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VIDEO: A Groundbreaking Jobs Plan in St. Louis

Posted on 07/20/2021

From The Philadelphia Citizen:  Turns out a global pandemic can be a good time for a metropolis to plan for its future.

In 2020, amidst an unprecedented year of national crisis and racial reckoning, business and civic leaders in the St. Louis metro began the hard work of devising a new approach to economic growth in the region.

Against a backdrop of decades-long economic underperformance, population stagnation and racial division, these leaders commissioned our New Localism Associates to craft a 10-year plan that combined growth in quality jobs and heightened global relevance with a steadfast and broad-based commitment to inclusive growth and racial equity.

They also convinced Mark Wrighton, the former Chancellor of Washington University, to lead a local team of diverse, reflective stakeholders to ensure that the work was fully grounded in local knowledge.

The resulting STL 2030 Jobs Plan maps out a suite of mutually reinforcing actions to grow quality jobs (defined as those paying at least 80% of the national median wage) and reduce racial disparities in household income, health outcomes and wealth building across the St. Louis metro.

It attends to the broader dynamics at work in the metro economy, including rising interest in onshoring supply chains, the post-pandemic challenges facing Main Street businesses, the trend toward remote work and globally distinctive clusters, and the broader push for racial equity in the workplace.

Why was a plan needed?

The St. Louis metro is unusually rich in assets. It has a deep financial services sector and a globally significant bioscience cluster. It has a thriving startup ecosystem, as evidenced by plant science innovator Benson Hill’s plans to go public later this year (one of several tech “unicorns” the metro has produced over the past half-year). It has some exceptional and sophisticated practitioners, including cluster intermediary BioSTL, Arch Grants for entrepreneurs, tech training from LaunchCode and community development leader Invest STL. It has innovative corporations such as Boeing, Enterprise Holdings, Pfizer and Square, among many others. It has major institutions—Washington University in St. Louis, Saint Louis University, Harris-Stowe State University, Scott Air Force Base, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency headquarters, the University of Missouri—St. Louis to name just a few—that provide a solid platform for economy-shaping action powered by area anchors. Its residents and leaders alike are fiercely committed to their community and eager to improve on the status quo.

And yet, despite this strong platform, the St. Louis metro economy consistently underperformed in the years before COVID-19. Between 2008 and 2018, metro GDP grew by only 5.2%, lagging older industrial economies like Baltimore, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, Heartland growth centers like Denver, Minneapolis and Nashville, and the nation as a whole, which saw nearly 20% GDP growth during the same period. This laggard performance made it harder for companies to attract talent, for entrepreneurs to start businesses, and for households to build wealth.

What explains this underperformance? Our research revealed three factors that held the metro economy back:

Decentralization. Over the past fifty years, employment in the metro became radically decentralized. Like Detroit, the St. Louis metro resembles a 1970s-era exit-ramp economy, with many major companies located on isolated suburban or even exurban campuses set away from a declining and increasingly depopulated urban core. The renewed interest in city life in recent years that increased population growth and commercial activity in urban areas throughout the U.S. largely sidestepped St. Louis. The resulting contrast with the national average is stark: The metro would have an additional 130,000 jobs in its greater downtown if it had the same level of employment concentration as the average U.S. metro.

The interplay of race and space. Systemic racism and residential segregation have had a devastating effect on the region. St. Louis is characterized by extraordinarily large areas of low-density, low-income Black communities that have long been disinvested and underserved. These concentrations of poverty in North St. Louis City, North St. Louis County, East St. Louis and elsewhere have hampered the virtuous cycle of development, business growth, job creation and wealth building that has increased economic mobility elsewhere in the metro.

Fragmentation. In the St. Louis metro, fragmentation has been elevated to an art form. A splintered governmental landscape, artificially drawn racial boundaries and dismal economic performance have created a culture of scarcity where growth is perceived as a zero-sum game that rewards only a few at the expense of all others. A plethora of organizations, programs and initiatives have sprung up to address key challenges such as educational attainment, entrenched poverty and entrepreneurial success, each with its own mission and activities. Though many deliver effective individual solutions, lack of coordination means that they don’t add up to a cohesive whole. Of course, fragmentation is quite common in U.S. metros. But older industrial cities like Pittsburgh and emerging tech hubs like Austin have created generative economies and cultures of collaboration where 2 + 2 = 5 (in the evocative phrase of Henry Cisneros). St. Louis, by contrast, has long been less than the sum of its parts, a place where 2 + 2 = 3.

The plan’s North Star

Business and civic leaders understood they needed a new approach to economic development that was capable of producing growth and inclusion. Working with Michelle Tucker at the United Way of Greater St. Louis, Dara Eskridge at Invest STL and the team at Center for Civic Research and Innovation, we created a definition of inclusive growth unique to the St. Louis metro to guide our work.

broad-based economic growth that enables all stakeholders in the St. Louis metropolitan area (including residents, workers, entrepreneurs, companies and communities) to realize their full potential. Such growth enables the widest range of people and places to both contribute to and benefit from economic success.

Its purpose is to achieve more prosperity alongside greater equity in opportunities and outcomes by substantially increasing the number of quality jobs while radically reducing racial and spatial disparities in income, health and wealth that have undermined metropolitan performance for decades.

With this definition as our North Star, we set about identifying the actions needed to make this vision of inclusive growth a reality.

Read more.