The piece focused on five cities: Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Los Angeles, and detailed each city’s experience of homicides.

But what is noteworthy for Kansas Citians is that, based on the Post’s reporting of “crime data from 52 of the country’s largest police departments,” it appears that Kansas City may have the highest homicide rate for 2025—notwithstanding a reduction from previous years.

The homicide rate indicates homicides per 100,000 population; it is a useful tool for comparing cities with different total populations. While Kansas City’s total homicides in 2025 will likely be lower from the peak of 182 in 2023, when adjusted for population, it appears we may be on top. (St. Louis will likely have an even higher rate, but was not included in the Post’s analysis due to its size.)

This should serve as a reminder to all Missourians that it is not enough to reduce crime, though that is welcome. We must adopt policies that demonstrate results year over year rather than congratulate ourselves for drops that may have nothing to do with public policy. And if Kansas City does indeed end 2025 with the highest homicide rate in the country (out of the 52 cities selected for the study), it’s a reminder that public safety—and specifically homicide—must become a greater concern.

The post Kansas City Homicide Rate May Be National Leader for 2025 appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

For this reason, I was surprised when I found out that only a small number of my St. Louis high school friends planned to move back home after college. I experienced a similar shock when I heard the recent Show-Me Institute podcast episode with Susan Pendergrass and Dr. Ness Sandoval. In that episode, Dr. Sandoval lays out the bleak fact that there are more people dying than people being born in the St. Louis region right now. We could rationalize this as a reflection of the overall birth rate decrease in the United States, but the data show that many U.S. cities, such as Austin and Orlando, do not face the same demographic decline.

The natural question to ask is: what is St. Louis doing wrong? Or, perhaps, what are these other cities doing right?

For one, most cities do not face the safety issue that St. Louis does. Every year, St. Louis fiercely competes against New Orleans, Detroit, and Baltimore for the title of “the murder capital of America.” This fact almost certainly contributes to St. Louis’s demographic decline. Who would willingly choose to move to the murder capital of America?

What many outsiders don’t realize is that the City of St. Louis is an independent municipality separate from St. Louis County. In 2020, the City of St. Louis had 300,528 residents and 263 homicides. That is a murder rate of 87 per 100,000 people. Meanwhile, St. Louis County had 1,004,125 residents in 2020 and a murder rate of 12 per 100,000 people. When news sources dub St. Louis as the #1 (or as of September, #2) murder capital of America, they are referring to the City of St. Louis, not the St. Louis region. Unfortunately, many outsiders don’t know this and the whole region suffers as a result.

John Boyd, a business relocation specialist, recently spoke about the impact crime has on a company’s decision to move: “One of the big reasons you see migration from California, New York and Philadelphia is not just high taxes, but crime statistics. St. Louis hasn’t enjoyed the type of growth Kansas City has in recent years, and crime is a big reason why.” Boyd continues, saying that companies are “not merely looking at crime statistics but how crime is and isn’t being prosecuted.” This idea is particularly relevant to St. Louis. Kim Gardner, the circuit attorney for the City of St. Louis, has faced a lot of criticism recently for the way she has handled crime.

If companies choose to relocate from St. Louis or don’t view St. Louis as an attractive relocation destination, job opportunities will be more scarce and fewer college graduates will see St. Louis as an attractive job market. That’s why it’s hard to blame my friends for choosing another city over St. Louis for their first job out of college.

While St. Louis could do a better marketing job of clearing up the perception issue and highlighting all its attractive features for new college graduates, the safety issues need to be addressed and prioritized. All the marketing in the world cannot change the reality of St. Louis City’s worrisome crime patterns.

The post The St. Louis Demographic Decline: One Explanation Among Many appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In many cases, privatizing services—either by sale, contracting, or other options—can lead to better service at lower costs for taxpayers and residents. Privatization is, in short, a good thing.

But it has to be done right. It has to be done as part of an open and transparent process. In Perry County, an attempt to privatize the local county hospital is not being handled properly.

But let’s step back, because the further back you go the worse it gets. In the 1990s, control of Perry County Memorial Hospital (PCMH) was passed from the elected, county hospital board to a private board. I was informed this was done behind the scenes and under the cover of night, like when the Colts left Baltimore. I’m further told everyone involved in that decision is gone now (i.e. dead), so who knows how or why it happened. Perry County still owns the physical hospital itself, but that is all.

Now, that private board is leading the effort to turn over management of PCMH over to Mercy health systems. There has been basically zero public input on this decision. Some community leaders scheduled a public forum on the issue, and nobody from the private board attended. A letter released by community leaders after that meeting stated:

This decision is being made by a small group of people in private meetings. This lack of transparency and secret maneuvering calls for your immediate attention as the PCMH private board has historically acted without transparency. The community’s citizens have a right to information that directly affects their access to health care.

