolutely agree. And that’s where I think organizations like ShowMe are well positioned. Because you’re in the state of Missouri, you can be in Jefferson City or you can be in St. Louis or Kansas City in those face-to-face relationships. It’s going to make your government affairs personnel far more valuable, your fundraisers who can be face-to-face with donors far more valuable, grassroots activists that are face-to-face. It’s going to put a premium on face-to-face interactions for sure. I agree — there’s going to be so much content out there. You’re still going to need content because that gives you credibility, it gives you what you’re going to talk about. But then you’ve got to pair that with the face-to-face interaction, otherwise it’ll just get ignored.

Susan Pendergrass (12:47) And you can definitely see the gap when people are generating stuff through AI and they don’t know the subject matter enough — like you said about the attorney. But there is definitely a role for humans to say, I mean, I do this all the time with AI: I’ll say give me five of these things, give me five infographics or something like that. But the human has to know which one is the best or which one makes the most compelling argument. AI simply really can’t do that. So while some people would love to believe that AI is going to run the world, I do believe there is an emerging role for human discernment to know which AI products are better than other AI products. Would you agree with that?

Todd Davidson (13:32) Yeah, 100%. I think the sweet spot is utilizing AI to make yourself more efficient or do things that you don’t like doing. But then that raises you up into that discernment phase where you’re the one making the call. I do this all the time — I’m having conversations with AI to increase the outputs. I should not spend any time making infographics. I’m not good at it. But I can have a conversation with AI where it produces that infographic much more effectively than I could. I’ve also found that, if you put the prompting on it, it can help you find those particular sources that you’re looking for. Say you want to write a survey on school choice research — it can help you gather all of those materials much faster. But then you have to make sure that it’s of high quality.

Susan Pendergrass (14:35) What do you think about the current pushback on AI-generated pictures? Do you think that is just a learning phase we all need to get through? Some top artists on Spotify have been determined to be AI-generated.

Todd Davidson (14:57) Really?

Susan Pendergrass (14:59) Yeah. The number two Christian artist is just AI, and across all genres there are artists with millions of subscribers who are just AI-generated music based on what AI knows we all like. So we do like it. Does it matter that there’s no real person writing the music? I don’t know.

Todd Davidson (15:12) It’s kind of sad. Yeah.

Susan Pendergrass (15:21) I know the initial reaction is, that’s sad. But then after a while you’re like, I don’t know.

Todd Davidson (15:26) There is going to be intense pushback to all things AI. AI is very unpopular right now. I saw some polling just last week that showed it is the number one concern of voters. There will be a populist pushback against AI. We’re seeing this pushback against the data centers. There’s even polling that showed a plurality of the population believes it’s immoral to use AI. And I think it gets at the core of some of what you’re talking about here — yes, there’s this very popular, satisfying music, but it loses some human element because there’s not a human behind it. I do think we’re going to see a lot of pushback to AI on multiple dimensions. There’s that cultural dimension. There’s the economic anxiety dimension right now: a fear that AI is driving up energy costs, a fear that AI could take my job. There’s going to be pretty significant pushback. Right now we’re mostly seeing that in anti-data center efforts, trying to stop the building up of data centers across the country. I was looking at some Democratic pollsters today who were pitching that Democrats should advocate for a guaranteed job, guaranteed income, guaranteed healthcare, and a guaranteed home if you lose your job to AI. That kind of populist messaging is going to resonate with a lot of the public. What is the response going to be to that? What are the other solutions that we could advocate for that both allow the continued growth and opportunity and also allow continued innovation around AI, because we’re going to need AI to continue to develop?

