Figure 1: Violent Crime Per Capita (St. Louis, Kansas City, and Springfield)

The chart below shows the violent crime per 100,000 people from 2004 to 2023.

Source: FBI Crime Data Explorer (CDE)

The violent crime statistic includes aggravated assault, homicide, robbery, and rape. The chart above displays the convergence in crime numbers between the three largest cities in Missouri. The specific per capita rates in 2023 for the respective cities are: St. Louis (1,439.3), Kansas City (1,483.1), and Springfield (1,178.1).

This would seem like good news for St. Louis when looking at the chart above and seeing a steady decline in violent crime, and it is, but it doesn’t change the fact that the city still ranks within the top 10 most dangerous cities in the United States by many metrics, along with Kansas City.

Crime being down in St. Louis is good. In my opinion, the bigger takeaway from this data is the fact that violent crime in Kansas City has remained stagnant rather than decreasing, and Springfield’s rate has steadily risen over the last 20 years. None of our major cities is close to being considered safe compared to similar midwestern cities like Des Moines or Omaha.

Omaha claims transitioning from its officers using only enforcement (applying the law) to also including intervention (stopping the crime taking place) and prevention (taking preventative measures before crime begins) has reduced violence. Other cities have studied Omaha in hopes of replicating its success, including Kansas City. Unfortunately, based on the data, it hasn’t yet made a difference in Kansas City.

St. Louis should be commended for the drop in violent crime in the city, but major Missouri cities still have a significant problem with violent crime. If we want to become a state that people want to live and work in, our cities need to prioritize fixing this problem.

The post Statistics Shows Crime Numbers Converging for Major Missouri Cities appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

St. Louis has a reputation for being a violent city. Crime issues have helped push people out in droves and deterred newcomers from settling in the area. St. Louis City’s population has decreased by over 30% since the 1980s, and the number of vacant downtown buildings has increased substantially. The Wall Street Journal went as far as to call downtown a “real estate nightmare.”

Although St. Louis continues to rank among the most dangerous cities in the country, efforts have been made to solve the ongoing crime problem, beginning with the replacement of former St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner in 2023. Gardner exacerbated the crime issue in several ways, including having an exclusion list of police officers who were not allowed to bring cases to her office and creating a massive backlog of more than 6,700 cases that awaited charging decisions. The current St. Louis Circuit Attorney, Gabe Gore, has since cleared all cases in the backlog.

More recent efforts include House Bill (HB) 495, signed by Governor Mike Kehoe into law in March. This legislation transfers control of the St. Louis Police Department to a state-appointed board. The governor has already made five interim appointments to the six-person board (the mayor is the sixth member of the board). In addition, a $45 million 911 dispatch center broke ground last year in St. Louis with the goal of improving response times. In St. Louis, only half of the 911 calls in 2022 were answered within the national standard of 10 seconds.

It is unclear whether these efforts will have positive impacts on public safety in St. Louis, but what is clear is that violent crime in the city is down. It was down 7.8% in 2024 compared to 2023. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department (SLMPD) reported homicides were down 6.3 % in 2024. It is worth noting that crime is down across the country, so this may be part of a larger trend.

The fact that St. Louis has lower violent crime and homicide rates is a positive sign, but time will tell if the city can sustain this success and lose the moniker of being one of the nation’s most dangerous cities.

The post St. Louis’s Improving Crime Data appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Forbes’s data were compiled from an array of federal organizations, including the FBI. The rankings are based on fatal accident rates, DUI arrests, road rage incidents, car thefts, risk of wildlife collision, condition of roads, and more.

Breaking the rankings down further, Missouri has the:

• 5th highest rate of car thefts
• 6th highest percentage of drivers who experienced a road rage incident
• 10th highest number of drunk drivers involved fatal car crashes
• 10th highest wildlife collision risk
• 12th highest number of people killed in fatal car accidents

The City of St. Louis likely contributes to the overall high riskiness measured in Forbes’s metric. Last year, I wrote a post during the height of mass Hyundai and Kia thefts, when thefts of those two brands soared from 273 to 3,958 in one year. During a two-week period in that August, there were 462 cars stolen or attempted to be stolen in the City of St. Louis, yet shockingly, only 1 person was charged in city courts for a crime related to auto theft over that same time period.