Outsourcing the operations of PCMH to Mercy may be a great move. Heck, it probably is a great move. The economics of small, publicly operated hospitals are hard and getting worse. But that doesn’t mean that an unelected board gets to make these decisions behind closed doors without public input.

I fear the private board will frame its final plan to the county commission as a fait accompli with an implied threat to do something drastic if the county commission does not approve it. Possibilities there could include large cuts to hospital services, shutting down PCMH entirely, or hiring Joe Exotic to turn it into a big cat animal sanctuary. (Okay, probably not the latter.)

This process is bad public policy and bad for democracy. If the Mercy plan is good for the community, make the arguments in public and do the hard work required to convince the people of Perry County. After all, it’s still their hospital, even if just barely.

The post Something Is Rotten in the County of Perry appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Or maybe not, depending on who you ask. A recent Post-Dispatch story highlighted some who seem skeptical about schools reopening. A superintended in a Texas school district is quoted as saying: “As far as 2021–22, at least some part of that school year is likely still going to be pandemic response-related on the assumption that children won’t have access to the vaccine, or at least many won’t.” The article also quotes Michael Mulgrew, head of the United Federation of Teachers in New York, who says it’s impossible to commit to in-person schooling in the fall because it’s theoretically possible that those who get vaccinated might still spread the virus.

In Fairfax, Virginia teachers jumped to the front of the line to get vaccinated, but the district isn’t reopening in-person schooling even though a large majority of teachers have now been vaccinated—and the union won’t even commit to in-person schooling in the fall. The union also said that schools shouldn’t be reopened until all students have been vaccinated (never mind that no vaccine has been approved for kids under 16 yet).

In Chicago, teachers went on strike in the fall, and then the union issued a laundry list of demands for reopening in December. This list including some untenable items like outlawing simultaneous teaching—where teachers both instruct in-person and remotely—and reducing remote learning screen time. The union then defied an order from Chicago Public Schools to return to classrooms in late January, and narrowly avoided a strike by recently agreeing to a partial reopening of schools.

Similar stories have played out in San Francisco and Baltimore, among many other places. Obviously, everyone wants teachers and other school staff to be safe when returning to schools. But one begins to wonder what’s really happening here when it feels like the goalposts are constantly moving and the pretexts for avoiding reopening are so flimsy. Excessive caution about reopening schools also appears to fly in the face of the available evidence on the subject.

There’s simply very little evidence that schools are significant sources of COVID spread. Based on available data, COVID rates for students and teachers mirror the rates in the surrounding community (this doesn’t even include elementary and middle school students, whose rates are predictably lower than the population at large). The CDC director recently said that schools do not need to wait for all teachers to be vaccinated before safely reopening. The CDC also published its own study in late January, and concluded: “There has been little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission.”

Meanwhile, this process is taking an unbearable toll on students. Very few people seem to think remote learning works particularly well; more than a quarter of Missouri parents rated their children’s remote learning experience as a D or F. Remote learning has also left many students and families behind, and has exacerbated existing achievement gaps. We’re still early in the process, but early projections indicate the overall learning loss could be enormous and long-lasting. And it’s not just about learning; research suggests kids are suffering socially and psychologically.

So what does this mean for Missouri? The point isn’t that every school across the state has to fully open tomorrow. Not every district has to have the same plan, as the variables in districts across the state vary dramatically. But we should be listening to what experts have to say and paying attention to the data. And since experts indicate that schools can be reopened safely, it seems that Missouri schools should be planning to do just that as soon as possible. The concerns and needs of parents ought to come before those of special-interest groups.

The post Who’s Driving the Bus on School Openings? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Baltimore’s population has been steadily declining in the past few years. It stands at about 610,000 today—down from 620,000 in 2010 and 650,000 in 2000—and its height of 950,000 people in 1950. Like Kansas City and St. Louis, it has struggled with a high homicide rates, coming in second behind St. Louis in 2017 and ahead of fifth-ranked Kansas City. Like Kansas City’s moniker ‘Killa City,’ Baltimore’s homicide rate earned it the nickname ‘Bodymore, Murderland.’ Baltimore students are some of the worst served in the country.

