I saw this yesterday and thought it may be of interest here. Calgary has made the decision to stop subsidizing sprawl in its suburbs. The parallels to STL are not easily drawn in our fragmented state, but assuming that consolidation efforts proceed and we eventually get something done, something like this could be in STL's future 15-20 years from now. It needs to happen now, IMO, but we must crawl as a region before we can walk.

http://calgaryherald.com/opinion/column ... ban-sprawl

City of Calgary is 320 sq miles. 5 times the land size of stl city. Or basically everything from the river to st.charles county.

STL City is 62 sq mi, STL County is 500 sq mi. This would be the equivalent of not subsidizing anything past Town & Country to the west, Hazelwood to the north, and 270 to the south.

Andrew, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Mayor actually talking about suburban development WITHIN their large city limits?

Meaning the equivalent in St. Louis wouldn't be anything outside of 270, but rather it would include things within 270.

That's how I read it anyways. Which is why I was thinking they were able to do it. They can't control what entities outside of their city do, but they can ensure things that are happening within the city aren't subsidizing the sprawl.

Yeah, the issue is two-fold. They control more area than STL City does. They also have suburban type development in the city proper. Were STL City to be larger (i.e.-stretch to 270), the same would true here.

My point was that the City of Calgary can do this since it has 320 sq miles that it controls...City of St.Louis cannot since County and St.Charles wont follow suit...as we have seen about a lot of issues here lately....Metro sales tax...smoking ban, minimum wage ect.

I wasn't suggesting this was something we could do right now here in STL. I was posting to point out what other regions and cities are doing. This is definitely years if not decades down the road for the STL metro region.