I’ve lived in the city for two years now, and I still haven’t seen someone in the city get pulled over for driving into oncoming traffic or running red lights. The data confirm this observation, as vehicle stops, citations, and arrests in the city have all greatly decreased.

Since 1995, the City of St. Louis has lost 22% of its residents and 40% of its police force. Police staffing shortages are real in the city. In 2024, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department is budgeted to have 1,220 officers on staff, but currently only has 894.

For a city that is shrinking, the reputation and reality of having unsafe roads is a huge problem. It is imperative for St. Louis and Missouri at-large that we make a U-turn and make our roads safer.

The post Missouri Ranked as Second Most Dangerous State to Drive in appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Everyone wants to help kids thrive, right? Who could be against a new tax in Platte County to help kids get more mental health services? Well, we are. Politicizing charity and mandating it through law is a dangerous path to take. Platte County citizens would be well served to think twice before going down this road.

There is an ongoing petition drive in Platte County to create the Platte County Children’s Services Fund. If approved by voters, the plan would institute a new sales tax to fund mental health services for children in Platte County. It would create a new board in charge of overseeing the collection and distribution of the funds as grants to eligible children’s charities.

Charity should not be politized, yet that is exactly what this proposal will do in Platte County. Several years ago, the children’s service fund in St. Louis County became a flashpoint in the county executive’s race. The fund was slow to distribute money and had grown to a balance of $78 million. That large balance became a point of contention in the campaign, made worse when questionable activities with the funds led to the firing of the children’s service fund director and an FBI investigation. Even without that level of controversy, charities will still be forced to play politics. Board members of various Platte County charities that might receive funds will have to start taking that into consideration when they decide whom to support in various county political races. One can’t risk backing the wrong horse and putting the charity’s funding in jeopardy. It’s machine politics at its most insidious.

Any future Platte County Children’s Service Fund would be a special taxing district, and the last thing Platte County needs is another obscure taxing entity with little accountability and even less oversight. The children’s service fund in Lafayette County, on the eastern edge of the Kansas City region, provides a useful case study for those problems. The fund had operated for years with almost no oversight. Those operating it routinely engaged in improper activities, including funding charities that were affiliated with board members, funding charitable activities that were not eligible for funds in the first place, and funding a private business that wasn’t a nonprofit. After a whistleblower brought this to light, the state auditor investigated and referred the fund to authorities for possible Medicaid fraud. If you think the future Platte County children’s fund will be immune from these incidents, you should disabuse yourself of that notion.

If Platte County voters pass the new tax and create a children’s service fund, will some kids benefit? Of course some will. But citizens need to consider all the possible effects of this endeavor. Creating a new taxing agency with no oversight, entangling philanthropy with politics, and making charities dependent on government largesse is not a recipe for making life better in Platte County. Let’s allow these charities do what they were intended to do—help kids—without the heavy hand of government involvement.

The post Think Twice before Supporting a New Tax appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On this episode of the podcast, Susan Pendergrass is joined by Hannah E. Meyers. They discuss what cities can do to prioritize the public safety of their citizens.

Hannah E. Meyers is director of the policing and public safety initiative at the Manhattan Institute. Most recently, she managed corporate and private investigation teams for an international firm and directed research strategy for a counter-extremism NGO. She served for five years with the Intelligence Bureau of the New York City Police Department, partnering with detectives on counterterrorism investigations and bringing one of the first state-level terrorism cases to prosecution. During her time at NYPD, she also supervised an intelligence analysis team and was seconded to the FBI. Earlier in her career, Hannah did think tank research pertaining to terrorism and human rights, was a contributing writer on a variety of topics and served as deputy director of policy for a New York State gubernatorial nominee.

Download A Public Safety and Policing Plan for NYC’s Next Mayor

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The post SMI Podcast: A Playbook for Public Safety with Hannah E. Meyers appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“There is still work to do because even one homicide is too many,” [Mayor] James said. “But I have faith in the collaborative and strategic approach of KC NoVa. This year’s data tells us that so far we are making great strides in the right direction.”

Fast forward to today—after years of a nation-leading spike in homicides (currently #5 in the nation with 108 in 2018 as of this writing)—and those same people seem to want to deny any affiliation with policing. The mayor, whose role as a member of the police board was highlighted in 2014, seems to shrug off any role in policing today. In a KCPT panel discussion about the 50th anniversary of the Kansas City Race Riots, moderator Nick Haines raises a question about minority hiring in the police department, “Mayor, you’re on the police commission.” James responds, “Yes . . . and…?” to laughs from the audience. (Starts at 35:32.)