No one can accuse Baltimore of doing nothing to reverse its fortunes. In fact, Baltimore seems to have done everything that developers and urban planners recommend. Consider the following amenities paid for in part with city and state subsidies:

• Power Plant Live! entertainment district (developed by Baltimore-based The Cordish Companies, developers of Kansas City Power & Light District and St. Louis Ballpark Village)
• Rail transit such as the Baltimore Metro and LightRail Link
• A downtown baseball stadium, Oriole Park at Camden Yards
• The National Aquarium
• The Baltimore Convention Center, first renovated in 1996 and now considering another renovation and expansion; the convention center is connected by rail to . . .
• Baltimore Washington International Airport (BWI), including recent renovations and new concourses
• Baltimore even has a waterfront development!

These are developments that would make any recent Kansas City or St. Louis mayor salivate. And yet none would want to turn their cities into Baltimore. Why?

Maybe it is because we all understand—whether we admit it or not—that cities need to get the basics right. Cities should prioritize basic infrastructure, public safety, and tax policy done well before they splurge on expensive baubles. Kansas City and St. Louis do not yet have the basics right, and nothing should distract us from fixing it.

The post Baltimores on the Missouri? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Success? How does Mr. Burt define success? According to his LinkedIn account, Burt was the vice president of Sales and Services at the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association from March 2005 through December 2008. During that period, Baltimore taxpayers subsidized a new Hilton Hotel to the tune of $300 million. It opened in August 2008. Attendance at conventions in Baltimore has remained flat, and according to The Baltimore Sun, the convention center lost over $5 million in 2014 and again in 2015. The President of the City Council suggested selling the hotel, saying, “The hotel has been a drain on the city since it opened. We floated $300 million in bonds for it, and since it opened, we’ve been constantly losing money.”

Would Kansas Citians consider that a success?

From January 2009 through August 2010, Burt joined the Indianapolis Convention and Visitors Association as the senior vice president of sales and services! Indianapolis also expanded their convention center during that time. According to the Indianapolis Business Journal, the project has failed to meet expectations.

Attendance for state and national conventions in 2009, before the construction was in full swing, was 459,944. Attendance in those two categories in 2012 was 483,164, a slight increase from three years earlier—before the expansion.

Is that success?

From August 2010 through June 2014, Burt was vice president of sales and services for Destination DC, the “the official destination marketing organization for the nation’s capital.” DC was also in the process of building a hotel: the 1,200 room Marriott Marquis adjacent to the Washington Convention Center. It opened in April, 2014 and convention-related hotel room nights in 2014, 2015 and 2016 are all lower than the peak of 512,000 in 2011—before the hotel opened.

More success?

People who crisscross the country spending taxpayer dollars may think that every new construction is a success. But that is not the case for the taxpayers and city councils left holding the bill for underperforming hotels and convention centers. Kansas City’s own past is littered with unfulfilled convention promises, yet each one was supposedly a success. Taxpayers have every right to wonder how much more of this kind of success they can afford.

The post A New Convention Hotel Is Not Necessarily a Success appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On Tuesday, April 5, Saint Louis voters will decide whether to extend the city’s 1 percent earnings tax for five more years.

Without a doubt, this is a hugely important decision.

In inviting me to talk to you, Ron Zager (co-chairman of the Missouri Progressive Action Group), asked that I begin by presenting both sides of the argument—for and against the earnings tax .

I am happy to do so. It makes for an interesting—and even a startling—contrast.

Supporters cite three principal reasons for extending the earnings tax:

1. It is simple, fair, and easy to collect. Businesses withhold $1 out of every $100 from the paychecks of all of their employees and pay it directly to the city. They also pay a 1 percent tax on their net profits.
2. It brings in a lot of revenue—almost as much as the combined receipts from the city’s property, sales, and utility taxes. It provides a third of the city’s General Revenue Fund, used to support fire, police, courts, streets, parks, recreation, and other day-to-day city services.
3. A large portion of this revenue is like manna from heaven. People who commute into Saint Louis from the surrounding suburbs account for more than half of the city’s annual earnings tax receipts of about $160 million. And why not? The high-earning commuters are significant consumers of city services, swelling the daytime population of the city by about 35 percent.

To sum up the case in favor of retention: The earnings tax is critical to the continued functioning of city and the continued provision of police and other services to a population that includes a high proportion of low-income residents. It is a real lifeline. The city would be in danger of going bankrupt without it.

Opponents have three main reasons of their own for eliminating or phasing out the earnings tax:

1. It encourages people and businesses to move out of the city.
2. It also encourages an ongoing merry-go-round of tax carve-outs and special favors for large and well-known firms. The city does not extend the same benefits to thousands of smaller businesses, which take care of most of the daily needs of people who live in the city, such as the neighborhood grocer, cleaners, pharmacist, or auto repair shop.
3. Though not a regressive tax (applying the same 1 percent to people at all income levels), it is a cruel one. Unlike federal and state income taxes, there is no exemption from the city earning tax for working people at or below the poverty line. The tax hits the first dollar of income even from the lowest-paying jobs. A still greater problem is the narrowing of job opportunities in parts of the city experiencing a rapid out-migration of people and the closure of many small businesses.

