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

The post The Public Safety Climate in the City of St. Louis with Susan Pendergrass and Patrick Tuohey appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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.

As voters in the City of St. Louis prepare to vote on whether to retain the earnings tax in April, the city is in a tight spot. The city and school district need more revenue, which comes about through more taxes. But because taxes are high and a detriment to growth (especially the one-percent earnings tax), businesses are not locating in the city and the economy is not growing. So, to attract new businesses and convince current ones to stay, the city selectively gives out generous tax incentives. These may attract some businesses and residents, but because of the incentives, they don’t provide the tax revenue that the city was after in the first place.

Are you with us so far? Count us among those who agree that poor public schools and a high crime rate are harming the City of St. Louis more than taxes. But if the economy were growing, City Hall and the board of education would have more money to hire more police officers and teachers. It’s as if St. Louis is in its own Catch-22: a problem or situation where every solution is impeded by other conflicts. Call it our Catch 1%.

St. Louis’s “solution” to the problem of losing businesses and residents over the past couple of decades has been to offer generous tax benefits to every politically influential Milo Minderbinder who asks for them. Last year alone, there were 70 million uncollected tax dollars because of various subsidies. That approach has been a failure. It has led to substantial tax subsidies for developers who do not need them, such as the St. Louis Cardinals and their Ballpark Village development. They succeed while paying significantly reduced taxes. Their subsidies have helped them drive out smaller competitors (e.g., Mike Shannon’s) who paid taxes, but now no longer do because, well, they are closed. The use of tax subsidies actually leads to a reduction in tax revenues. That’s Catch 1%.

The same thing goes for the idea that tax subsidies are intended for blighted sections of the city. Clearly, there are parts of St. Louis that are struggling, and these areas might well benefit from the use of tax subsidies. But for the most part they aren’t getting them. Why not? From an economic development official’s point of view, the incentives are misaligned. If you have tax dollars to invest, why not direct them into a thriving area surrounded by other successful businesses? You’ll look that much smarter when the development succeeds—even if it would have been just as successful without the government handout. The projects that truly need the incentives aren’t the sure things . . . and that’s the whole point of the incentives—to bridge the gap between failure and success for a project in an economically depressed area. But in St. Louis, the less a project needs a tax subsidy, the more likely it is to get one. That’s Catch 1%.

So here we are, giving out tax incentives to people who don’t need them in places that don’t need them and still funding city government with an earnings tax that limits economic growth. Could the City of St. Louis operate without the earnings tax if the residents and voters wanted to do so? Of course. Most large cities in the United States do not have local income taxes. One problem (of several) with the tax subsidies and abatements the city gives away is that they make it impossible to rely less on the earnings tax and more on local property taxes, which is how many comparable cities fund their local services. Nobody says it will be easy to phase out the tax, which brings in an estimated $159 million per year. But if voters decided to end it, during the 10-year phase-out period an overall effort toward ending corporate welfare, raising alternative (and less economically harmful) taxes, budget cuts, continued pension reforms, service sharing with other governments (as in re-entering St. Louis County), and privatization efforts (e.g., the water utility) would allow St. Louis to continue to fund necessary services. It bears repeating that most comparable cities, including Chicago, Memphis, Omaha, Tulsa, and Nashville, fund their local services without local income taxes.

As St. Louis City voters prepare to decide the fate of the one-percent earnings tax in April, they do not have a simple choice. But the way the city has been operating for years is not working. The population is still declining, crime rates are high again, and the schools are failing too many students. If the city continues to go along as it has been for years, managed decline is about all we can hope for. Perhaps it is time to break out of the Catch 1% the city is in and do something radical.

The post Earnings Taxes and St. Louis’s Catch 1%. appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Most cities in the United States, including most large cities, do not have any form of local income tax. As of 2019, there are only 17 states with local income tax jurisdictions and only 19 of the country’s 100 most populous cities have some form of local income tax. This means that thousands of cities (including comparable large cities such as Chicago, Omaha, and Nashville) have a lower earnings tax than St. Louis city—their earnings tax is 0 percent!

Even if we’re just looking at the jurisdictions with local income taxes, St. Louis still doesn’t have the lowest rate. Many jurisdictions in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio have rates below 1 percent. In Colorado, Aurora, Greenwood Village, and Sheridan have monthly local income taxes of $3.00 or less on those that make over $500 per month, which is a 0.6 percent local income tax at most. Clearly, St. Louis does not have the lowest rate among local income taxes.