In a more recent press conference, Mayor James complained bitterly about lack of gun control legislation and political ideology in the state legislature. But as a recent KSHB report on homicides made clear, there is no evidence that Jackson County, Missouri, has significantly more gun ownership than, say, Johnson County, Kansas, or that gun ownership in Kansas City has increased over the same time frame that homicides have spiked. It’s not the guns.

There is research, however, that indicates that increasing the number of police officers does reduce crime. KSHB’s Andy Alcock makes that point in his report, too. In fact, according to FBI statistics, Kansas City has fewer police officers per capita than all other cities with high homicide rates. What’s worse, since 2011, the number of uniformed police officers in Kansas City has declined.

As I laid out in a Kansas City Star guest column, no one in Missouri has more power over policing in Kansas City than the mayor’s office. What is lacking is not power, but will. And until Kansas City leaders get serious about adopting policies and policing methods that actually contribute to reductions in violent crime, we are figuratively whistling past an ever-growing graveyard.

The post Kansas City’s Unrelenting and Unaddressed Homicide Problem appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The report examined “the severe civil disturbance that occurred in Kansas City during the week of April 8, 1968 and [made] a report to the people of Kansas City.” Among other things, the report contained recommendations for avoiding future riots and “for the establishment of harmonious relations among the people of this city.”

One of the areas examined was Kansas City’s police—their number, recruiting, training, and tactics. At the time of the report, Kansas City had 932 police officers and was facing reductions. On page 48 the report offers:

Instead of its police force being reduced, this city needs a total of at least 1,500 police officers. Even the existing statute contemplates two police employees for each 800 persons in the population. Since 1961 Kansas City’s population has increased by approximately 15%, and its land area has been nearly doubled by annexation. Expected police service has increased by 58%, but the number of law enforcement personnel has remained approximately the same as it was in 1961.

The commissioners’ call for more police to reduce crime is borne out by subsequent research. Yet Kansas City today has 1,283 sworn law enforcement officers, down 121 from the 1,404 officers they had in 2010. The city never achieved the 1,500 mark recommended by the commission’s report. Nor has the city successfully adopted the commission’s recommendation to rely more heavily on foot patrolmen—but that may be a function of not having enough officers.

Based on 2017 data, Kansas City has the sixth-highest homicide rate in the United States per 100,000 population. Based on FBI statistics, of the ten cities with the highest homicide rates, Kansas City has the fewest officers per 10,000 population.

A years-long, nation-leading spike in the number of homicides is arguably as “severe” a “civil disturbance” as one can imagine. Numerous factors are causally linked to crime, including education, poverty, and income inequality. Yet when it comes to the one aspect of public safety that policymakers can control, policing, Kansas City has fallen short of its 1968 goals.

The post Kansas City Fails to Meet Goals Set by 1968 Report appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

One reason is the City’s deserved reputation as a crime center. As recently as 2016, the city was ranked the most violent city in America by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and property crime remains a major issue for residents and visitors alike. What drives the crime is subject to interpretation and analysis; poverty and the region’s long-simmering racial tensions are factors. But whatever its source, crime affects whether people stay in the city—or for that matter, whether they come to the city in the first place.

Taxes are also an enormously important piece of the puzzle. The negative impact of income and earnings taxes on economic growth appears in the academic literature again and again, and yet St. Louis policymakers and others have refused to change course. In a paper written for the Show-Me Institute in 2014, economist Howard Wall found that half of the population loss that took place in the city between 2000 and 2010 could be attributed to the earnings tax. Even if the effect were only half as big, it would still be a massive problem.

Additional research, including a host of Show-Me Institute papers, have demonstrated similar growth issues related to the City’s earnings tax. Still, establishment political interests continue to rally around it. Whether that’s out of stubbornness or fear, the negative impact the tax has on the City and its future remains the same.

Capital and labor are mobile, and because they are, leaving the city is very easy. Factor in that the city gives away millions in tax dollars to a cavalcade of long-entrenched special interests, and it becomes clear that an economic system that robs Peter Taxpayer to pay Paul only works if Peter sticks around. And Peter hasn’t.

