QUALITY OF LIFE
by Mark Drucker, Ph.D., Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville

In April 1999 HUD identified St. Louis as a poster-city for its depiction of "places left behind in the new economy." In its report, "Now is the Time," HUD was referring to the President's comments in his 1999 State of the Union Address, when he urged that such places be viewed not as national burdens, but as untapped markets for additional national economic growth.

The report found that St. Louis confronted what it described as "the new urban challenge," posed by changing global economics as well as factors such as race and suburbanization. The HUD researchers flagged the following indicators:

• An average annual unemployment rate more than 50% above the average annual national rate, and a drop from 1992 to 1998 of only from 8.3% to 7.2%.
• What the report called a "massive exodus" of 22.4% of St. Louis's population from 1980 to 1996, losing "workers and consumers to grow the economy, as well as the tax base needed to protect livability and strengthen the local business climate."
• A poverty rate (in 1995) higher than 50% more than the national average (St. Louis had a 29.5% rate), indicating that even "with a strong national economy, these places have a long way to go," and that St. Louis is "plagued with persistently high poverty."

While noting that cities like St. Louis can be found in the "slow lane" of the national recovery, HUD also noted that they may be untapped and emerging markets, based upon "competitive advantages and substantial assets," such as "locally unmet consumer demand, and underutilized labor resources, and developable, well-located land that is rich in infrastructure." Although HUD's intention is to advocate for attention to, and investment in cities like St. Louis, and for the capitalization required for that investment, it is hard not to interpret this combination of poverty, joblessness, and available space as a kind of Moscow on the Mississippi.

THE QUALITY OF LIFE FOR CHILDREN

St Louis, for the past seven years, has benefited from a brilliantly-led national model of a children's advocacy collaborative called Vision for Children at Risk (VCR). VCR's research component, Project Respond, has been the region's primary source in pinpointing the prevalence and targeting the location of any negative social indicators involving children. Twice, VCR hosted regional Children's Summits to secure commitments from public, private, and nonprofit institutions to support a Children's Agenda addressing those indicators. VCR additionally had the principal local role in coordinating the implementation of the U.S. Department of Justice's anti-juvenile delinquency program, Safe Futures.

However, in August, 1999, St. Louisans learned that even excellent processes like VCR were no substitute for major social action when Zero Population Growth issued its national Kid Friendly Cities Report Card. With a grade of "F," St. Louis was second to last (Baltimore) on ZPG's list of 25 major cities.

ZPG's approach was to place the 25 cities' performance within the full range of their performance, according to each of 14 different indicators. This is the picture of the city with which St. Louisans were greeted in August:

  C+  Transportation  Percentage Commuting on Public 
                        Transportation (12.2%)
                      Average Drive (22.0)

  C-  Education       Percentage in Pre-School (59%)
                      Drop-Out Rate (20.7%)

  D   Health          Percentage Teenage Births (22.0%)
                      Infant Mortality Rate (12.3%)
                      Percentage Low Birth Weight (11.1%)

  D   Public Safety   Violent Crimes per 1000 (27)
                      Poverty Crimes per 1000 (124)

  D   Economics       Unemployment Rate (7.7)
                      Percentage Children in Poverty (39.3%)
                      Percentage Homeownership (45.1%)

  D   Environment     Number of Annual Bad Air Days (20)

  F   Population      Population Change (-11.4%)

None of this should have taken the city by surprise. ZPG's previous survey (released in August, 1997) had listed the city as third from last among cities with populations above 100,000 (above Newark and Gary).

VCR's Project Respond Search Director Nate Thompson had said in 1997: "We've got certain zipcodes where it's almost like living in a third world country (Post-Dispatch, August 29, 1997, p.3C)." And Neonatalogist Corinne Walentik had commented on the need for health education, (an interest of ZPG itself): "We can't get school-based clinics in the schools. You can't talk about contraceptives. We don't do a good job of letting our patients know what services they're entitled to."

The August 29, 1999 Post-Dispatch editorialized that "St. Louisans take great pride in the region as a terrific place to raise a family . . . in a sense (the city of) St. Louis's kids are the canaries in the mineshaft. . . The slow statistical decline (in some indicators) means little to a poor, young mother whose scrawny infant has just died in a neonatal intensive care unit, or to a middle class family tired of living in a city with crummy services." So, with rhetoric like this, the daily paper's editorialists were trying to club their readers into recognizing the urgency of the problems.

KINDNESS FROM STRANGERS?

Inevitably compared to de Tocqueville, travelers would write books about cities and warn St. Louis about what they observed. In September 1998, Robert Kaplan returned to the St. Louis he had written about in An Empire Wilderness as part of his tour promoting his book. The journalist, who had written previously about the Balkans, made several points about St. Louis:

  "Suburbanization here does not mean decentralization of as 
  much as it does jurisdictional sovereignty for well-off whites so 
  they can isolate themselves from the problems of predominantly 
  black inner cities [p. 33]."

  "The juxtaposition of the Central West End with a wasteland of 
  wrecked buildings and streets as ominous as any I had seen in 
  the war -torn Third World had come about when working-class whites 
  fled and wealthy whites in luxury homes hired private security 
  services to protect their investments (p.39)."