The minuses are really the flip side of the pluses I have just mentioned.

Yes, the earning tax is easy to collect, but it is also easy to avoid. As a business owner, you can avoid the tax on your net profits simply by moving your business to the suburbs—anywhere outside the city. There is no earnings tax in Clayton, here in Frontenac, or anywhere else in Saint Louis County and other surrounding counties and municipalities. If you did move your business, many or even most of your employees who already live in the county would, out of their own self-interest, applaud your decision. And others who live in the city would be given a reason to move to the county.

Yes, the earnings tax pays many big bills for the city. By the same token, it provides a strong incentive for individuals and businesses—who have bills of their own to pay—to relocate in order to avoid the tax.

By collecting more than half of earning tax revenue from commuters, the city is (inadvertently) making a powerful argument for downtown-based law firms and other businesses with a large number of highly paid employees to take flight—for both economic and personal reasons. At one stroke a firm can give many of its officers and employees an instant 1 percent raise while sparing them the bother of a long commute. So what can the city do to prevent such businesses from moving?

If you are the sitting mayor or other high-ranking city official, here’s the answer: Offer big potential flight risks all kinds of tax breaks and other incentives to stay downtown. Find ways to abate property taxes to keep prestigious firms from leaving downtown. Waive the half-percent payroll tax (separate from the earnings tax) for large employers such as Anthem and Wells Fargo. And lobby the state for more handouts.

But of course, given your obsession with preserving earning tax receipts, you do that only for the big guys and you forget all about the little guys who are so numerous (even in decline) that you know little or nothing about them.

A classic example of how this works can be taken from 2011, when Stifel Financial Corp., which has had its corporate headquarters in downtown Saint Louis since 1890, announced plans to buy its downtown office building and expand its workforce in the city by a couple hundred people. Mayor Francis Slay called it “tremendous news for the future of downtown.” He also helped Stifel get some $17 million in public financing for the purchase and renovation of the building.

Why would a large and successful financial firm need help in feathering its own nest? Ron Kruszewski, Stifel’s CEO, said it all: “There’s very little investment going on right now without some incentives.”

That prompted Bill McClellan of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to comment in one of his columns: “When liberals like me argue for comprehensive health care, critics call us socialists. But when businesspeople demand public money to underwrite their projects, hardly anyone says anything.”

(I’ll take issue with McClellan on one point here: There is at least one institution that has fiercely and consistently opposed all forms of corporate welfare and crony capitalism, whether it is providing public funds for new corporate headquarters, public funds for professional sports stadiums, or any other kind of commercial development. That is the Show-Me Institute.)

To sum up the minuses: the earnings tax is a tax on work and enterprise, and when you tax something, you get less of it. In this case that means fewer jobs and less growth. The earnings tax has also encouraged unfair and unwise favoritism in tax practices—decisions made up on the fly to keep big-name businesses from bolting to the county. It’s time for a long look at Saint Louis city government—how it is financed and, more fundamentally, how it thinks.

Let us take a moment to consider decade-to-decade changes in the relative importance of Saint Louis among major cities in the United States over a long period of time—both before and after the introduction of the earnings tax in 1954.

According to census data, the last time Saint Louis moved upward in the ranks of U.S. cities was in the 1890s. The population grew from 452,000 people at the beginning of the decade to 575,000 in 1900, and Saint Louis moved from being the 5th largest city in the country to the 4th (behind New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia).

Of course, that was just prior to the Saint Louis World’s Fair. In that same amazing year of 1904, Saint Louis also hosted the world’s third modern Olympics—following the 1900 Olympics in Paris and the 1896 Olympics in Athens.

Saint Louis held onto 4th place until the 1920 census, when it was overtaken by Detroit and Cleveland, dropping to 6th. It was passed by Los Angeles in 1930 and Baltimore in 1940, falling to 8th. It remained in that spot in the 1950 census—when the city’s population hit an all-time peak of 857,000.

At that point the city’s population went into a steep decline that continues to this day. Since 1950, its population has dropped from close to 900,000 to a little more than 300,000—discarding almost two-thirds of its human body weight—and Saint Louis has gone from being the 8th-largest city in the country down to the 60th, behind such places as Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Wichita, Kansas.

It would be absurd to place all or even most the blame for this decline on the earnings tax. It would be equally absurd to deny that the earnings tax has made a significant contribution to the depopulation of the city and the growth of surrounding areas.