The city hasn’t just beggared taxpayers through the earnings tax and its tax subsidies; it has also beggared some of the very public services that lure young families to a city. I will leave the heavy lifting on education policy to my colleagues at the Show-Me Institute, but I will observe that a city steering $30 million per year from basic city services like education does so at its own peril. Yet, that’s exactly what the St. Louis does.

There is a charm to the urban environment that attracts many. That charm can be enough to compensate for the negative effect of somewhat higher taxes, or somewhat greater risk, or somewhat poorer services.

But there is a limit. If you were 30, married, and had children or were planning to, would you put down roots in a place bedeviled by St. Louis’s problems? Or would you go someplace where safety, educational opportunity, and tax stewardship were high priorities? When fundamental public needs are left unmet, it isn’t fleeing residents who are at fault; it’s the city that is.

Regional power is moving to the north and west of the city, through St. Louis County and toward St. Charles County. Lest we forget, St. Charles County is now larger than St. Louis City—and it’s positioned to widen that population gap for the foreseeable future.

The City’s greatest issue isn’t whether it will be the economic center of the region. Its greatest issue, the one that will determine its long-term viability, is whether it will be a competent steward of public money and the public’s trust—whether the City will address the policy questions that ultimately underpin and promote long-term development and population growth. Doing so will require a meticulous commitment to getting the fundamentals of governance right and eschewing the rest.

It’s said that the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, and the next best time is to plant a tree is today. For the sake of its future, now is the right time for St. Louis to address its fundamental and widely recognized issues of governance in a serious and research-driven manner. Until the city gets serious about regaining public trust by getting back to the basics of governance—above all, a full commitment to security, education, and the stewardship of the public checkbook—no one should be surprised when more St. Louisans follow their predecessors out the door.

The post St. Louis Is Failing, and It Has Only Its Government to Blame appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Unsurprisingly, everyone on the receiving end of the tax wants to see it renewed. According to a piece in The Kansas City Star,

Renewing the tax is essential for preventing and reducing violence, County Executive Frank White said.

“Anything that we can do to help our citizens in terms of prevention, and being proactive in what we do, is really what this (tax) is about,” he said.

County prosecutor Jean Peters Baker echoed the same sentiment. Yet homicide is up in Kansas City, (home to more than 68 percent of Jackson County’s population) and markedly so since COMBAT launched its anti-violence campaign in 2013. Kansas City’s homicide rate in 2015 was so high as to have made the FBI’s list of cities driving the national numbers. The 2016 homicide rate will be even higher. Exactly how is the tax helping to prevent violence?

As for drug prevention, one of the programs funded by the tax is the DARE program. Yet research has shown for years that the DARE program either does not work or makes matters worse. Exactly how is the Jackson County program making a positive difference on drug use?

Recall too that taxes in Jackson County are not low. The left-leaning Brookings Institution found in 2013 that Jackson County was well above average when it came to property taxes paid and property taxes paid relative to home value. So why the additional tax? As former Star columnist Yael Abouhalkah pointed out in 2009, "Almost no other county in the nation has a special drug tax—and yet communities across the country close drug houses, hire police officers to chase drug dealers and fund drug courts." In fact, these communities appear to be doing a better job of it than Jackson County does.

Good public policy requires more than good intentions; it requires good outcomes. Crime and drug prevention efforts in Jackson County seem to be failing badly—and not because of a lack of funding.

Taxpayers deserve an honest accounting of how the County is spending their money and making a difference for the better.

The post Immortal COMBAT? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As of last month, the MTC demanded drug tests, specific background checks, and stringent insurance requirements before any ridesharing company could set up in Saint Louis City or County. Since that time, the MTC has backed down on drug testing and has stated that it believes it can resolve issues surrounding insurance. Background checks, including fingerprinting, is the most intransigent remaining problem. In past meetings, the MTC held that Uber’s checks were inadequate. Now the MTC says the main problem is state law:

Fingerprint-Based Criminal Background Checks—Uber is adamant that its own proprietary, Internet-based criminal background checks are more thorough, detailed and reliable than those conducted by law enforcement and based on fingerprint scans of driver applicants. We [MTC] can argue back and forth as to which position is correct. But it matters little what MTC thinks, or what Uber desires. Fingerprint-based criminal background checks conducted by the Missouri Highway Patrol and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are the law of the land. And Missouri statutes governing the MTC mandate such checks.