Objectively, 1 percent is not all that high, and a few large cities with local income taxes have slightly higher rates. But the earnings taxes in St. Louis City and Kansas City are certainly not the lowest in the country and they are definitely not negligibly low. The additional 1 percent that Kansas City and St. Louis city residents and workers pay creates real negative effects for these cities. The local income tax in Missouri’s two largest cities is higher than those in hundreds of other cities in Missouri and thousands of cities across the country, making our largest cities less competitive while also taking money away from our hard-working citizens. That’s not a false claim.

The post St. Louis City’s Earnings Tax Is Not the Lowest in the Country appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The level of services provided and the types of taxes or fees collected to fund those services differ from city to city. My newest paper, “Breaking Down Expenses and Revenues: Kansas City and St. Louis Compared to Six Other Cities,” updates two previous Show-Me Institute case studies to shed light on the revenue collection and spending habits of St. Louis and Kansas City.

The six comparison cities are Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Omaha, Denver, Louisville, and Indianapolis. Compared to those cities, St. Louis and Kansas City are, respectively, the second and third highest spending cities overall, and the two highest spenders on debt service.

In terms of revenue collection, Kansas City ranks first among the comparison cities in fees per resident; in fact, it collects almost as much in fees per resident as all of the other cities combined. Indianapolis is the only other city with an earnings tax, yet both St. Louis and Kansas City nearly double Indianapolis in earnings tax collected per city resident.

For further discussion of the revenue and expenditure trends of these cities, click the link below to read the entire essay.

The post Breaking Down Expenses and Revenues: Kansas City and St. Louis appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

It is noteworthy that in the age of driverless cars, some want to look backward to the inflexible fixed-rail technology of the 19th century. In Kansas City, when we get icy weather, the streetcar system is shut down and replaced with buses. And when even a single streetcar is involved in an accident or breaks down, the whole system is shut down. Streetcars cannot reroute themselves; they cannot drive around an accident. As neighborhoods grow over time, fixed rail routes cannot shift as demand shifts. Streetcars are literally and figuratively stuck in a rut. And on top of this, streetcars cause traffic congestion because they are so large and slow moving. Streetcars also fail to remove cars from the road. Research shows that streetcars really just move people away from buses, not out of their cars.

Because streetcars are such an inefficient and expensive transit option, proponents instead point to the economic development they purportedly create. Every new development is met with satisfied nods as evidence of the streetcar’s success. The research around the country and our experience in Kansas City tell another story. It’s not the streetcar that drives development, but all the taxpayer money handed out to encourage construction along the route. Abatements, cash handouts, tax credits and tax increment finance subsidies litter the streetcar route here.

On top of the subsidies, there’s the price tag on the streetcar itself. The cost of a streetcar is many times the cost of simply adding a new bus route. It is almost humorous that Kansas City raised taxes to fund a large portion of the approximately $110 million cost for 2.2 miles of track, then lowered taxes for developers to entice them to invest along the route. Imagine what would have happened if the city had skipped the streetcar and instead lowered taxes for everyone!

Omahans should be aware that Kansas City voters have been rejecting streetcars for decades. Due to an odd artifact of Missouri law, small groups of citizens can create transportation development districts and tax themselves. As a result, fewer than 400 votes cast in the district committed all of Kansas City to supporting a $110 million project. In response, activists circulated a petition requiring a city-wide vote before the Council could spend any tax money on streetcars. The petition collected the necessary number of signatures, was verified, and was passed by a vote of the people in August. But our Council declared the petition unlawful and appropriated more funds to the streetcar anyway.

Before the Obama Administration, few if any federal funds were available for streetcars. Since then, however, the spigots have been flowing—and the result has been a boom in streetcar spending in cities across the country. In several cases the percentage of people who use transit in those very cities has actually dropped.

Streetcars do look fun, however. One pundit in Kansas City refers to ours as a party bus. It’s free to ride, looks sleek, and is something new on the street. But it doesn’t help the city grow or efficiently move people where they want to go. It requires a lot of money to build and operate and requires even more subsidies along the route to create the illusion of economic growth. In Kansas City, the few (if any) benefits of a streetcar have not been worth the significant cost. Omaha taxpayers should be wary.

The post A Streetcar Undesired 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.

In his remarks, Cozad compared Kansas City to Indianapolis. According to a case study written by The Show-Me Institute’s Michael Rathbone, Indianapolis is similar to Kansas City in education, median household income and poverty levels. Indianapolis has about twice the population of Kansas City and is just a little larger than Kansas City in total city area. (The study also compared us to Tulsa, Denver, Oklahoma City, Omaha, St. Louis, and Louisville.)