  ". . . Anybody who could manage to leave north St. Louis was doing 
  so.  Yet black flight to the suburbs was not speeding integration 
  . . . on a local level, blacks want to govern themselves; they want 
  the power and the patronage that come with self-governance, just as 
  whites have had.  Nobody, either black or white, is pushing 
  integration in St. Louis."

St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Repps Hudson wrote that Kaplan was "determined to find what he was looking for, not let the facts speak for themselves." But Hudson felt that Kaplan had gotten "some things right, such as his characterization of the St. Louis area as sprawling, deeply divided racially and somewhat oblivious to the harm those facts are likely to cause (August 30, 1998, p. D5)."

In 1999, NPR's "Talk of the Nation" host Ray Suarez toured with his own book, The Old Neighborhood, which included his observations from visiting St. Louis. Suarez recounted relevant social indicators in his description of the region; the urban core, as a small percentage of the total region; the high median age; the small working-age population; the high proportion that the elderly represent of the total population.

But he also focused on his visit to the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood, and comparisons of it to suburban St. Charles. Especially interesting to him were the perceptions and reality of crime - and how much they motivated outmigration from the city to the suburbs. Suarez recapped his interview with St. Louis criminologist Rick Rosenfeld, who said: "The tragedy of mobility here is not that people leave the city of St. Louis; it's that so few resources go into the communities left behind to make them attractive to the families . . . who themselves might want to move into that neighborhood. I don't think mobility is the issue. It's our unwillingness to do anything about the tragic conditions that occur once people leave."

Suarez's host in Wells-Goodfellow, Veronica Evans, was working hard to get the police to close down a crack house. She doubted that it would be such a problem in St. Charles. Rosenfeld agreed, citing the volume of the problem in St. Louis: "If you are the St. Louis police department and you're in contact with a dozen community groups that have just identified a dozen crack houses to take down, it might not get taken down as rapidly as you'd like. That's not the case in St. Charles."

But the most significant visit to St. Louis by a critical journalist was a project sponsored by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch itself: the 1997 "Call to Action" by Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson.

THE PEIRCE REPORT: "MATERIAL HAZARDOUS TO CIVIC PRIDE"

This was the warning label on the report which purported to examine St. Louis's vital signs, and began its fifth paragraph with a senior statesman's prognosis that "St. Louis city is near death."

Peirce Reports reflect very specific beliefs of the authors about how 1990's cities and regions (citistates) should reform themselves. Peirce and Johnson, in the spirit of journalism, interview a great many leading residents, compare these interviews to develop a view of that citistate, and then apply their "new model for cities" to what they have learned. Some St. Louisans, like other Peirce Report clients, were told that:

• The region's stability depends on a strong economy, a healthy environment, social equity, and civic engagement.
• When a region has a problem, it can borrow solutions from the best practices of other regions.
• Collaboration is better than competition, and regional citizenship should supplant partisan politics.
• Like other "postmodern" thinkers, Peirce and Johnson believe that there already is national consensus on the environment, against prejudice and on minimizing the role of the federal government.

The best of the Peirce report then was not their preestablished generic reformist recommendations, but the "reality check," as they put it, that they were giving St. Louis.

  "Allowing the center city to decline is 'like abandoning your 
  heritage, your birthright.'  The whole region has been affected and 
  is leaking population."

  "With corporate mergers - Boeing, the large commercial banks, 
  the phone company - corporate decisionmaking power is leaving 
  the region."

  "All the expensive redundancies of 771 governmental units isn't 
  helping St. Louis to invest in its future."

  "The region is educating its people poorly compared to other 
  regions."

  "Disparities in the quality of life between the races leads to 
  feelings of hopelessness in the African-American community."

  "St. Louis 'is expanding topsy-turvy across the farm fields and 
  prairies' in especially pronounced urban sprawl."

The Report then pinpoints "a timid civic psyche" preoccupied with 1904 (perhaps when the city peaked), characterized by suspicion between the races, and, given (in their view) the stalemate between so much government, much deference toward Civic Progress, the corporate leadership often expected to make key St. Louis public decisions (and they quote a Civic Progress member: "We're expected to solve all the community's problems. Expectations are much higher than we can produce)."

Peirce and Johnson, on a more micro level, blamed the low levels of production of new and rehabilitated housing units in the city not to the market (and the attractiveness of inexpensive suburban single family homes), but to the relative absence in St. Louis of neighborhood community development corporations. They noted how national intermediary organizations (Local Initiatives Support Corporation, Enterprise Foundation) which might have helped these organizations were run off in the 1980's, when they expressed interest in playing a role in St. Louis. They quoted an expert who had been assessing St. Louis: "St. Louis is a deeply flawed region with massive assets. The challenge is to fix the structure to use the assets before St. Louis disappears."

ST. LOUIS' ASSETS

The Peirce Report not only provided dire warnings ("near death," "Detroitization," "before it disappears"), but also identified assets.

"Another part of the picture of St. Louis' quality of life is the recognition of strong resilient institutions, thriving amid some disturbing trends, despite being deserted by that outmigration of residents. If these assets were to be mapped, it also would be worth noting the extent to which they are emerging, as opposed to truly longstanding community assets."