Uber has stated that its own background checks are thorough, and the MTC’s checks may prevent UberX from entering the Saint Louis market.

This post cannot comment on whether the MTC’s interpretation of the law is correct. However, if state law governing the MTC does need to change to allow more flexible background checks, state policymakers should consider such a reform. There is no reason Saint Louis residents cannot decide for themselves whether Uber’s background checks meet their needs.

Should the state legislature decide to reform laws governing the MTC, there is no reason to stop at background check requirements. They should consider eliminating provisions that require four of nine MTC commissioners to be taxi industry representatives. They could also curtail the regulatory powers of the commission to consumer protection provisions, which is all the MTC says it wants anyway. However, given the past performance of the MTC and its recent dysfunction, perhaps the best reform state legislators could make would be to disband the body altogether. 

The post MTC Making Moves to Allow Ridesharing appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This November, many Columbia residents will be concerned about whether the football Tigers will finish off their SEC schedule in a winning fashion. They might not give much thought to the looming decision of whether to increase their own property taxes by 30 cents per $100 of assessed value over the next five years. If passed, after the fifth year the average Columbia homeowner would see an $88 increase in their property taxes. The money from this tax increase would further fund public safety.

Public safety is clearly a major public good, and it should have sufficient funds to deliver adequate services to the residents of Columbia. However, there are good reasons to believe that a 73 percent increase in property taxes, not 4 percent as one proponent has claimed, is not necessary at this time. Below are some pros and cons to this proposed tax increase.

PRO:

Proponents of the tax increase correctly state that the number of police officers per 1,000 residents has declined over the past several years. Coupled with this decrease in the ratio of police to residents, the inflation-adjusted budget for the police department has declined as well. This means that a decreasing number of police have fewer financial resources while serving an increasing population.

CON:

These decreases in funding and personnel, detractors argue, have not led to an increase in crime. According to the FBI, in Columbia total crime per 100,000 residents has declined slightly since 2009. There has been a much larger drop in violent crime since 2009. More officers might make crime decrease even further, but that is no guarantee. Many cities in Missouri have more police per 1,000 residents and more crime as well.

PRO:

Columbia has fewer firefighters than comparable Midwest towns. Also, firefighter response times are increasing as more Columbia residents have moved farther away from fire stations.

CON:

With the exception of 2012, the number of fires in Columbia has been on a steady decline. This decrease in the number of fires is coupled to a budget that continues to increase, even when adjusted for inflation.

There are other options for Columbia residents to consider if the November measure fails. For instance, the city could look at the fire expense reimbursement it receives for services performed for the three colleges in town. According to the Columbia budget, these reimbursements are projected to decline in the next few years. Columbia can renegotiate with these colleges in order to get higher reimbursements.

Columbia could privatize its water and electric utilities. The sale of these utilities not only would bring in immediate money, but it also would expand the property tax base, which would generate more funds for the police and fire departments.

Voters in Columbia have a lot to think about when considering whether to raise property taxes this November. There are reasonable points for and against this proposal. Whether the tax increase passes or fails, there still are other methods for raising revenue in the city. City residents should not think their only option going forward is to increase taxes or cut back on public safety services.

Michael Rathbone is a policy researcher at the Show-Me Institute.

The post Please Convince Me: The Pros and Cons to Raising Property Taxes in Columbia appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

When the St. Louis Cardinals played the Detroit Tigers in the 1968 World Series, the whole nation was watching (it captured an astounding 57 percent of television viewers) and both cities — as well as both teams — were looking good. Detroit was still the unchallenged auto capital of the world, and St. Louis was home to a dozen of the nation’s biggest and best-known companies.

Since then, the two baseball teams have fared better than their cities. When they met again in the 2006 World Series, the rest of the nation yawned — 83 percent of viewers tuned out. Who cared about a baseball rivalry in two dying cities in flyover country?

From 1950 to 2010, Detroit’s population dropped from about 1.8 million to 714,000 — a 61.4 percent decline. Over the same period, St. Louis City dropped from 857,000 residents to 319,000 – a 62.7 percent decline.