For one thing, we know that downtown Saint Louis no longer rules the roost as the unchallenged commercial center of the Saint Louis region. Clayton has become a strong second center, and other places around the county are also filled with offices and business enterprises. It is only in Saint Louis City that you find acres and acres of abandoned houses, deserted storefronts, and boarded-up factories.

Here’s a statistic that may surprise you: There are now more people who commute into Saint Louis County . . . both from the city and from Saint Charles and other counties . . . than there are people who commute into the city from the county or other jurisdictions. There are 236,000 people commuting into the county versus 172,000 commuting into the city, according to recent census data.

Somehow, Clayton and other municipalities receiving this great daily influx of commuters have been able to handle it . . . without instituting an earnings tax or having everything from the streets to public safety fall to pieces. Why is it any different for the city of Saint Louis? Why is the city unable to cope without taxing the earnings of people who come there to work?

Let’s turn then to the question of whether it is possible to phase out the earnings tax without throwing the city into bankruptcy and fulfilling the worst predictions.

Bear in mind that the proposal on Tuesday’s ballot in the city calls for phasing out the earnings tax over 10 years—whittling away at a $160 million funding gap that would occur in the year 2026 through spending cuts or revenue enhancements averaging $16 million a year between now and then.

Is $16 million a year too tall a mountain to climb? Somehow, in the city’s desperate efforts in recent months to persuade the Rams and the NFL to keep the team in Saint Louis, the city funneled $16 million through the Saint Louis Convention & Visitors Center Commission to pay legal fees and other expenses in what turned out to be a losing effort.

Before that, Mayor Slay and Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon were prepared to raise about $400 million to pay for a large portion of the cost of building a new downtown stadium for the Rams. That alone would have equaled the revenues from the earnings tax over a two-and-a-half-year period.

If almost any large business you can imagine were to lose customers year after year—eventually losing more than half of its business base—you would expect it to downsize drastically, if not go out of business.

Why is it—despite the steady, continuing loss in population—that the city’s budget continues to grow, if only slowly, from one year to the next, with few if any large reductions in its workforce?

Faced with such questions, city officials typically shift the focus to public safety, saying they need more rather than fewer police and firemen. Public safety accounts for a little over half of general funds expenditures. Why, then, is it so hard to trim the other expenditures that make up about 45 percent of the budget?

There are other ways that the city can either cut expenditures or raise revenues besides the shock of instituting sudden and drastic increases in property or sales taxes. It could raise hefty sums of money by privatizing assets such as the airport or the water system.

It could also make a serious effort to raise some revenue from its large nonprofit institutions. As Post-Dispatch business columnist David Nicklaus pointed out in a recent article:

These universities and hospitals depend on city service but don’t pay property taxes. Boston and other cities have negotiated payments from their big nonprofits; Saint Louis could try to do the same. Eliminating the 1 percent earnings tax should make it easier for these institutions to attract and retain employees; wouldn’t they pay something to make the tax go away?

But none of those things is going to happen without a fundamental change in thinking on the part of city officials who have come to look upon the earnings tax as the sine qua non of Saint Louis city governance.

Following the last election, when voters re-approved the earnings tax, city officials heaved a sigh of relief, agreed that the tax did indeed put the city at a competitive disadvantage, and promised to study alternatives. That was five years ago. And since then they have done nothing.

Maybe if the vote is closer this time, they will begin to think differently. But maybe not. Maybe they will just go on hoping for miracles while continuing to pursue policies that have contributed the city’s decline and fall from the heights it once occupied as a great American city.

The post The Saint Louis City Earnings Tax: Lifeline or Noose? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Far from it. Of the 77 U.S. cities that KPMG ranked (which was not exhaustive of all major metros), Saint Louis ranked 45th and Kansas City ranked 46th. Among the cities cheaper than Saint Louis (and Kansas City) are regional competitors like Nashville, Omaha, Cincinnati, Memphis, Indianapolis, Cleveland, and Oklahoma City, to name a few. Worse yet, Saint Louis was more expensive than all 18 Southeastern cities KPMG looked at, from Atlanta to New Orleans.

So where did the Post-Dispatch get a top ten ranking for Saint Louis? If we only consider regions with populations greater than two million (of which KPMG ranked 31), Saint Louis is the 9th cheapest. I will leave it to the readers of this blog to decide if Saint Louis should pat itself on back for being cheaper than New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, when it has higher costs for businesses than Nashville, Memphis, and just about every other regional competitor. But if we do decide to use population as criteria, it seems more justified to look at metros with populations similar to those of Saint Louis and Kansas City (between two and three million residents). When we do that, Saint Louis is 7th and Kansas City is 8th out of 14 such cities. That seems awfully middling.

