Well, I was kind of joking, but that is exactly true. The mission was fine when we were single or just married and in our twenties (or early 30′s.)

As someone whose child is about to start school I feel absolutely justified in saying that the school district appears to be doing everything it can to force us to move. We’re planning on staying put and making sacrifices to do so, but it has been difficult.

Re. Walnut Park cred: I went to Mark Twain (SLPS) on Ruskin and then St. Philip Neri (now defunct) on Thekla. I walked Calvary for fun WAY before it was cool to do so (think 1968). My dad spent his childhood in Walnut Park and lived in the same bungalow where we did when I was a kid. (He moved there from Kerry Patch in the 1920s.) So yeah, I have reason to love the North Side. You may now proceed with your tirade against my yuppie ways.

^That’s why I partly blame the situation of the North Side on those who left. Well, those people, the Federal Government, and Real Estate and Banking Industries that profited greatly from suburbanization.

St. Louis, no doubt, has a lot of issues to overcome. However, this makes it a great City for people who want to fix them. I like Chicago a lot for many reasons. Due to geography, it’s great for a weekend, or longer, visit. But it’s also extremely expensive. In St. Louis, for a significantly lower price, one may own a condo, loft, or house. Renting is a lot more affordable as well. This makes St. Louis a good investment, as I believe we will eventually see increasing demand for housing.

The biggest problem is our political “lack of leadership.” However the solution to this problem is to change leadership then the system under which they operate. But the institutions and political culture, thus rules!, of this City are entrenched against change and have been so for decades. Change then, of course, requires a necessary accumulation of people who want to invest their time and energy for such a change. Such an effort would be well beyond something like an Aldermanic or Mayoral Recall. Unfortunately, as long as we continue to lose young educated people, those well suited for sustained reform, such an outcome becomes less likely, or at least severely delayed.

We need to resist the inclination to pack bags and leave. But it’s not hard to understand why this individual decision seems attractive and rational. Yet when a collective group picks up and leaves, the City suffers as it lacks the social capital required for progress or mere sustainability! In effect the same flight that created the initial problems is propagated.

st louis is not chicago

st louis does not want to be chicago

st louis is a small town, chicago is a big city

if for some reason i wanted to move to chicago, i would instead first move to phoenix, atlanta, sacramento, seattle, san fran, minneapolis, Albuquerque, la, vegas, Baltimore, dc, phili, but chicago,

bunch of pasty white people freezing while they watch a crappy baseball team?

Chicago? For real ?

I am disappointed to see the attacks on this woman.
Margie, I’m sorry you left. Chicago is a fantastic place, has some of the same dynamics that we do here in STL, but for a number of reasons we can never be Chicago. Each city can learn from each other.
This blog just shows that the 130 year old inferiority complex that we have as St. Louisiand in regards to Chicago is still intact. It’s not very productive and we need to get over it.

Part of the allure of TRUE city living has to be the danger in it. Is that a little too harsh? I don’t know. Maybe. Think about NYC pre-Rudy. Think about Times Square in those days. For all the hiccups and dirtiness there, and it existed in spades, there was above all a SENSE OF COMMUNITY.

That’s what’s missing, folks. Community. Knowing your neighbors. Caring about them.

Unfortunately, that’s not a subject taught in schools and in Generation Narcissism, it’s slipping further and further away. When children are told that it’s “all about them” and that they inherently deserve whatever they want, things corrode. As Cormac McCarthy writes in “No Country For Old Men,” “Anytime you quit hearing “sir” and “ma’am”, the end is pretty much in sight.”

Civility counts. Concern for others counts. When I say “danger,” I don’t mean “let’s get more crime here so everyday looks like an episode of The Wire.” No. I mean an edge, though. Just a little conflict. Some rivalry. Contrast. When you get that, you get things that contribute to rich and varied lives. Things like a newspaper where there are beat reporters. Beat cops. Storefronts. Galleries. People who care. You’ll find that this isn’t necessarily a geographic thing; Generation Narcissism is everywhere and it’s gaining traction daily. The more successful cities, the cities where white people like to move to, well…they just cater to it. What you’re seeing in St. Louis is a struggle with that, because the strong communal aspect of this town isn’t gone yet. While the loft builders and nightclub owners and the Alive Magazine crowd are doing their best to obliterate it, it’s not dead yet.

The thing is, most young white people aren’t that concerned with community. They’ll go elsewhere to fulfill their self-interest.

So to those who can’t make it work in St. Louis, who lack the balls and the soul to support it and invest in it…leave. Good riddance. We don’t want you. A community has to reject contaminants to remain intact.