Think of Detroit as a larger St. Louis — more than twice the size in area as well as population. Drive through north St. Louis and you see block after block of abandoned and boarded-up buildings; drive through Detroit and it is mile after mile of the same. It is the Empty Quarter of cityscapes — which partly explains why it takes an hour for Detroit’s police to respond to a 911 call.

Detroit leads the nation’s cities in violent crime, followed by Oakland and St. Louis. According to FBI statistics, your chances of being the victim of a violent crime (murder, rape, robbery, and assault) are not a whole lot less in St. Louis City than they are in Detroit. The incidence of such crimes is only 13 percent lower in St. Louis than Detroit. I worked in Detroit from 1976 to 1982 as a reporter and anchor at WXYZ-TV. Coleman Young was the city’s first black mayor, notorious for playing the race card (though most white politicians were no better). I once asked him about his girlfriend’s exorbitant salary as the administration’s PR person. That night, the station ran his response — an expletive-filled rant accusing me of racism for even raising the question. Later, many city employees — both black and white — thanked me for spotlighting the mayor’s favoritism.

Lee Iacocca took over a struggling Chrysler in 1978 and refused to meet union demands to match GM and Ford wage rates at $18 an hour. He told the union: “At $13 an hour, you can have 20,000 workers . . . at $18, you’ve got zero.” He understood the Big Three were on thin ice.

After 13 years anchoring and reporting at KSDK in St. Louis, I returned to Detroit for a year in 1999 at WDIV TV. I was astonished at how much worse the city looked. Gone were the well-kept, middle-class neighborhoods. The drugs and violence were so bad that city cops often would ride four to a squad car.

Therein, I think, is a principal difference between Detroit and St. Louis. Things in St. Louis never reached the same pitch of hopelessness.

St. Louis experienced its biggest out-migration of people in the 1980s, when the population fell 27.2 percent. From 2000 to 2010, the city’s population was down just 8 percent.

By contrast, Detroit’s population over the last decade fell a stunning 24.9 percent.

So, no, I do not think that St. Louis City is following Detroit down the road to ruin — or to bankruptcy, either. In a recent column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dave Nicklaus pointed out that with slightly more than twice the population of St. Louis, Detroit has six times as much debt.

What’s more, St. Louis has not experienced a massive breakdown in vital services. Far from taking an hour to respond to a call , St. Louis police, on average, are at a crime scene in 10.32 minutes. And where Detroit police cleared only 11.3 percent of murders and 12.7 percent of reported rapes through arrests in 2011, St. Louis police cleared 66.4 percent and 71.8 percent of such crimes, respectively.

Though far from perfect, St. Louis City still works for most people. Many old neighborhoods are flourishing again. Let’s hope that we are on the cusp of a real turnaround in the city’s fortunes.

Rick Edlund is the communications director at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.

The post Is St. Louis the next Detroit? (Not in my view) appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

That is pretty much how Columbia city leaders responded to objections to the recent Enhanced Enterprise Zone (EEZ) designation declaring more than half of Columbia as blighted.

“The word ‘blight’ is just semantics,” the Columbia mayor told a crowd.

“Blight” is not semantics. In this context, it is a word loaded with hidden meaning that the mayor and others do not want to discuss. It does mean that Columbia is taking a major step toward much heavier use of taxpayer subsidies for all types of commercial activity. Once you have blighted more than half the city, it is a short step to the point where almost every development receives some type of subsidy. That is not a “maybe.” That is the current reality in Saint Louis and Kansas City.

The dirty little secret that Regional Economic Development, Inc. (REDI), the local media, and Columbia city officials do not want you to know is that EEZ, Tax Increment Financing (TIF), Community Improvement Districts (CID), and other subsidies do not work. They do not succeed in growing the local economy. “Call me blighted and give me the money,” as one city councilman stated, may be an oafish example of out-of-control government, but even worse is the abject economic ignorance it displays.

The panoply of subsidies that come into play when a large area is declared blighted have a number of adverse side effects. They shrink the local tax base, encourage more government planning of the economy, and increase the chances of eminent domain abuse.

As a famous Swedish economist once said, “It is not by planting trees or subsidizing tree planting in a desert created by politicians that the government can promote . . . industry, but by refraining from measures that create a desert environment.”