That’s probably why, if one reads the study that the Post-Dispatch reports on, they’ll find that it does not claim that Saint Louis is among the most competitive cities in the country. KPMG didn’t even break down cities by population in the study, choosing instead to do so by region.  The Post-Dispatch story (while citing the study) is actually based on an ancillary KPMG press release, which lauds Cincinnati, and is careful to note context.

Titling an article “St. Louis among most cost-competitive cities for business, report says” when the report in question says no such thing is a questionable decision for a newspaper of record. But this is not just a problem with the headline. The article itself is equally misleading, and it was not a headline writer who placed this story front and center on the Post-Dispatch’s website less than a week before a vote on multiple tax issues (where the city’s business climate is an issue). 

The post Report: Saint Louis, Kansas City *Not* Among Most Cost-Friendly Cities for Business appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

It would be a shame if this money came from the police department amidst a spike in Kansas City murders. Where else could we find the money?

• Perhaps the city could sell the land it is considering using for the convention hotel. After all, that is city-owned land that is also blighted. And according to The Star, it’s worth $13 million. The Pitch says $4.5 million. Either way its a good start. And the city likely owns all sorts of valuable land that it is doing nothing with.
• The city could halt its awful idea to spend $12 million in taxpayer funds to tear down and rebuild a grocery store within 3 miles of at least two other grocery stores.
• Schulte is under order from the Council to find $18 million for the so-called Jazz District. Maybe tearing down “dangerous” buildings is more important.
• We could stop the streetcar project altogether on the grounds that protecting the health and well-being of thousands of families on the east side is more important than a 2.2 mile streetcar to nowhere.

The post The Demolition Option in Kansas City appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

                The recent downgrade saw Saint Louis’s general obligation debt rating fall one notch, from Aa3 to A1. That still leaves the city with a rating denoting an upper-medium investment grade, even if the rating is well below prime. And as some news sources have pointed out, that means Saint Louis’s rating is higher than Chicago’s or Detroit’s. Unfortunately, if we don’t compare Saint Louis to cities exiting or very likely entering bankruptcy, its rating is relatively low, as the chart below demonstrates:

                A lower bond rating can lead to higher borrowing costs. In the same way that an individual with a low credit score might have to pay higher interest rates on a car loan or a mortgage than someone with a great credit score, a lower rating for a city can mean it has to pay more to borrow. As cities regularly borrow money to make civic improvements, the higher cost of borrowing means residents pay more for large projects like, say, a football stadium. Speaking of stadiums, the rating for nonessential debt (read: convention center and stadium) issued by the Saint Louis Municipal Finance Corporation was also downgraded, to A3. That corporation would responsible for issuing bonds for a new stadium.

                The primary reason for Saint Louis’s weak credit rating is the city’s “weak socioeconomic profile,” which is admittedly difficult for city leaders to fix. However, there are ways city hall could work to increase the city’s bond rating. According to Moody’s, the city is too reliant on the earnings tax. In addition, the city could boost its rating by making an effort to reduce total debt. Unfortunately, with the city prepared to go even further into the red to build a billionaire a new football stadium, it may be a while before Saint Louis can brag about its credit rating to people who don’t live Chicago. 

The post Bad for Borrowing: Saint Louis Bond Ratings Slip appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Steve Vockrodt at The Pitch considers other costs that the city doesn’t seem to be including in their estimates:

The property upon which the hotel will be built (bound by Truman Road and 16th Street and by Baltimore and Wyandotte) is mostly city-owned, which means that it currently generates no property taxes. Troy Schulte, the city manager, has said the land is worth $13 million.

Assuming that valuation is correct, it means that the land—if the city sold it to a developer and it returned to the tax rolls—would generate $333,998 a year in property taxes. Under TIF, the development captures all that money.

Given these arrangements, then, the public subsidy for the hotel is going to be a lot more than $35 million. About half the cost of the $300 million project will wind up being paid for by public taxes.

But wait, there’s more. The Kansas City Business Journal adds:

The post Convention Hotel: Power & Light District v. 2.0? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

We have shown census tracts representing Saint Louis’ population distribution before. However, a different way to view the data is to consider metro population within certain distances from a central point (in this case city hall), allowing easier city-to-city comparisons. When we compare Saint Louis to cities of similar population, we observe that the city has abnormally low population density in its core. According to 2010 Census figures, Saint Louis had the 18th largest MSA population (2,812,896), but only the 31st largest population within 10 miles of city hall. For example, compared to Baltimore, with a slightly smaller population than Saint Louis (2,710,489 in 2010), Saint Louis has a larger metro area but much lower densities close to the city center.