Brad – I disagree, but not completely. On your point about St. Louis being the “most racist city in the country”, yes, racism colors way too many discussions in this city.
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No real city “stays the same”. It’s either getting “better” or it’s getting “worse”, and yes, that definition IS in the eye of the beholder. The reality is that St. Louis is big enough (and struggling enough) that there’s room, at least for the forseeable future, for EVERYONE!. Bottom line, we need more people, and I don’t care if they’re “privileged white yuppies”, or “radical, bohemian, independent-thinking artist/intellectual . . . chain-smoking, black-coffee and whiskey sipping types”, hard-working south-city hoosiers or single black parents struggling to make ends meet on the north side. As you point out, diversity is both the key to success and a huge marker of our “soul” as a city.
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“The powers in Downtown St. Louis have concluded that the way to revitalize the city is to draw as many of these people there as possible.” Well duh, yeah, they’re the ones a) are actually willing to consider moving in, and b) have the resources to do so! The alternative is a gradual (or not so) decline into oblivion. I understand, the “bohemian” lifestyle demands gritty surroundings and cheap rent. But both conspire to an ultimate collapse of the built environment. The one thing St. Louis isn’t lacking is a gritty environment. Is it “fair” that some parts of town are gentrifying and some low-rent-paying residents are being forced to relocate? Probably not, especially if you’re one of ‘em. But the one big difference between here and many other cities (NYC, Chicago, Seattle, Denver) is that there ARE viable options. Benton Park is not Soulard is not Lafayette Square. North St. Louis is not Washington. There are plenty of properties available here, including “gritty” ones, for a quarter or a tenth of what you’d have to pay in those cities. Yes, many also come with “gritty” neighborhoods and undesirable neighbors, but if a “pre-Rudy” ambiance is what you desire, there are, unfortunately, plenty of “opportunities” around here.
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“The thing is, most young white people aren’t that concerned with community.” True. The same can be said of the black gang bangers on the north and south sides – they’re sure as hell NOT helping the community, either. And, unfortunately, the same can be said of way too many working folks, retired folks, homeless people and, yes, “bohemian” folks. Most of us are spending most of our time working “for the man” to put food on our tables and a roof over our heads, leaving little/not enough time to reach out, become involved and to build a community. (Then, again, community is in the eye of the beholder.) Combine that with a political structure that prefers to function with as little public input as possible, and what you see is what you get . . .

northside:

I would be pleased to live in a city in which women understand that they are not required to shave.

westnotbest:

I have no interest in speculating in real estate, but thanks for the heads up.

R.

I read Brad’s depressing tirade of vitriolic generalizations and hackneyed, fish-in-the-barrel honky-bashing more than once before deciding to reply. This “homogenous population”, i.e., the “creative class” is “one of the worst offenders in the class divide that’s killing this country”? Really? I think instead of HMO, pharmaceutical, and oil company execs who profit obscenely off of human misery, wrap themselves in the flag and eat lunch at Bush’s ranch while they do it. I think of the Republican party pimping itself out to the most ignorant, vindictive, godbag hypocrites in America, stoking their bigoted fears of gay marriage and immoral stem cell research to pack the polls and return the most shockingly horrid president ever to the White House. It’s a false-consciousness wet dream right out of an Emma Goldman speech. I think of rigged elections in Florida and Ohio and Al Gonzalez unable to recall what he did five minutes ago. I think of Bill Clinton and Co. dithering and dicking around over the semantics of “genocide” instead of intervening decisively in Rwanda. I think of our splendid attorney general, who isn’t quite prepared to condemn water boarding as “torture” or as an “interrogation technique”. Yeah, that’s a tough one. Locally, I think of decades of coordinated efforts to marginalize the urban environment by allocating taxpayer funds to heavily subsidize infrastructure and highways to ever-metastasizing, featureless, exurban vistas cluttered with nondescript vinyl houses and strip malls next to cornfields populated by idiots who love to bray about the sanctity of the “private market forces” that built their “neighborhood”, while every inch of their septic tank was paid for grace of public dollars. Interestingly, like Brad, many of these “soulless” folks subscribe to the view that the urban core is, or at least should be, the concentrated domain of minorities and the impoverished. The word “urban” is code for (wink!) “lots of blacks”. To them, anyone else who chooses to reside in the city and likes it must hanker perversely for some chaotic bazaar of social dysfunction and random, senseless violence, 200K loft notwithstanding. TV shows and the local news feed this benighted preconception. The view of urban white people, particularly those who are relatively affluent and educated, as brazen interlopers in the swarthy homeland of “grit” is a tiresome, ignorant distortion rooted in a demeaning and limited view of what cities have, can, and should be. Existence precedes essence. A city is a living organism, animated for good or ill by those who animate it, irrespective of color or class. A prescription that posits it as an abstract, simplistic, romanticized decay mall of monochromatic “community” is for Endsville, not St. Louis

okay, westnotbest, but your earlier post talked only about the bubble — the bursting of which actually tends to lower rents

r.

which brings us back to the original thread: st. louis is affordable because it has not much to offer

r.

“Watching these developers (both of whom I remain fans of, BTW) be threatened, bullied and ultimately extorted into publicly withdrawing and discrediting their own plan was one of the most sickening forms of “civic progress” I can imagine. It disillusioned me in the truest sense. I am still angry about the injustice of this act and the complicity and cooperation of the “leaders” of the groups I mentioned.”

Margie, if St. Louis left you disillusioned, I wish you luck in Chicago. I do not know your industry, but isn’t it exciting that you were so close to a major event in St. Louis. Albeit a losing effort. But you fought the good fight, and raised awareness. I doubt, unless you have some connections, that the closest you will come to impacting major changes in Chicago will be reading about them in the Tribune.

Enjoy the ocean lil fish.

Hi Ken,
This little fishy is finding the lake water just fine, thanks.

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