Susan Pendergrass (17:30) It’s already here. I mean, we’re doing this in reverse order. And I think my opinion is that massive new technologies always get pushback — like the car. People were on their horses, and then we started designing roads for cars. Calculators got a lot of pushback, the internet got a lot of pushback. But ultimately people decided that they liked it better. I think AI is the same — we just have to figure out how to work with it. And I know that it is threatening to take a lot of jobs, but I see it more as a good thing. It gives us an opportunity to become the expert over AI. AI is not going to be the expert — we still need the human component. Like you said, face-to-face interactions. Legislators are still going to know what Missourians want and how to represent their constituents, and those are real-world issues. The data center pushback is because I don’t want to look out my window and hear a buzz and see a data center — I don’t want all that land going to data centers. That’s a real-world, in-person issue. But I just think we’re going to have to learn to work with it. I don’t think robots are going to — maybe this is where I don’t want to say things out loud — but maybe the robots will take over the world, I don’t know. But personally I feel like it is helpful to get a lot more content out, because you don’t know what’s going to resonate with stakeholders. Whether it’s a video or an infographic or a report or a different type of content, the fact that we can generate these things much more quickly I think is a benefit to us, and it makes the in-person time more meaningful to me.

Todd Davidson (19:11) You’re absolutely right. When a new technology comes out there’s going to be pushback, and organizations like ours have to figure out what’s the policy framework that allows that innovation to thrive without getting in the way. And fortunately we have a lot of those policies already. Like Avery, your colleague at Show-Me Institute, talks a lot about energy. One of the biggest pushbacks on AI is that it’s driving up energy costs. There’s some research that shows that’s not quite what’s happening. What’s happening is a lot of green policies that got passed in the 2010s are coming to roost — the renewable portfolio standards and those things are really what’s driving up energy costs. But even still, what can we do to make energy more affordable and reliable, even with a bunch of data centers added to the grid? And Avery’s got good policy on this: expanding nuclear power, expanding the use of reliable energy sources.

Susan Pendergrass (20:23) It’s separating out consumer electricity from data center electricity. You can carve these things differently.

Todd Davidson (20:29) Yeah, that’s another one — where the data center has its own power source. So there are policies out there that can mitigate it. And on the job question, unfortunately AI is happening at the same time that we’re having a continued cost of living and inflation issue. It’s one more thing that is driving anxiety. It’s not the root cause of what’s going on — we’ve got other factors that we need to address to get inflation under control, particularly on the energy side.

Susan Pendergrass (21:08) Yeah, but I do think it’s great that we have so many opportunities to expand or improve how we do things. In our little corner of the world, which is think tanks, we’ve been doing things kind of the same way for a long time. So I think a new approach to how we do business is a welcome change, and I think we could be a lot more effective.

Todd Davidson (21:38) Yeah, I think we’re going to see far more productive think tanks on the research side. On the litigation side, I was talking to Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. They litigate a lot of cases. With the advent of AI, every lawyer essentially got a legal clerk right away. They went from nine lawyers and a handful of legal clerks to nine lawyers who each now have their own AI legal clerk. It’s dramatically expanded the number of cases they can take on. And the same thing on the research side. On the marketing side, production of content is going to be quite a bit easier and more cost effective as well.

Susan Pendergrass (22:26) Well, I appreciate having a chance to talk to somebody who has a positive perspective on it, because I do hear a lot of doom and gloom when it comes to AI. I was reminded by somebody that many of the scenarios in movies and books about AI are very dystopian, but perhaps it’ll be utopian. We don’t know. It’s all in how we approach it, right?

Todd Davidson (22:48) Yeah, it is. It’s going to be an exciting new world that we live in and we’re right on the frontier.

Susan Pendergrass (22:54) Anyone with little kids, like you — who knows what the world’s going to look like when they’re going to college. So you’ve got to stay flexible, right? Well, thanks so much, Todd. I appreciate you coming and talking to us about it. We’ll have to talk about it again sometime soon when the whole thing has changed.

Todd Davidson (23:02) Yep, stay flexible and always be learning. Yeah, sounds good. Thanks, Susan.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

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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.

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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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On January 21, 2026, the Show-Me Institute hosted an in-depth discussion on crime and public safety trends in the City of St. Louis at the Knight Center at Washington University. Patrick Tuohey, Senior Fellow at the Show-Me Institute, was joined by local experts Gabe Gore, St. Louis Circuit Attorney; Janet Lauritsen, Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri–St. Louis; and Pernell Witherspoon, Senior Professor of Criminal Justice at Lindenwood University.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Watch: The Public Safety Climate in the City of St Louis appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As 2025 comes to an end, we reflect on the progress made this year, from expanding MOScholars and strengthening property rights, to improving telehealth access and supporting Missouri’s entrepreneurs. Despite challenges, including rebuilding after the May 16th tornado, our mission remains the same, ensuring every Missourian has the freedom and opportunity to prosper. As we look to the next twenty years, we invite you to stand with us. Support the Show-Me Institute and help build a lasting legacy of liberty for Missouri. 

