urbanSTL

^ I think perceptions for those with open minds are changing as much of the City undeniably is becoming more livable and offering visible improvement.... and that will only improve with time, Some folks just are dead enders and really aren't worth the thought.

Ebsy wrote:Some recent additions to our great City, on this site in particular, make it seem like the City is continuing to decline at an extraordinary rate.

But when hard numbers are staring us in the face (very low population growth, job loss, corporate HQ loss etc) it's hard to be happy.

Every city goes through ups and downs. Unless you are Detroit where the one industry you are heavily invested in takes a downswing, things will get better.

So the Saint Louis Economic Development Partnership says that publicity from the Ferguson events have halted several business expansion plans in the region...

Denny Coleman told members of the County Council that Ferguson has generated "more than 88,000 news stories nationally and internationally that resulted in more than 100 billion media impressions."

"The press coverage of our region has been unprecedented and almost uniformly negative," Coleman added.

http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/ ... 9c0b4.html

I wonder if any of those are in NorthPark.... Clayco said it was to have announced a couple major projects by this time.

^ I'd love to know details on the County's claims. Are these big projects that just hit a temporary bump or have they moved on elsewhere? Or are they just waiting to see how much of the Northland burns after no indictment before going ahead?

Why don't cities with a higher percentage of blacks and other minorities make these "hot cities" lists for growth and locating businesses.

Because those cities tend to be poor(er), which means they lack the amenities creative class workers expect, and because the talent pool is smaller when there are fewer college educated people as a proportion of the population.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012 ... .html?_r=0


Put another way, we're the 18th largest metro, but the 42nd most educated. That is probably why we do not attract outside biz investment.

^ it is a well-deserved recognition.... and it has room to grow by filling up some of the vacant edges and occasional prime surface lot.

jcity wrote:Why don't cities with a higher percentage of blacks and other minorities make these "hot cities" lists for growth and locating businesses.

onecity wrote:Because those cities tend to be poor(er), which means they lack the amenities creative class workers expect, and because the talent pool is smaller when there are fewer college educated people as a proportion of the population.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012 ... .html?_r=0

Put another way, we're the 18th largest metro, but the 42nd most educated. That is probably why we do not attract outside biz investment.

Nothing to do with race or education, in my opinion. Houston ranks behind St. Louis on that NYT's Cities with the Most College-Educated Residents list, yet Houston is booming. BOOMING. Plus, more than a quarter of its residents are African-American and even more than that are Latino and other minorities.

Then cities with high black pops such as Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and Charlotte are on Forbes' 2014 Best Places For Business And Careers 2014 list. Rick Perry's corporate poaching, NC's governor breaking the bank to lure jobs and Atlanta growing more and more into a major global city helps to lure business and jobs.

Meanwhile in Misery............I mean Missouri.

A lot of African-Americans live in Rust Belt cities in the Midwest. Chicago, which has 1.6-million African-Americans, has a fairly sluggish to moderate economy. Rust Belt cities, including and especially St. Louis, it's safe to say, have been piss poor reinventing their economies until recently.

Notice that Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and Charlotte are in the South. The South has been kicking the Midwest's ass for the past 20 years or more when it has come to economic development and landing business. Airbus, Mercedes, Boeing, Lenovo, Honda etc. etc. etc. all have operations in the South.

Charlotte, with all of its black people, GDP has surpassed St. Louis' even though it's a smaller metro.

The issue is poor LEADERSHIP - not race.

^My point wasn't about race, but about the concentration of people with degrees, and that historically, blacks tend to be poorer and have fewer degrees. All the rockstar cities have extremely high % of residents w degrees. Almost every city in the top 15 of that list has a huge knowledge economy. Atlanta and Charlotte have more degrees as a % than STL. Houston, and other resource-extraction meccas, probably do alright with low proportions of college educated residents, because of the nature of the resource-extraction economy. See North Dakota for another example. Right now, we are neither. Job 1 is to grow the knowledge sector, and figure out how to resurrect the middle-income, middle-skills part of the economy so the future city isn't an island of prosperity in a sea of misery.