What Peirce and Johnson noticed first was the region's "most exciting underused treasures," as they put it, the universities:

• St. Louis University, both at its north campus and Medical Center locations, is an excellent example of emerging institutional assets. The recent design and landscaping improvements have represented a real Jesuit blessing to midtown St. Louis - an authoritative institutional presence where previously there were city street university school buildings, abandonment, and the remains of Laclede Town. The Medical School, in selling its hospital to Tenet, has secured a future for itself and for its contribution to medical education.
• Washington University Medical School, a longstanding community asset, has been equally aggressive in its own role in an integrated delivery system with BJC. Institutionally they together dominate the Central West End, expanding east toward St. Louis University in a current version of the "Technopolis" plans of the Community Development Administration. They have built parking lots and are redesigning space to the north, while sponsoring competition with existing merchants by installing ventures like retail book superstores (Barnes and Noble). Finally, the Medical Center Redevelopment Corporation has been accumulating federal grants to undertake more concerted efforts to the south in the dramatically undernourished Forest Park Southeast (Ranken) neighborhood.

One purpose in strategic planning methods for employing an asset is to spin off benefits to ongoing policies and programs. In this context, the Peirce Report, on the lookout for city employers, recognized the Regional Jobs Initiative's targeting of city hospitals.

BJC (Barnes) Hospital, with its drive to control the medical care of a million patients by the year 2000 is a longstanding institutional asset for St. Louis that is swelling in scope at the same time it reduces its bed capacity. Its merger history is a national case study of the birth of an integrated delivery system. BJC has assumed responsibility (and financial losses) for Connect Care, the voucher-like successor to direct city provision of acute care. Whether it is extending its relationship to Mallinckrodt Radiological Institute, or cornering the institutional market in some psychiatric service, BJC is a dominant factor in its market.

Emerging institutionally is Tenet, the for-profit integrated delivery system which has acquired almost all of the rest of the city's hospital beds -- at Deaconess and at Incarnate Word, and, most of all, in the purchase of St. Louis University's hospital.

Three corporations that have been longstanding resilient institutions and also physically dominate the city's landscape are:

• Anheuser-Busch, with both an employment base, and logos and symbols that exemplify St. Louis traditions.
• Ralston Purina at Checkerboard Square, with its tradition of Danforths and a new generation of corporate managers who have tried to extort the city to retreat on its earnings tax in order to keep them in the city.
• A. G. Edwards, for so long the only non-Wall Street-located member of the Securities Industry Association, perched on Jefferson, but sharing its expansion in the division of the Laclede Town and midtown space.

The Peirce Report paid appropriate deference to the Zoo-Museum District cultural tax, and the institutional community assets it supports:

• The Zoo, with its proud history of national recognition and expanding set of modern outdoor natural habitats, like Big Cat Country, and museums like "The Living World" and, in Spring 2000, Monsanto's new $4 million Insectarium.
• The Art Museum which, in Summer 2000, finally will embrace contemporary art with eleven major installations inside and outside its halls, and with the brilliantly leveraged Beckmann and the highly popular Vatican angels exhibits, completed a successful 1998-1999.
• The Botanical Gardens, expanded and expanding consistent with the agribusiness research role the region intends to play, and the international clout it has obtained rescuing flora and fauna from the tropic Americas, and, with Kew Gardens and Harvard, cataloguing the botany of China.
• The most "emerging" of all institutions, the History Museum, moving on up from a local genealogical research role to curate multi-year exhibits on the Gilded Age and the St. Louis World's Fair, and, most of all, looking forward in 2004 to celebrating the Lewis and Clark expedition.
• The Science Center, really a new start-up, and now a national model for a children's hands-on science museum. Only a few years ago, the Science Center was a small museum in Oak Knoll Park, and now, it is a major presence inside and across Highway 40 from Forest Park (and in their newly revitalized cyber systems).
• The St. Louis Symphony does not benefit from that regional tax, but, at its Powell Hall performance center, is another longstanding St. Louis asset whose stock rose internationally during Slatkin's period as conductor.
• Another longstanding institution is the Gateway Arch, the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, with its position of leadership among Midwestern tourist attractions.
• Emerging - and for only 3 to 4 days per year on the Arch grounds - is Fair St. Louis over the July 4 holidays, now a citywide culturally diversely presented event.
• Metrolink, currently a single light rail line running from East St. Louis across the city and on to the Airport, has been the most surprising emerging success, especially as a substitute for downtown parking for those attending sports events
• The three major professional sports franchises - all with new ownership in the last five years - are candidates to be classified as emerging institutional assets.
• Another candidate qualifying as an institutional asset would be the "boats," or, at least, St. Louis' own portion of the gambling industry, The President Casino.
• A brief two-day event is the major national Balloon Race, run each September from Forest Park. Of course the balloons, by definition, are not longstanding, and, in Peirce Report terms, are as likely to be disappearing as they are to be emerging, but the Balloon Race is a somewhat underdeveloped and underadvertised St. Louis institutional asset.

VIRTUES

If the city has its assets, it also might be said to have virtues to help support its next five years.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Entrepreneur magazine in 1997 voted St. Louis as the second best metropolitan area for entrepreneurs and small businesses (behind Portland). St. Louis, said the magazine, was resilient and able to change with the times. The criteria for the magazine's rankings were in five categories: risk, business performance, economic growth, affordability, and government's attitude toward small business.

