Meet Me In Austin
On May 9th Austin, Texas will vote for a new mayor. Thus far the race has been very low key and turnout is projected to be only around a miniscule 10% of the registered voters. The residents of the city may be sleeping through this campaign, but this election, as in all elections, has consequences.
Cities do not grow inevitably. Our nation has many once great cities that have withered and declined over the years in large part due to apathy and mismanagement. One of the leading candidates for mayor in Austin, City Councilman Brewster McCracken, seems to understand this fact. He has now run a television advertisement in which he points to the stark decline of St. Louis, MO as an example of how a once great and leading city can fall. This naturally provoked an angry response from some residents of St. Louis (as seen in the news clip above), but they seemed to completely miss his point. If Austin and its civic and political leaders do not focus on the aspects that lead to a growing and prosperous city, then what happened to St. Louis and many other cities could happen here as well. Can anyone dispute that St. Louis is literally less than half the city it once was?
I have read and studied a good deal about St. Louis. My father-in-law and his entire family were born and raised there. To say that St. Louis is today a shadow of what it once was is not an understatement. For the best review of what the city once was and what it is now we will turn to the incomparable Almanac of American Politics -
For a century or more, St. Louis seemed the center of America: the starting point for the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804; the locus half a century later of the Dred Scott case, a Supreme Court ruling that helped split the nation; the site of the 1904 World’s Fair that introduced the hot dog and the ice cream cone and got 19 million people to Meet Me in St. Louis. Its 630-foot-high Gateway Arch is just below the point where the waters of the Missouri surge into the Mississippi, about halfway between New Orleans and Lake Superior, the Atlantic and the Pacific. This first major American city west of the Mississippi River was the final resting place of Daniel Boone and for many years was Chicago’s rival as the transportation hub of America. In 1904 St. Louis already had the Eads Bridge, one of America’s first suspension bridges; the Wainwright Building, one of Louis Sullivan’s first skyscrapers; and Union Station, the world’s largest passenger train station when it opened in 1894. Some 600,000 people lived then in densely packed brick houses on old street grids radiating outward from downtown. This was a heavily German city, with a Teutonic solidity and orderliness that distinguished it from the surrounding Southern-accented rural terrain; and from Mitteleuropa came the founders of St. Louis’s great businesses—the Anheuser-Busch brewery, May Company department stores, Joseph Pulitzer’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch—and its first great politician and a friend of Abraham Lincoln, Senator and Interior Secretary Carl Schurz. There is almost a European aura to Forest Park, the site of the 1904 fair, and the dozen mansion-lined private streets nearby, like Portland Place.
St. Louis is still one of the nation’s 20 largest metro areas, but today it does not occupy as central a place in the national consciousness, and the central city itself has largely emptied out. The German order that made so many people comfortable living in close quarters and commuting by streetcar seems to have yielded to an American desire for Daniel Boone’s wide open (suburban) spaces and the less restrictive automobile. St. Louis’ population peaked at 856,000 in 1950; it was down to 343,000 in 2004, less than its 350,000 in 1880 and far less than the 1,000,510 now in suburban (and juridically separate) St. Louis County. Indeed, more blacks live in St. Louis County than St. Louis City. Downtown St. Louis has been spruced up admirably: the Gateway Arch was finished in 1965; Union Station has been redeveloped; Laclede’s Landing and the former garment district are stocked with shops; a new Busch Stadium opened with a panoramic view of the Arch and downtown. But most of St. Louis’s old factories have closed and many of its once tight neighborhoods are only a memory.
That section of The Almanac sums it up far better than most politicians would like to admit. Growth and prosperity do not just happen. A city must ensure that it provides good basic services such as police, fire, roads, parks, water, and sanitation. It must ensure that it creates a business friendly environment. It must keep down property and sales taxes. It must also be certain to avoid the enticing boondoggles that too often sucker in politicians that are playing fast and loose with taxpayer dollars, such as Austin requesting a million dollars from the federal stimulus bill to build a disc golf course. Cities must realize that they are in competition with other communities and when crime and costs rise too high citizens and businesses vote with their feet. Austin cannot afford to let that happen, and it cannot let its hubris and “Keep Austin Weird” vibe obscure this fact from its voters. Kudos to Councilman McCracken for understanding those facts.
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