Despite the larger population and larger geographical area than Kansas City, Indianapolis appears to be run much more efficiently. Their total government spending per capita is much lower than Kansas City’s, $1.411 to our $2,354. They spend much less on city administration per capita and less for about every other category the paper examined, including public safety, public services, culture and recreation and capital outlays. The Mayor’s own Citizen’s Commission on Municipal Revenue reported in 2012 that Kansas City has a higher number of employees per capita than most other cities it considered.

If Kansas City leaders were able to bring total spending per capita ($2,354.05) just halfway down to what Indianapolis pays ($1,411.64), it would save us $220 million each year, almost exactly the amount the earnings tax provides. They don’t have to match Indianapolis—or the even more efficiently run Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Omaha or Louisville—just get us hallway there.

Even if Kansas City just lowered its per capita city administration spending from its current $210.59 down to the level of Omaha ($109.57) the city would save $46 million per year. We’d save $78 million per year if we reduced it to what Indianapolis spends ($43.47).

Instead, our leaders prefer to dig in their heels and offer only scare tactics about cutting public safety spending. Don't taxpayers deserve better?

The post The Cost of Inefficiency in Kansas City appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The trend line (see the graph above) is also significant.  Charter enrollment is going up, and traditional public enrollment is going down.

A few quick reactions:

1.       The narrative, at least coming from the Kansas City School District, is that the district is improving.  Graduation rates are up, and test scores show that the district might be on the path to full accreditation.  If that’s true, it would stand to reason that charter schooling is helping (or at the very least not hurting) the Kansas City public schools.

2.       It is important to remember that the city and the school district are not coterminous; in fact, 16 different school districts cover some part of Kansas City proper. Why charter schools are only allowed in one subsection of the city, especially when there is such clear demand for them, is beyond me.

3.       This report does highlight just how small the Kansas City School District has become.  I don’t think a lot of people realize this, but there are only 14,230 students enrolled in the Kansas City public schools.  When you think that Omaha’s main school district has 51,000 students, Des Moines’ has 33,000, and even Little Rock’s has 25,000, you realize just how much the district has shriveled up over the years.

Ultimately, Kansas City needs to have a conversation about what to do with the school district. If trends continue and more and more students attend charter schools, we have to think about transitioning the district from an institution that operates schools in addition to funding and regulating them to an institution that funds and regulates schools, but leaves operation up to others.

The post We’re Number 5! We’re Number 5! appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This case study examines government revenue, per person, of Saint Louis and Kansas City along with six other comparison cities (Denver, Indianapolis, Louisville, Oklahoma City, Omaha, and Tulsa). It examines tax burdens on residents (in total and as a percentage of personal income), the amount of fees collected, and other tidbits of information that the general public might find interesting. Please give it a look.

The post Show-Me Institute Presents: Breaking Down Revenue appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Download and read the full case study below.

The post Breaking Down Revenue: How Kansas City And Saint Louis Compare To Six Other Cities appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

MoDOT has justified these new charges partially under the argument that Missourians in the future will drive less and use alternative transportation more. However, recent data suggests that such a transformation is not occurring, at least not yet.

In MoDOT’s long-range plan, the department cited the steady increase in passenger rail traffic from 2007 to 2012 as a reason for increased investment in this mode, including the addition of lines from Saint Louis to Springfield and Kansas City to Omaha. However, in fiscal year 2014, passenger rail travel actually fell on Missouri’s heavily subsidized inter-city line, the Missouri River Runner. Passengers declined from 197,000 in 2013 to 189,000 for 2014.

In fact, passenger rail usage in Missouri is still lower than it was in 2001, when there were 208,000 passengers. The recent stagnation and long-term decline of inter-city rail traffic argue against a role for MoDOT in funding new billion-dollar rail lines in Missouri.

MoDOT’s long-range plan also called for a larger state role in transit spending, citing increased usage from 2010 to 2012 statewide and demographic changes as evidence of increasing transit demand. But once again, recent data shows that transit usage statewide fell from 2012 to 2013 (from 63.4 to 62.5 million UPT), reversing the post-recession trend.

In fact, transit usage in Missouri, despite significant local and federal support (averaging more than $400 million per year), has steadily declined since 2000. There are many arguments one could make for increased transit spending by MoDOT, but rapidly increasing demand is not one of them.