In the 1998 rankings of utility patent grants (patents) issued by metropolitan area, St. Louis ranked 29th, with 743 patents (San Jose was 1st with 4931 patents, but only 5 metropolitan areas had over 2000, and only 11 above 1500 - Boston, Chicago, LA, NY, etc.). Compared by East-West Gateway Coordinating Council in Where We Stand to 34 comparable metropolitan areas, St. Louis in 1997 was 17th out of 35.

On the other hand, Hennen's American Public Library Rating Index, in its second edition using 1997 data, rated St. Louis' Public Library as the 36th best of 90 libraries serving populations of a similar size. The Index is based on factors such as visits, circulation, collection turnover, and staff and spending per capita (according to the September 27, 1999 St. Louis Post-Dispatch).

Where We Stand also looked at 1997 business startups per 1000 residents. With 2.75 startups per 1000, St. Louis ranked 32nd in its comparison group, ahead of only Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and Boston.

According to the St. Louis Business Journal (June 28, 1999), Pricewaterhouse-Coopers' National MoneyTree survey indicated that Missouri drew just .4% of the first quarter 1999 $4.3 billion in venture capital committed in the U.S.. More than half of the total was spent in California (40.7% of the total in Silicon Valley alone), 11.1% in Massachusetts, and less than 1% in 26 other states. As a St. Louis venture capitalist commented, "We've got a lot of great ideas here, and we've funded a lot of them. The difference between St. Louis and the West Coast is for every one idea we have, they have 10."

GENEROSITY

Gloria Ross at the United Way reported that their Fall 1999 goal was to raise $60 million, up from $51.7 million in 1995, $53.8 million in 1996, $55.7 million in 1997, and $57.3 million in 1998. The St. Louis Business Journal (December 22, 1997) noted that, of the $55.7 million in 1997, $11.7 million of this was allocated to the seven top-funded agencies (in the same order of allocation amounts as in 1996), each receiving between $3.5 million and $945,000. These agencies were the Red Cross, Provident Counseling, Salvation Army, the YMCA, the Urban League, the Jewish Community Centers Association, and Catholic Services for Children and Youth.

The St. Louis American, St. Louis' African-American weekly, editorialized on September 16, 1999: "Poverty is not our universal state. It never has been. And it behooves those of us who are not in poverty to act like it. Not flaunting good fortune, but sharing. It's a grand African-American tradition that's well worth continuing. Our economic state has never reflected our spiritual state. Before we knew the meaning of the words 'volunteer' and 'contributor' we were giving freely to our churches, and our neighbors." The paper then congratulated the 400 African-Americans expected to donate a million of the $60 million of United Way's 1999 goal.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy (February 22, 1994) placed St. Louis giving in a national perspective based upon early 1990's comparative metropolitan area donations (per capita) to ten big national charities, and by four different foundation sources. Within The Chronicle's system, St. Louis ranked 14th of the 50 largest metropolitan areas. Assisted by the "per capita giving" criterion, many Midwestern cities performed very well - Minneapolis, Columbus, Omaha, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Milwaukee (all among the top nine).

Rankings didn't correlate to center city per capita income rankings (St. Louis, for example, ranked 5th here), but instead to strong corporate involvement in public affairs, personal CED involvement as a vehicle for them to be successful in community life, and long traditions of family giving (a factor which may have changed due to the explosions of high-tech and Internet wealth later in the 1990's).

One traditional area of philanthropy has been scholarship assistance. The New York Times, on its September 23, 1999 front page, described public schools and their students as "long dismissed as the runts in the family of philanthropy." But now, The Times reported, corporate philanthropists like Gates, George Lucas, Theodore Forstmann, and Eli Broad were following the earlier lead of George Lang and the "I Have a Dream" Foundation in attempting to rescue children from failing public schools.

Forstmann in particular has invested in Children's Scholarship Fund scholarships to serve as the prototype for the publicly funded vouchers he believes should buy children's way out of public schools into the private and parochial schools he favors. In St. Louis, according to the September 7, 1999 Post-Dispatch, 561 children (of the 4,000 children across the country receiving up to $9,500 per year of such support) have left the public schools (more than 75% of them) to attend parochial (94%) and other private (6%) schools.

Meanwhile in Fall 1999, the scholarship-subsidized Loyala Academy admitted its first class of 19 low-income African-American 6th graders, planning eventually to expand to teach 60 middle schoolers. Applying the model of New York's Nativity Mission School, Loyola teaches its students from 7:45 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. weekdays, and from 9 A.M. to 3 P.M. on Saturdays - and all but 4 weeks of the summer. St. Louis developer Richard Baron, on the other hand, decided that a necessary supplement to housing he was building in St. Louis's Murphy neighborhood would be an excellent neighborhood school, so he and the city public schools have partnered in the development of the Jefferson School, just such a program.

A more familiar example of regional generosity has been college scholarship assistance, such as the Scholarship Foundation has administered since 1920 on behalf of corporate and Jewish community donors, and partially raised through an upmarket rummage store. Executive Director Faith Sandler reported $2,560,000 raised in donations in their last fiscal year, (in part, as a capital campaign to increase their retail earnings), plus $820,000 in sales from that shop. Seven hundred students received $1.6 million in loans, and $250,000 in grants. The loans have had a 98% rate of repayment.

