urbanSTL

For all the crime, lousy public schools, vacant land and abandoned buildings, and concentrated poverty, there is an incredible amount of real estate development and investment happening in St. Louis city. You can read about it all over this website. Thousands of pages of posts about it.

What does that tell you? (Especially you naysayers? )

There is a lot of development activity, unfortunately its still not as much as other peer cities with better schools, less crime and better future economic and population projections

^ Sometimes numbers aren't the only thing. People aren't moving to cities/areas based on numbers alone. Despite our "numbers" people and companies are still in fact moving to the central corridor in large numbers. I often visit St. Louis's peer cities and St. Louis is doing great and close to on par with them (other than downtown Stl still lagging behind a little).

One thing to keep in mind is a lot of cities with explosive development - Austin, Nashville, Indy to an extent, never had a core population much in excess what they have now so they need to build rapidly to accommodate. St. Louis had what 800k at one point with 320k now. With a city as big as we are (in terms of infrastructure already in place) to be adding this much new development is amazing.

Just read this interesting article about the city of Manchester, England... a down on its luck old industrial city in a less appealing part of the country with a couple of notable sports teams. The city is not too much larger than St. Louis and the metro is also somewhat similar in size.

The city is now thriving, due to a younger population and tech startups, but not without its problems.

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/ ... han-london

A couple of quotes stood out...

In 1987, the population of the city centre was a mere 300; now, it is over 11,000.

The old council, which we sort of swept away, was complacent, paternalistic and patronising

Interesting to read this with St. Louis in mind.

^ Nice... I love that complacent, paternalistic and patronising line.

I'm not particularly surprised that we are 170th this year or were 127 last year but what I don't understand is why we dropped so significantly. I don't get the feeling that we were in a free fall. Do others?

roger wyoming II wrote:This is Metro data, and it's pretty ugly:

Saint Louis ranks 170th (out of 200) in Best-Performing Cities index on jobs and economic growth. This same index had us at 127 last year.

http://best-cities.org/bestcities.taf?r ... metro=MSTL

When we post comparisons, I think it would be helpful to distinguish what areas are being compared. This one is rankings/comparisons of Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs)....Saint Louis MSA population 2.8 million.... I think poor performance in rankings among MSAs should be something to be more concerned about then poor performance in rankings among city propers.

3 MSA's in the state are in top 32

Columbia (11)
St.Joe (16)
Springfield (32)

Texas will pick a few red dots, with oil tanking so is the Texas economy.

^ right... meant to say Texas will be like Florida's 2014 map.

When you travel around, some metros have a name for their region that is different from the usual Greater Boston, or Metro St. Louis. I like names like The Inland Empire, the Sun Corridor, etc. that the traffic guys uses on TV to describe the area with a little marketing built in. We've used the Metro Area, or Bi-State. I'd like to see the media borrow from GRG and describe the metro and media market area here as the Great Rivers Region. I think it is pretty descriptive and applies better here than any other place in the US.

So how do we get the Weather folks and Traffic folks to pick up that metro descriptor?

I know we often discuss the retaining of young college grads and young professionals. Just wondering what the latest is regarding our region's efforts to retain young talent. How is our region doing compared to peer cities and the national average?

I know this is kind of a ridiculous reason to bring this up, but this is why. I was on the Metrolink last night, going to the Blues game. I overheard 3 different young people talking about being back in town for the holidays. One living in NYC, one in Houston and one in Chicago. Then, the 2 young ladies that sat next to me at the game, were STL natives, now living in Nashville. I know this could have been a fluke, but if got me thinking what more we need to be doing to keep our young people. I know we need more jobs, but our self-esteem is low as well. We do not promote ourselves well. I was at the Botanical Gardens a few weeks ago,for the lights. It reminded me how many gems we have in our fair city, what sets STL apart from peer cities. I think the amenities in our city are amazing. We all know we are not living up to our potential. I think we need leaders to get us there. That is the first place to start. I am rambling, but overhearing all of those former STL'ers talking about their new cities, struck a nerve.

^ I think a lot of that is probably young people coming back home for the holidays.... I'm sure there are a lot of conversations in other cities of young, new Saint Louisans who have returned to visit family, etc. for the holidays. (Haven't seen any new reports on our young people attraction.)