I don’t get this take either... is any town outside of the city limits just supposed to cease to exist? Yes urban sprawl isn’t good, but St. Charles isn’t that.
I don’t get this take either... is any town outside of the city limits just supposed to cease to exist? Yes urban sprawl isn’t good, but St. Charles isn’t that.
St. Charles city and county represent an legacy core and sprawl. Much like their bigger brother across the river. Not dissimilar from Joliet's relationship to Chicago.
No. I'm pointing out that the region has spread out too much which has burdened us with a lot to take care of so we should be careful about spreading out too much.
Maybe consider if the headline were "Mexico Rd needs $100M rebuild, officials deferred maintenance leading to bigger bill, weighing options"
It's not about St. Charles existing as an incorporated municipality and having a city hall. It's about how spreading out leads to a lot of infrastructure and facilities we later discover is a bigger burden than we realized before when we decided to spread out so much.
Ehhh, I still don't see how that applies to St. Charles needing a new city hall. This feels like trying to apply some negative perspective to literally any story outside of the city core. To use your own example, a $100M Mexico Rd rebuild is categorically different than a historic city upgrading its facilities to serve its residents.
Being too spread out makes it harder to maintain things. They deferred maintenance, as is typical when there's too much to maintain, and now the bill is even bigger, so big that abandoning the current location for a crap box miles away was seriously considered (build-abandon-build-abandon). Had we not spread out so much there would be more wealth to maintain the fewer things we'd need to maintain.
It's not about St. Louis City core vs everywhere else. St Louis City Hall needs maintenance too. But we've spread out too much, there's too much to take care of, so more competition for the wealth to maintain it, thus harder to maintain it.
There's a separate argument about how fragmentation also contributes to more things to take care of. Is that what you were thinking I was getting at?
Nope, I just disagree with applying the "spread out too much" idea to St. Charles, a city that's existed since 1769 (as Dennis pointed out earlier) that has arguable the best walkable main street in the region. The issues with deferred maintenance have nothing to do with St. Charles being spread out from the city and more to do with their inability to tackle it early on. Was the box store idea bad? Oh yeah. That's inexcusable. But fortunately the city quickly adjusted once residents spoke up.
What do you want St. Charles to do in this situation?
Your point would be much more valid if this was Wentzville trying to replace a building originally built in 1990 by moving into an empty big box store.
^ St. Charles could have avoided annexing all that land...they then built tons of unaffordable suburban sprawl on.
You speak of St. Charles as if the whole city is some old world walkable place. It’s not, it may have a couple little walkable streets but it’s actually mostly as quincunx described it. Spread out sprawl...and now the chickens have come home to roost.
What does sprawl have to do with their existing city hall needing replaced? That is the disconnect I'm seeing here. This has nothing to do with sprawl and only to do with their downtown building just being extremely outdated and in need of replacement.
^ I'm not really sure how it can be made anymore clear for you:
Being too spread out makes it harder to maintain things. They deferred maintenance, as is typical when there's too much to maintain, and now the bill is even bigger, so big that abandoning the current location for a crap box miles away was seriously considered (build-abandon-build-abandon). Had we not spread out so much there would be more wealth to maintain the fewer things we'd need to maintain.
Annexing land for suburban sprawl spreads out your resources and makes it that much more difficult to maintain and pay for the older stuff that was built previously...like, I don't know...an older City Hall building.
Being first settled in 1769 doesn't make it less of a mistake to transition from building in a traditional development pattern to a spread out low productivity auto-oriented one. O'Fallon was first settled in 1856. That fact isn't going to make it easier to maintain all its too large infrastructure burden over the long term.
"What do you want St. Charles to do in this situation?"
That's tough. Abandoning the traditional development pattern for the experimental spread-out one has left us in quite a predicament. At the very lest we could stop spreading out the region further so as to stop adding to the burden. Within the St. Charles city limits, seek opportunities to increase land productivity. That's made tougher when that effort is undermined by the forces spreading out the region.
U City is in the same predicament. they're struggling to maintain their streets, they need a new police station, etc. Their solution is to go full-throttle into the sales tax chase. That's a large risky bet on the auto-oriented development pattern.