Volunteering of course is another crucial 1990's aspect of civic generosity. The United Way fundraising machine is an enormous "volunteering" opportunity, as are: FOCUS, the regional citizens organization; the activities nurtured and monitored by American Field Service and other organizations implementing General Powell's national volunteering campaign; Vision for Children at Risk and other collaboratives; plus the traditional volunteering human service agency opportunities, and groups involved in direct action - building houses (Habitat for Humanity), an annual cleanup of a neighborhood (Block Aid, in its ninth year, for Neighborhood Housing Services), street festivals (Strassenfest, Bevo Day), direct social action (The American Friends Service Committee), civic education on matters like sprawl (Metropolitan Congregations United for St. Louis), and generally available groups to "help out") (Step Up with the Ambassadors).

And the most famous of current volunteer groups certainly is Metropolis, which, during the last two years, deserves so much credit for promoting the development of Downtown and attracting young residents to live Downtown. Metropolis has grown to include 1000 members, has arranged its 101st Thursday night "walk," and adopted a public school (raising $60,000 to improve its playground), reported Post-Dispatch columnist Greg Foreman (September 28, 1999). Their motto is "The City is Back. Back the City!"

INNOVATION

In 1998 and 1999, FOCUS' annual meetings concentrated on "What's Right with the Region." Members were asked to vote to determine which of five "candidates" in six different categories of civic improvement best exemplified what was right with St. Louis. The following criteria were to be employed:

• A new way of doing business
• A shift in paradigms or expectations
• Resulting in new ground being broken
• Risks being taken, and/or
• Creating hope through the joining of resources

On a more micro level, the Asset Based Community Development Committee of the United Way of St. Louis identified neighborhood examples of successful innovations in their publication, "Neighborhoods in Action:"

1. The conversion of a closed school into a community center offering job training and GED classes, and youth participation in renovation projects in Union West.
2. A community garden to help the neighborhood school to teach about nature in Maffit.
3. In Franklin, children can redeem "good behavior" coupons at a "store," work at state of the art computer facilities, and stay at a safe place at a local church's gym.
4. In Livers, a planter called the "Jewel Box" for the children to be able to use, and a "chit chat" book of residents' home and work phone numbers.
5. A mobile neighborhood patrol, a bi-monthly home delivered newspaper, a branch library preserved after being closed by the system, and a shared telephone line to pick up responses to job inquiries, all in Bevo.

St. Louis' most famous individual innovator is sculptor-developer Bob Cassilly, who, on the heels of his success in creating Turtle Park's sculptures across Highway 40/64 from the Zoo, opened up his extraordinary idiosyncratic City Museum in the Loft District two years ago. The Riverfront Times, in naming Cassilly its "Best St. Louisan of 1999" (September 29, 1999) described his current impulse to place a dangling school bus and Babylonian-style gardens on the roof of his 10-story building housing the City Museum.

And how he offered the Mayor a check to buy the Arena before it was demolished, where he promised to build ice and roller-skating rinks and mini-amusement part rides. The article recounted:

"He became a developer so he could be his own patron, financing his sculpture and his 'compulsive building syndrome' with his real estate swapping. . . he says he 'liven on the gap' between what value St. Louisans put on St. Louis and what value people who moved here from the East Coast put on it. In other words, buy cheap, fix up, sell at a profit to a newcomer."

Equally new as "public art" is the Fog Wall across the street from the downtown Kiel Arena, and its adjoining MetroLink Station. When it is fully installed, its combination of light and water effects will simulate a mist highlighted by a light show overlooking stretches of bosque and pralrle.

Still being debated is Mary Miss's plan for a "part Park, part urban development" before the still under-construction pink Eagleton Federal Courthouse downtown. The Riverfront Times (July 14, 1999) described her "work in progress": "Structural fragments from old buildings, saved from demolition, decorate the site, with some functioning as impromptu chairs and benches.

The full façade of one of those buildings might be left flat, working as sculpture, playground, and seating area, and as a reference to St. Louis's past in juxtaposition to the skyscrapers that make up its present." Mary Miss's interest in increasingly expanding the number of blocks to be include in the park - and the project's costs - has been described as the "exuberance" of her advocacy, but she believes that the project dimensions must be sufficient so that the site won't be dominated by its context.

Like Bob Cassilly and Mary Miss, another example of a St. Louis innovator is Michael Sherraden, Washington University's Director of its Center for Social Development and the inventor of individual development accounts. IDA's are designed to promote savings and asset accumulation for the poor, who, if they save and deposit certain amounts of monthly funds from their income or public assistance, will receive matching (as much as 3:1) dollars from federal and/or charitable sources.

The assets specifically would be reserved to improve or buy a home, finance higher education, or start a small business. Post-Dispatch editorialists (April 29, 1999) worried that Missouri State legislators were imperiling local implementation of this national experimental anti-poverty model, by typing parochial and private school voucher stipulations to Missouri's adoption of this IDA approach.

While the state constitutionality of such legislation was in question, Missouri Charter Schools have been authorized to start up - in Kansas City (July 9, 1999 Post-Dispatch). On August 16, St. Louis's first charter school, the African-American Rite of Passage-Arthur J. Kennedy Skills program, cancelled their Fall 1999 opening, disappointing the 426 children who had enrolled with them. This is an innovation, dearly cherished by school voucher proponents in St. Louis, that raised many of the standards issues associated with school choice: the reliability of new nonprofit sponsors, who had problems in leasing and renovations; backgrounds of the staff, including its founder, an ex-offender with a record of theft, drugs, child support, and alleged domestic violence; out-of-state for-profit ownership; and a focus (the rites of passage) that inherently is targeted or discriminatory.