Click Here to Support Liberty in Missouri

The post Watch: Help Build Missouri’s Legacy of Liberty appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On July 10, 2025, Keith Kehrer and Derek Rose, lawyers from Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, joined Show-Me Institute Director of Research Susan Pendergrass for a presentation on how the MOScholars program operates, followed by a Q&A session.

In 2021, the Missouri General Assembly created the MOScholars program, allowing individuals and businesses to receive state tax credits for contributions to certified educational assistance organizations (EAOs). But what does that mean for your Missouri tax bill?

In this recorded webinar, you’ll learn:

• What the MOScholars program is and who it helps

• How Missouri tax credits work, and how you can direct your tax dollars

• What qualifies as an EAO

• What to do at tax filing time

• How your participation supports school choice in Missouri

The post The MOScholars Program: Why and How to Participate appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On June 10, 2025, Patrick Tuohey, senior fellow at the Show-Me Institute, testified before the Missouri House Economic Development Committee during a special session focused on proposed stadium subsidies for the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals. In his testimony, Tuohey argued that the proposed funding package is based on a false sense of urgency, fueled by non-competitive offers from Kansas and a misleading June 30 deadline. He questioned the economic value of the proposed subsidies, highlighted concerns about taxpayer risk, and warned against allowing professional sports teams to play local governments against each other.

Read his submitted testimony here: https://bit.ly/4kXtdII

See the recording of the full hearing here: https://house.mo.gov/MediaCenter.aspx

The post Testimony of Patrick Tuohey Before the Missouri House Economic Development Committee June 10, 2025 appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On June 10, 2025, David Stokes, director of municipal policy at the Show-Me Institute, testified before the Missouri House Economic Development Committee to express concerns about the property tax provisions included in a special session bill.

Stokes warned that the proposed property tax caps, added on the Senate floor without a public hearing, are constitutionally questionable, economically harmful, and likely to trigger long-term unintended consequences. He argued that freezing or severely limiting property taxes in certain counties will increase pressure on other revenue sources, such as sales taxes and state income taxes, and lead to greater use of tax districts like TDDs and CIDs. He also raised concerns about fairness and uniformity, noting that identical homes could be taxed at dramatically different rates simply based on how long someone has lived there.

Read his submitted testimony here: https://bit.ly/4kXtdII
See the recording of the full hearing here: https://house.mo.gov/MediaCenter.aspx

The post Testimony of David Stokes Before the Missouri House Economic Development Committee June 10, 2025 appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On April 10, 2025, Ilya Shapiro, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites, visited Washington University School of Law to discuss the ideological and bureaucratic challenges facing American higher education. In this lecture, Shapiro argues that elite universities have abandoned their core mission of truth-seeking in favor of activism, driven by bloated administrations and timid leadership. Drawing on personal experience and national trends, he explains how law schools, in particular, are failing to uphold classical liberal values such as free speech, academic freedom, and equal justice.

Listen to it as a podcast

The event was hosted by the Show-Me Institute, the Federalist Society, the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation, and Show-Me Opportunity.

The post Lawless: Ilya Shapiro on Free Speech in Higher Education appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On April 30, 2025, the Show-Me Institute hosted a webinar featuring EdChoice experts Ben Scafidi and Colyn Ritter, who presented findings from The 2025 EdChoice Friedman Index: All Students, All Options, All Dollars. This first-of-its-kind report measured private education choice across all 50 states. Inspired by the vision of Milton and Rose Friedman, the index evaluated how effectively states empower families to direct education funding toward the best options for their children—whether public or private. The event was moderated by Susan Pendergrass, director of research at the Show-Me Institute.

You can download the Friedman Index here.