In fact, the area within a mile of the Saint Louis city hall has a lower population density (5,020 per square mile) than most of the rest of the city. This is atypical among peer cities, which have their highest densities downtown (averaging 9,000 per square mile). The map below shows population density in Saint Louis in concentric one-mile rings radiating from city hall:

In addition, contrary to the narrative of a rebounding core, the city’s population density fell most in Saint Louis City from 2000 to 2010, as the map below demonstrates:

Population did increase in certain neighborhoods in the central corridor and in the heart of downtown Saint Louis. And the growth downtown is somewhat misleading because of the incredibly low base it grew from: in 2000, the population density less than one mile from the courthouse was a mere 3,870 persons per square mile. And in the city as a whole, notable neighborhood gains are more than made up for by loses in areas to the north, south, and east of those improving neighborhoods. Looking at the region as a whole, outside of the heart of downtown, population density only showed steady growth in areas further than 25 miles away from city hall.

Saint Louis’ low population density and abnormal population distribution has important implications for the provision of public services. For example, when the type of service provision relies on density (such as with transit), it may be better for the city to model its service on other cities with similar densities rather than ones with similar MSA population totals. In addition, the pretense that Saint Louis’ downtown is (or should be) the dense economic engine of the region that drives much of regional planning may be inappropriate and result in misaligned public services.

However, the abnormal situation of Saint Louis’ downtown is also a reason to hope. Other cities show that there is a market for downtown living, and perhaps if the officials focus on safety and service instead of big-bang projects, organic growth will take hold. Or maybe they’ll build a new football stadium instead.

The post Ditching City Hall: A Saint Louis Development Story appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“Good, smart transit—a mix of buses rails, and other people movers—is a vital component of any successful city.”

But does a city really need a streetcar, or for that matter any type of light rail, to be successful?

Certainly many cities in the United States, more than 50, have some form of fixed rail transit. The largest rail systems are the New York City Subway and the Chicago L, but many small cities like Kenosha, Wis., Little Rock, Ark., and Tucson, Ariz., also have light rail or streetcars. However, many cities, large and small, do not have rail transit. Cities like Honolulu, San Antonio, Orlando, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati have been popular cities to work and play in for many years without much or any fixed rail. These cities, and many others like Kansas City, rely on bus systems.

There’s no reason why Kansas City cannot continue to rely on buses. Whether it’s rapid transit or simply providing service to wide areas, buses are capable of meeting cities’ needs in most situations. For example, the Chicago Transit Authority’s bus system had more than 314 million boardings in 2012. KCATA only had around 16 million boardings that year. The limits of KCATA’s bus system is yet to be reached.

While rail systems may be necessary in cities with significant congestion and population densities, nowhere does Kansas City have population or traffic to make rail necessary. And while it is not necessary, rail has its drawbacks, paramount of which is cost. For instance, Kansas City’s proposed streetcar expansion (less than 10 miles of routes) costs were more than double the entire capital spending on KCATA’s 250-plus bus fleet from 1992 to 2002.

Rail supporters contend that rail transit creates development, drives density, and is necessary to make Kansas City an attractive city for people to live in. But much of that belief is based on anecdotal evidence from successful cities with rail, usually ignoring places where rail has failed to drive development. Cities like Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, Buffalo, and Saint Louis have seen little regeneration from their rail lines, some of which cost more than a billion dollars.

Kansas City needs efficient transit that serves the community. It does not need rail to be successful, and residents should not let city officials with status anxiety waste hundreds of millions just to say Kansas City has rail.

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As soon as I read the list of cities to which St. Louis is judged as being similar, the issue of government structure jumped out at me:

St. Louis fell in the “Skilled Anchor” category. These cities are typified by slower growth, lower diversity and higher educational attainment. Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Akron and New Haven are other Skilled Anchors.

Which two American cities have a metropolitan government structure most like St. Louis? Baltimore and Pittsburgh, and I doubt anyone would dispute that. Baltimore is also an independent city-not-within-a-county, like St. Louis, and the metropolitan Pittsburgh and St. Louis areas are the two most fragmented in the country (as defined by government units per capita).  Both of these cities, especially Pittsburgh, were covered in detail by my “Government in Missouri” policy study. (For the fragmentation info, check out Table 9 on p. 29, and read endnote 23.)

I am not trying to draw any causation here, or even really any correlation. It may be just coincidence that St. Louis, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh are all judged as similar cities by the measures of the Brookings Institution. But then again, perhaps the similar government structures have resulted from how the three communities have adapted to various changes over time, now bringing them into similar circumstances.