While the founder's interest in strengthening instruction in African history and culture is clear, disclosure of his earlier-in-life prison record for theft upset a state legislative leader in the charger school field, reflecting on the $2 million in federal funds that the new school might oversee: "This concerns me a great deal. This obviously is a strong red flat. These charter schools have every bit of responsibility to tax payers as other public schools, maybe more. We have given them latitude to function not giver to others."

Less flashy than IDA's and charter schools is a Danforth Foundation grand of $70,000 to the Grand Rock Community Economic Development Corporation at St. Alphonsus (Rock) Church to train 80 of the 300 families at the Blumeyer Village public housing apartments in computer use. Children and their parents study together for 20 weeks and receive a computer after they complete their course. Another of three who has returned to college was gusted by the Post-Dispatch (May 11, 1998): "You can't lose, if you get involved in the program. I'm glad I did."

Innovative concepts to augment the scope of St. Louis's cultural attractions have included periodic interest in an aquarium (a Cousteau Center was once considered for Laclede's Landing), the Kemper family's encouragement for an annual Shakespeare Performance Festival for St. Louis (a success in Ontario and in Oregon, after all), and the initial plans for as African-American History Museum from people like Dr. John Gladney, specifically intended to be developed by an interracial group of St. Louisans.

The Civic Entrepreneurs Organization of 100 mid-market St. Louis business leaders has advocated a new Downtown exhibition venue for "blockbuster" shows requiring 25,000 to 75,000 square feet, two months to build, 4 or 5 months of presentation, and a month to disassemble. CEO sponsors St. Louis's alcohol-free FirstNight January 1 event, and sponsored an international Sister Cities soccer tournament. The CEO project committee chair noted to the Business Journal (August 4, 1997): "We're very aware that when there isn't a football game or baseball game downtown, it's dead."

The shows CEO hopes to bring to St. Louis are of the type that the former Art Museum Director designated - treasures of the Czars, artifacts from the Titanic, splendor of the Pharaoh's, angels from the Vatican (although St. Louis's Art Museum displayed the later two exhibits). Cities like St. Petersburg, Topeka, and Memphis have been even more active in hosting such shows, and many are presented in public venues of the type CEO has proposed, not at museums.

Since the Smithsonian Institution operates Native American and decorative arts museums in New York, St. Louisans have sought to bring a facility to St. Louis going back originally to as immigration museum for the East St. Louis properties of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (the Arch), up to the most recent decision not to locate a Smithsonian off-shoot at the former Kiel Opera House.

Also awash in Smithsonian connections is American's Music Center, a current East St. Louis Arch properties start-up nurtured by banker William T. Bugh. The cultural institutions in St. Louis's 42 million annual property tax cultural district have noticed that Illinoisans visit their facilities, but don't contribute property taxes to the district (40% of the Science Center's school children visitors are Illinoisans, according to the October 12, 1999 Post-Dispatch). Why not, they recognized, build America's Music Center, include it as a qualifying cultural institution for the district, and include Illinois counties as property tax contributors?

The Music Center concept has included an interactive music history museum, an ethronomoisicology institute, a music festival management corporation, and an amphitheater for live performances with up to 12,000 seats, as described in the October 20 Business Journal. And a ferry (which earlier preceded the construction of the Eads Bridge) may be reestablished.

An extraordinary innovation in its own right has been the Forest Park restoration process, and particularly Forest park Forever's work in mobilizing corporate and volunteer support for the 1293 acre Park with its 12 million annual visitors. St. Louis's Community Development Commission in December 1995 approved the Park's Master Plan developed by the SLDC Urban Design Department during two years of public planning process. By 2004, the city pledged to commit $43 million in capital improvements matching an equivalent amount raised privately by Forest park Forever.

The most conceptually exciting project is "A River Returns," the restoration of a continuous 3.15 mile waterway, drained early in the century when the River Des Peres was channeled into concrete tubes beneath the Park. The "returning river" will run from cascades on the west, through the Grand Basin, the Pagoda Circle in front of the MUNY theater, Deer Lake, and the fish hatcheries before finishing near the Steinburg Skating Rink in the east. Project Manager Ken Rogers told CNR NEWS (November 1998) that this "noble project if ever there was one ... the moving waterway will drain parkland that is prone to flooding, create fish habitats, and wetland plants will cleanse storm water runoff."

Forest Park Forever announced that an Ecolab Support Center would be funded by the Lila Wallace - Reader's Digest Fund and Ronald McDonald House Charities. The Monsanto Fund committed $2 million to "A River Returns," the Kresge Foundation pledged $1.5 million in a challenge grant for the Grand Basin, Emerson Electric donated $3 million for that same project, Anheuser Busch contributed a $3 million endowment for operating maintenance costs, and the Taylors of Enterprise Rent-A-Car committed themselves to build a new Boathouse, currently the popular setting for weekend evening outdoor rock performances.

The October 11, 1999 Business Journal reported that $31 million of the $43 million to be raised privately had been committed, and that Forest Park Forever had succeeded in restoring the World's Fair Pavilion landscaping and lighting the Park's status and monuments, restoring the MUNY bands stand, planting hundreds of trees, regarding the Cricket Fields, and organized volunteer master gardeners to improve the area surrounding the Jewel Box.