The fact that recent travel data runs contrary to MoDOT’s expectations is perhaps unsurprising. In written comments to a draft version of the Long-Range Transportation Plan, we cautioned MoDOT against extrapolating weak post-recession trends (and anecdotal evidence) too far into the future. We especially cautioned against using those trends to speculate on revolutionary change in Missouri travel habits. But speculate they have. Unfortunately for Missourians, those speculations are coupled with plans to spend billions in an effort to meet, what are at present, stagnating travel trends.

The post Recent Missouri Travel Trends Fail to Meet MoDOT Expectations appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This case study focuses on the cost of services that a city provides. The goal of this paper is to describe spending patterns on government services compared to Kansas City and Saint Louis. By presenting Saint Louis’ and Kansas City’s total expenditures and breaking down the general categories in which these expenditures were made, it is possible to compare them, in some ways, to the expenditures of other, similarly sized cities. For the purposes of this paper, the comparison cities are Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Omaha, Denver, Louisville, and Indianapolis.

The post Kansas City and Saint Louis Expense Breakdown Compared To Six Other Cities appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But over the past decade, the ?cool? cities have not seen any faster job or population growth than cities dominated by non-creative industries. The fastest employment growth has been in areas such as Houston, Dallas, Oklahoma City, and Omaha. The main employment in those cities is not in the cool, creative sector, but in industries such as oil and manufacturing. And, even the rapidly growing ?cool? cities, such as Raleigh and Austin, are not transit-centered places.

It is the same in Kansas City. Rail proponents are so frustrated about nearly a dozen defeats at the ballot box that they contrived a special taxing district, permitted only the residents of that district to vote, and used the result of that vote to commit the city to at least a $100 million rail line project.

A lawsuit against the city’s scheme was dismissed because of its timing, and the city has started collecting the tax. Now the blog Tony’s Kansas City is claiming that some are preparing for a ballot petition to stop the project. If the Kansas City City Council is unable or unwilling to defer to the clearly and repeatedly stated will of the people, then voters are completely within their rights to act on their own with a petition.

The post Get Off The Train: Kansas City Cannot Ride To Economic Growth appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But over the past decade, the “cool” cities have not seen any faster job or population growth than cities dominated by non-creative industries. The fastest employment growth has been in areas such as Houston, Dallas, Oklahoma City, and Omaha. The main employment in those cities is not in the cool, creative sector, but in industries such as oil and manufacturing. And, even the rapidly growing “cool” cities, such as Raleigh and Austin, are not transit-centered places.

So why do we keep hearing that transit is what causes economic development and revitalizes downtowns? Transit may attract a certain demographic, but trends over the past several years in our country hint that this demographic is not the economic driver it appeared to be.

Now, it is not to say that transit precludes development. But why keep focusing our efforts (and subsidies) on something that is not an absolute necessity to promote growth in Saint Louis? We have written about our support for toll roads to limit subsidies for roads, but at least those subsidies benefit a majority of the population. With transit, we are taking money from a majority of the population to pay for something that benefits the few. Even Citizens for Modern Transit unintentionally admits this with their statement “You may not ride transit, you may not know anyone who uses the bus or MetroLink; however, Missouri needs transit.”

The post Get Off The Train: Saint Louis Cannot Ride To Economic Growth appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A book co-authored by Arthur Rubinfeld, known as the “architect behind Starbucks’ expansion,” outlines the logic underlying the company’s growth strategy. With a target market comprised of “urban professionals, high-income individuals from the age of 18 to 45,” Starbucks sought to conquer the country’s major metropolitan areas. Demographic considerations, the intensity of competition, city-specific macroeconomic conditions, and a number of other factors, determined the pattern of expansion.

The areas surrounding Kansas City are home to a multitude of Starbucks coffee shops, which form something of a ring around the city itself. This same distribution is not evident in other Midwestern cities such as Saint Louis, Oklahoma City, Omaha, and Indianapolis. We can learn a lot about certain areas from the behavior of private enterprise.

My colleague Patrick Ishmael and I intend to explore this phenomenon in greater detail. We wish to better understand why Starbucks has chosen to focus disproportionately on Kansas City’s peripheral markets. As Rubinfeld’s volume makes clear, a substantial amount of research goes into determining how capital can be most profitably distributed. Accordingly, there is almost certainly a strong rationale under-girding Starbucks’ behavior in Kansas City. Perhaps further investigation can teach us some important lessons about the business climate in the City of Fountains.