The Columbia supporters of the EEZ, the same group that supported the recent TIF projects and the downtown Columbia CID, say that other cities have used these tools with great success (for example, an editorial in the Columbia Daily Tribune, Aug. 13, 2009). In this, they are completely wrong. They might as well stare you in the face and tell you the sun rises in the north. The City of Saint Louis has been using urban redevelopment tools such as Enterprise Zones and many others for half a century. How has it worked out? Mapping Decline, a 2008 book by Colin Gordon, documents the decline of the city of Saint Louis. The book’s research is exhaustive. The dominant theme is the use of urban renewal tools and tax subsidies (including EEZ) – and their absolute, total failure. From the conclusion:

The overarching irony, in Saint Louis and elsewhere, is that efforts to save the city from such practices and patterns almost always made things worse. In setting after setting, both the diagnosis (blight) and its prescription (urban renewal) were shaped by — and compromised by — the same assumptions and expectations and prejudices that had created the condition in the first place.

I can already hear readers in Columbia saying, “But we’re not Saint Louis.” You are right, you are not; so do not follow a path that will make your city repeat Saint Louis’ mistakes. It is one thing for Saint Louis to try to these projects and have them fail. It would be even worse for a city like Columbia to follow that example with the knowledge that the entire process has failed. At least the trailblazer who takes the wrong path has an excuse.

David Stokes is a policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.

The post EEZs Are An EZ Path To Corporate Welfare appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post “Throw Your Hands Up in the Air, and Wave ‘Em Like You Just Don’t Care” appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Dave has probably never been to Compton, Calif. Neither have I, for that matter, and I believe most sensible people haven’t. You can not honestly tell me that St. Louis is a more dangerous place to live, I’m sorry.

I believe that the St. Louis data might be skewed and there are a couple of reasons why. For example, Dave might remember a few weeks ago when the Post-Dispatch reported that the Illinois side of the river is more dangerous than the Missouri side (according to Illinois data, which the FBI rejects). In fact, Metro East is apparently safer even than the national average.

Really?

The first problem I have with the data is that St. Louis’ bizarre municipal boundaries make the per-capita crime statistics appear much higher than they otherwise would be. Crime is a problem in areas of most U.S. cities, but the difference is that it is generally spread out over a larger population. But when St. Louis unincorporated itself from St. Louis County more than a century ago, it effectively land-locked itself. So, unlike metro areas such as Phoenix or Houston (which continue to incorporate “safe” suburban satellites within their municipal boundaries), St. Louis is stuck with inner city crime with nowhere to run. And that is an idiosyncratic feature of the data that should have been accounted for.

My second point of contention, though, is that crime at the national level is grossly underreported, particularly within low-income and minority neighborhoods. I imagine that Compton, Calif., gets a much better rating because most of the crime that occurs within its borders never gets reported to the police. I mean, it’s not like the Crips go to the police station every time a Blood robs one of their fellow gang members. In contrast, I imagine that a significant portion of the crime being reported in St. Louis comes from those trepid suburbanites that make the five-mile trek into the city and become easy prey.

The point of my post was that while I agree that the city has crime problems (I thought I stressed that point when I mentioned that I was mugged outside of my apartment), I believe it is unfair to single out the city for idiosyncratic features that should be washed out of any truly unbiased statistical study. Maybe the data is right, but even then, I don’t see how reporting these statistics does anything but blur the issue.

In closing, I want to add Mark Twain’s famous quip about statistics: “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics." As a native Missourian, he might have had a problem with the St. Louis crime data, too.

The post No, Crime Statistics Are Statistics, Not Facts appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Apparently we no longer hold that honor. We’re now number two.

These statistics continue to amaze me, because I find it very difficult to believe that St. Louis is more dangerous than, say, Compton, CA; Camden, New Jersey; or Gary, IN (or really, for that matter, Kansas City). And the annual studies have been routinely criticized for their methodologies, which are grossly inconsistent and dependent upon idiosyncratic crime referencing systems used by municipalities. In short, I tend to agree with Michael Tonry, president of the American Society of Criminology, when he states:

[These rankings] do groundless harm to many communities. They also work against a key goal of our society, which is a better understanding of crime-related issues by both scientists and the public.”

Of course, I have been mugged and robbed in St. Louis, so who am I to really say differently?

Also of note, my hometown of Sugar Land, Texas, was ranked the fifth safest city in America.

Because apparently I like extremes.

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