Earlier the Business Journal (September 6, 1999) had highlighted the fundraising success of Progress Plus, organized in December 1998 to raise $10 million from midmarket companies. Its President, Smith-Scharff President Arthur Scharff told the Business Journal: "Theses are out home-grown, home-sized companies. I knew that, once asked to support a significant civic cause, they would simply step up to the plate, and they have."

Scharff and James Mann, Forest Park Forever's executive director, met with the mid-sized corporation CEO's to raise the money, and Mann noted, "Many were people I had never met before, who have strong opinions about what should happen in the community, but had never had a forum."

And by Spring 1998, "innovation" was the watchward for consultants retained to advise Downtown who represented firms from Newport Beach, San Francisco, Seattle, and Toronto. The city's last development director listened to ideas such as farmers' markets that may have seemed overfamilar, coupled with the promise of ideas unique and natural to Downtown St. Louis, and told the Business Journal (May 25, 1998): "There is no shortage of projects. We are 24 projects looking for a plan."

PRIVATE AND PUBLIC LEADERSHIP

Civic Progress is the organization of the CEO's of St. Louis' largest companies, meeting since 1953 once a month - in person - to discuss single or joint or reciprocal corporate investments in the region. By 1998, its members were open to an organizational reinvention. Rather than the popular gratitude accorded similar organizations in other metropolitan areas, Civic Progress was continually told that they lacked sufficient social conscience to weigh in on behalf of one course or another. Or, alternatively, that their heavy-handed activism was dominating some decision on behalf of their corporate agencies.

The Riverfront Times founder and columnist Ray Hartmann wrote in 1992 that the then all-white all-male 26 members ". . . generally mean well and donate much of their time, corporate resources, and, often, personal money to a wide range of good courses. Collectively they want good things for St. Louis and its residents, and they try their best. But . . . they are too much like one another to serve the needs and interests of the community at large."

The Business Journal would editorialize (November 4, 1996) that "the leadership table is too small." They wrote: "It's time for Civic Progress to reconfigure itself. . . a little reengineering might be the answer. A broader base and a small staff could better serve those who serve St. Louis." And the Post-Dispatch (August 10, 1991) warned, "Care must be taken to assure that the organization does not set the priorities for the area. For this reason, the absence of a staff and a long-range agenda is healthy."

The Business Journal continued to pursue the question of Civic Progress's effectiveness. When leading African-American members of its 30-year-old dialogue group on race resigned because they felt that race was not a high enough Civic Progress priority, the paper editorialized (September 7, 1998): "It's about time. Matters of race are too important to be on Civic Progress's agenda alone." In other cities, this is a public dialogue, they wrote. "If we are to grow and prosper, this cannot be a community of opportunity for white men alone." Should they be reengineering themselves, they asked American publisher Donald Suggs (August 17, 1998), who replied, "The Civic Progress we once know doesn't exist anymore, with so many CEO's not from St. Louis, and so many mergers in the business community. It's not the organization it once was, and I think that it's appropriate for them to reexamine their mission and their objectives."

The Business Journal (August 2, 1999, February 22, 1999) also proposed that businesses like Charter Communications, Gabriel Communications, BJC Health System, and Express Scripts and their CEO's be invited to join Civic Progress: "We cry for high-tech investment yet ignore those who bring technology. It's not that they (the CEO's) need Civic Progress, but for there to be real civil progress, we need them." In November 1998, Civic Progress formally decided to specify regionalism, education, and economic and social progress as its top priorities, and community life, infrastructure, and business climate issues as a second level of priority. To implement this new focus, Civic Progress would reduce its joint donations to low-priority nonprofits by between $1 million and $1.5 million.

Political Scientist Terry Jones pointed out in 1997 in St. Louis Currents that Civic Progress historically was more reactive than proactive, often driven by the enthusiasm of a single persuasive CEO advocate. In 1999, those seeking corporate donations not considered Civil Progress priorities would refocus their efforts on individual corporations. But in 1997, Jones also wrote:

". . . Civic Progress is often viewed as failing to live up to community expectations. Perhaps it is a perceived lack of regional leadership from elected officials who, after all, must cater to their local chacterates if they are to be reelected, or perhaps it is merely assumed that visible corporate leaders have both the divine right and the noble obligation to set a regional agenda and make it happen. . . When it comes to setting the region's agenda, for action, or tackling complex and controversial social problems, . . . (it) has neither the will not the wherewithal to maintain a sustained and effective involvement. . . It is simply too narrow, too unrepresentative, and too focused on profit to rule the region, as well."

A lack of confidence in some of St. Louis' elected public officials historically has been part of this preoccupation with the region's private sector leadership.

In March 1993, the paper was exploring the likely new mayoralty of St. Louis's first African-American mayor, Freeman Bosley. As he discussed his initial meetings with Civic Progress, he told the Post-Dispatch: "I believe that Civic Progress members usually pick the African-Americans they want to deal with. People that they feel comfortable with who will not necessarily tell them the truth, who will sugar coat. The result is that they don't get any legitimate input into what's going on around here."