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The statistic quoted by McCracken, that St. Louis was once the fourth-largest city in the United States, but is no longer among the top 50 cities, likely comes from the same statistical source used in this wikipedia list. There, it is plain as day: Austin: #16 (pop: 743,000); St. Louis: #52 (pop: 356,000). Never .mind the footnote in the list indicating that, like Baltimore, St. Louis is an independent city that is not a part of any county. More relevant is the fact that a city’s true population rarely comprises only the people who reside in its boundaries, but also the people who live and work within the vicinity.

There’s a standard measure of such population groupings, called “metropolitan statistical areas” (MSAs). Here’s a list of the top 25 MSAs and their populations. St. Louis is listed 18th now, with a population of 2.8 million. That’s more like it. Notice that Austin is not in the list? I found it here, listed 48th (2002 population: 1.3 million).

It’s true that the Austin MSA is growing fast, much faster than St. Louis’, but it’s unlikely that it will overtake us soon. What can residents of St. Louis and the state of Missouri do to ensure that we remain significant and grow strong? The Show-Me Institute has definitely covered some of this ground before. Here are some reminders.

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Unfortunately, as has been demonstrated by a recent court decision, Missouri was among the states whose eminent domain reforms merely rearranged deck chairs on the Titanic. Unless the Missouri Supreme Court proved willing to restore the property rights guaranteed by the state’s Constitution, cities and agencies across the state could continue to take perfectly normal properties in order to give them away for the profit of a governmentally preferred owner. With last week’s unfortunate decision in City of Arnold v. Tourkakis, (and kudos to Nick for an excellent post on this topic) it seems unlikely that the Missouri Supreme Court is willing to prevent the eminent domain abuse that currently plagues this state.

This abandonment of property rights is deeply unsettling. As a nation — and as individual states — Americans adopted Bills of Rights in order to make sure that certain essential liberties would never be subject to restriction or elimination. Among those freedoms is the assurance that governments have no right to take away someone’s property unless it is required for the construction of a road or public building. The real-life consequences when the government does take someone’s property illustrate why this power mustbe tightly limited.

Eminent domain is rarely threatened against wealthy people or those who can fight back. Instead, the usual targets are communities composed of minorities, the poor, and/or the elderly. In the middle of the 20th century, cities so regularly used eminent domain against black neighborhoods that the practice was commonly referred to as "Negro removal." That offensive label eventually fell out of use, but poor black communities continue to be condemned far more frequently than white communities. A 1989 study estimated that of 10,000 families that Baltimore displaced in the name of removing blight, fully 90 percent were African-American. Mindy Fullilove, an expert on the impact of eminent domain on minority communities, estimates that more than 1,600 black neighborhoods have been destroyed nationwide.

But then there are elderly people. In Kelo v. New London, Wilhelmina Dery was an 87-year-old still living in her family home, in which she was born. All she wanted was to live out her final days in those beloved, familiar settings. She eventually did get her wish, but only because she died before the city got its chance to kick her out of her home.

In Norwood, Ohio, the city took the residence of Carl and Joy Gamble, an older couple who received their condemnation notice just days after they were finally able to retire. They were uprooted from the home in which they had raised their family and built their American Dream, and separated from their nearby family and friends, after which they moved into a small apartment with a daughter in Kentucky. After a grueling three-year legal war, the Ohio Supreme Court vindicated their rights, but the stress drove Carl to his grave and left Joy in such delicate health that she couldn’t return to the home she had sacrificed so much to save.

I was recently told about an elderly couple in Rolla who weren’t physically able to cope with a move when they were threatened with eminent domain. The wife had Alzheimer’s disease and the husband was terrified to complicate her dementia by moving her to an unfamiliar environment. Unmoved by their plight, the city tried to make it look like they were just holding out for more money. One councilmember said they should just move to a nursing home.

Someone’s home represents their stability and shelter, both in physical and emotional ways. It is the centering location in their life, the place to which they should be able to return each day and know that they have their own place in the world. These things are especially precious for people who can claim ownership of very little else. But rather than protecting the rights of these citizens, both courts and legislatures have been content to sacrifice their security in the name of "progress," or — more coarsely — so they can be replaced with a wealthier, "more desirable" class of people.

Eminent domain abuse is not just unconstitutional — it is unjust, immoral, and abhorrent. And, assuming that Missouri’s lawmakers and courts will continue to stand by as more and more home and business owners are wrecked by these abuses, the people of this state will have no choice but to
amend the state Constitution in the hopes of restoring the security that should be an American birthright.

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