The post Watch: 2025 EdChoice Friedman Index Webinar appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Many believe that rural districts and students can’t benefit from open enrollment, but the reality is quite the opposite. Rural students often have few school options, and open enrollment can provide them with greater access to educational opportunities—particularly as the four-day school week expands. In states with open enrollment, rural districts have gained students, with many seeing it as a way to sustain their budgets. In Missouri, over 80% of rural high schools are within a 20-mile drive of at least one other high school, making open enrollment a viable option for many families. Instead of focusing on preventing student loss, rural districts can use open enrollment to attract students and strengthen their schools. 

Learn more about the need for Missouri to adopt strong open enrollment policies here.

The post Missouri’s Rural Schools Can Benefit from Open Enrollment appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Missouri has both criminal and civil penalties for parents who use an address outside their residence to enroll their children in a different school district. This means parents could face fines and even criminal charges just for trying to give their child a better education. But there’s a solution: strong open enrollment policies. By allowing students to attend any public school with available space—regardless of their home address—Missouri can eliminate the need for families to risk legal trouble and empower parents with choice.

Learn more about strong open enrollment policies here.

The post The Crime of Address Sharing: Why Open Enrollment Matters in Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Missouri’s outdated school assignment rules make it very difficult for families to choose the best public school for their children. The Hirshey family’s story is just one example.

When Dawson was seven years old, he suffered a life-changing injury at a baseball game. His recovery required brain surgery and extensive care. Now, as he and his twin sister Delaney grow older, they want to attend a larger school with more opportunities and resources to support Dawson’s ongoing needs. But Missouri’s rigid school boundary laws make that choice nearly impossible—unless their family moves or breaks the law.

Missouri should adopt strong universal open enrollment polices. Open enrollment policies allow families to choose their public school either within their home school district (intradistrict choice) or in a different district (interdistrict choice). By allowing students to attend any public school with available space, Missouri can empower parents with choice and ensure that no family is punished for simply wanting the best for their child.

Learn more about strong open enrollment policies here.

The post Open Enrollment: Empowering Missouri Families appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Founded in 2005 by Rex Sinquefield, Crosby Kemper III, and Michael Podgursky, the Show-Me Institute has spent two decades championing free-market solutions. With key victories like reducing Missouri’s income tax, expanding school choice, and increasing government transparency through initiatives like the Missouri School Rankings Project and the Show-Me Checkbook, the Institute has driven meaningful progress across the state.

As we look to the future, the Show-Me Institute remains committed to empowering Missourians and policymakers to build a freer, more prosperous Missouri.

The post A Legacy of Liberty: 20 Years of Show-Me Institute appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Federalism and The Founders’ Vision with Charles C. W. Cooke appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Patrick Tuohey, senior fellow at the Show-Me Institute, about the Kansas City 33 School District’s recent proposal to issue $424 million in bonds for building improvements. Despite a significant decline in enrollment and a previous failed bond referendum, KCPS is asking taxpayers to fund this initiative through increased property taxes. They discuss whether new buildings can truly address the district’s deeper issues, such as poor academic performance and declining enrollment, if the funds could be better spent elsewhere, and more.

Listen on Spotify

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Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post New Schools, Old Problems: The KCPS Bond Proposal with Patrick Tuohey appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, about his recent report titled Doing Less with Less: Crime and Punishment in Washington, DC. They explore the factors contributing to the rise in violent crime and public disorder, the impact of reduced law enforcement capacity, the broader implications for public safety, potential reforms to improve the criminal justice system, strategies for better resource allocation, and more.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on SoundCloud

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Addressing Crime in Our Cities with Charles Fain Lehman appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On August 12, the Show-Me Institute and Show-Me Opportunity hosted a virtual event where Elias Tsapelas, director of state budget and fiscal policy at the Show-Me Institute, and Aaron Hedlund, chief economist at the Show-Me Institute, made the case for a Missouri Taxpayer Bill of Rights. The event explored the limitations of the current Hancock Amendment, proposed reforms to better protect taxpayers in the state, and more.

Download the full Missouri Taxpayer Bill of Rights Policy Brief Here

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Watch: The Case for a Missouri Taxpayer Bill of Rights Virtual Event appeared first on Show-Me Institute.