The post What Can Starbucks Tell Us About Kansas City? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

No doubt, the Kansas City Zoo’s funding pales in comparison to some other parks. For example, in 2006, the Saint Louis Zoo’s budget topped $46 million, with nearly half of its funding coming from the Metropolitan Zoological Park and Museum District (ZMD), which Saint Louis City and County property tax dollars fund. For perspective, the Kansas City Zoo’s budget last year was roughly a quarter that size, at $11.6 million — $3.4 million of which came directly from the city.

Is there a funding disparity here? Has Kansas City, to date, placed a different priority on its zoological park compared to other metropolitan needs? Sure, on both counts. But according to a report in the Kansas City Star that may be changing, and soon:

The zoo on Nov. 8 will ask voters in Jackson and Clay counties to create a new zoo district by approving a 1/8-cent sales tax. It would give the animal park an assured stream of money safe from the uncertainties of the Kansas City municipal budget.

Supporters say it would vault Kansas City into the ranks of the truly great regional and national zoos.

“We’re looking at this as one chance in a lifetime,” said Randy Wisthoff, the zoo’s director. “It could be the most important thing to happen at the zoo in its 100-year history, or in the next 100-year history.”

When every big government project is marketed as a “one chance in a lifetime” opportunity to taxpayers, I have to say, the buzz of the suggestion wears off pretty quickly for me. Phraseology like this, of course, is intended to engender urgency for a cause, but while that’s a fine marketing strategy, it can facilitate really bad, and oftentimes silly, public policy decisions.

How much would a fully-implemented Kansas City zoo tax generate? Quite a bit, actually.

If approved in both counties — it must at least pass in Jackson to take effect — the zoo district could generate $14.2 million a year. That is more than the zoo’s entire budget now and would allow it to accelerate a master plan that calls for a $15 million penguin exhibit, an orangutan jungle and a new display for big cats. Plans also include a water play area for kids and a giraffe feeding station.

Another Kansas City Star report notes that “zoo officials say they need a regional tax base to compete with better-funded zoos,” but, is the market for zoos so lucrative that Kansas City really needs to raise its zoo game with a special tax? As someone who had the opportunity to appreciate and enjoy the zoo as a child two decades ago, I would love to see Kansas City expand its zoo, but I’m not convinced that (1) it’s needed, (2) the taxpayers need to pay for it, or (3) that the economic effect of the zoo justifies special taxpayer attention.

It’s the prerogative of Kansas City area residents to determine their tax burdens, so if they see a benefit from the tax, it shall be. But as someone from a family of zoo supporters, I’m not convinced it’s necessary.

Note: Platte County and Cass County, both of which contain parts of Kansas City, will not vote on the zoo tax next week. Residents in those counties might vote on the issue sometime in 2012.

The post A Wild Idea: Kansas City Votes Nov. 8 On Proposed Zoo Tax appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

So, now that we have an opportunity to “save,” “keep,” or “retain” — choose your favorite active verb — yet another downtown employer, Peabody Energy Corp., through an outlay of millions of dollars, our local elected officials contend that local government faces the prospect of either doing something or doing nothing. If St. Louis does nothing, then the city faces the prospect of possibly “losing” 500 jobs, which could tarnish the “image” of downtown. If St. Louis does something, then the city could pat itself on the back for giving tax dollars to a Fortune 500 company.

Development “incentives” are anything but. On their face, they may appear to influence the course of business development, affecting company decisions to locate or to relocate. In reality, private market forces and intangibles determine business behavior in the marketplace.

As best I can discern, the only behaviors that government “incentives” encourage are the development of relationships between government officials that have been statutorily charged with bestowing our money to entities of their choosing and the corporations that so often laugh all the way to the bank.

Here at the Show-Me Institute, we have a different term for “incentives” of this variety: Corporate Welfare.

The provision of these welfare benefits on a case-by-case basis creates such a distorted environment for the exchange of goods and services as to necessarily disadvantage all market actors that do not receive the benefits in question. Ironically, rather than solving problems, these programs create problems, most notably that of rent-seeking by others.

At the end of the day, when the 10-year bonds or the five- to 25-year tax abatements are firmly in place and not subject to judicial abrogation, they do nothing to address underlying business conditions that make plausible a company’s purported threats to relocate.

Government incentives for some create an economic burden on others, ultimately proving a disincentive for many to engage in commerce.

Count me among those supportive of the position that it’s unwise when local government spends tax money in this manner.

The post Should We Save, or Should They Go? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.