A retired (Civic Progress) CEO expressed his own hopes for the new mayoralty: "He can, by the actions he takes, and by the way he conducts himself in office, indicate that an African-American is perfectly capable of governing a mayor city, that he brings certain unique perspectives and talents to the situation that make him more sensitive to certain issues and probably brings with him a number of alternative suggestions and policies with respect to how to handle them."

Four years later, the Post-Dispatch editorially laid out their view of the job requirements for the mayoralty (February 4, 1997). They emphasized their concern over the rejuvenation of Downtown, the city's "economic engine," making it "a magnet for business and living." They ticked off their interests in its architectural heritage, residential development, a convention hotel, and the riverfront ("elaborate development plans, which were far too dependent on gambling, have sunk into oblivion"). And they also focused on racial polarization: "Almost all of the city's problems seem to have been refracted through a racial lens: schools, crime, favoritism, and even economic development. "

Mayor Harmon, in his election campaign, emphasized (Post-Dispatch January 8, 1997): "We need to change the way we do business." Once elected, he would confront the difficulties of managing city government with real limits to the authority and power of the office of mayor. Talking about development, he told the Business Journal (December 15, 1997): "Essentially, I don't have any control. There's a panoply of development agencies spending significant amounts of money. It's an issue of accountability." And he saw the riverfront "as the next big thing I'm going to turn my attention to." His ideas included a marina and better connecting the riverfront to Downtown.

While the Mayor evaluated his own first hundred days as only "fair" or a "C" (as he told the Business Journal, November 10, 1997), he made early decisions on managing the Housing Authority, ambulance services, Connect Care, and the downtown convention hotel. But the article described him as seeing "a steady stream of people in and out of Room 200, leaving him little time to read or plan."

The Mayor also was accused of changing his mind about policy matters. He told the Post-Dispatch (October 21, 1997): "If I get different information, I might change. I shouldn't be too proud or too political to stick to a position that may be wrong." To this, St. Louis University political scientist Ken Warren said he saw this as the growing pains of "an idealistic open man" in a new job. "As a free spirit. . . he doesn't want to play the old game in city politics."

Robert Baer, a Civic Progress member, Unigroup's president, and the Mayor's former boss both there and when the Mayor was police chief, wrote to the Business Journal (November 17, 1997): "Mayor Harmon clearly does not view himself as an old time politician encumbered by cronyism and other baggage which unfortunately too often can hamstring elected officials. . . There is a wealth of pent-up energy among many people throughout the region who want to see positive action and are willing and able to get involved. The political status quo will not get the job done and is not what our community needs."

ST. LOUIS 2004

Believing that there was an urgency to the question of the future of the St. Louis region, in 1996, Civic Progress leaders, assisted by their staff person, banker and public relations executive Al Kerth, decided to jump-start an effort to assure St. Louis of world class city status. They called this nine-year effort St. Louis 2004 in honor of the 100th anniversary of St. Louis's greatest previous time in the international sun, the 1904 World's Fair. Originally 2004 represented a year in which international and national attention might be focused on St. Louis and events to take place in St. Louis (although not a World's Fair or Olympics).

Kerth also believed that social progress in St. Louis might be tied to this engine of urban status mobility; if the world were to come to St. Louis' door in 2004, the region had best take the necessary social policy steps to win the world's approval. Further, Kerth personally was committed to an expanded definition of the role of civic leadership in St. Louis (beyond Civic Progress's contributions), and great task forces of regional leaders were convinced to address the pivotal areas of St. Louis community life - education, healthcare, the environment, citizenship, and so on. Each task force would have a homebase at a major institution under the wing of its leader.

Meanwhile Senator John Danforth had retired from his U.S. Senate seat, reentered the practice of law, and funded Interact, a new organization to spur religious institutions into activist work in improving race relations. The 2004 founders were successful in getting Danforth to head their effort, and he hired for much of his staff the Washington Senate office and lobbying professionals he valued and could convince to move to St. Louis. As Washington insiders, their strength was in having studied the lessons of national policy conflicts (e.g. the defeat of healthcare reform), but they would prove to be selective in applying theses insights, based upon their recognition of who their new bosses were (e.g. cigarette "sin" taxes to pay costs of insuring the uninsured would be okay; alcohol "sin" taxes would not be, since they might be considered "Anheuser-Busch taxes").

The corporate leadership who had founded St. Louis 2004 were interested in big, high impact, memorable results. Existing organizations committed to civic good works needed to know, if the creation of 2004 would suck all of the air out of the room (and much of the financial donations they had been receiving as well). Would the Danforth Foundation redirect its allocations to support 2004 priorities? Confluence, the regional citizens organization with volunteer citizen task forces studying two or three regional problems per year, merged with The Leadership Centerto create a new organization, FOCUS St. Louis.

Similarly, the task force host institutions would avoid shooting themselves in the feet. For instance, the integrated delivery systems - BJC and SSM - hosting the healthcare task force were not stirred by ideas to make St. Louis a center of consumer knowledge and advocacy. Most of all, as the task forces and 2004 grasped their role within regional political dynamics, they recognized that they were to proceed from consensus, from agreement on issues (e.g. gun control would divide, rather than bring together the region).

All of this would have seemed self-evident and unworthy of explanation, if the staff had not irresistibly been attracted to the wave of late 1990's "process." St. Louis 2004 listened to criticisms of the legitimacy of its role in acting on behalf of the region, and felt a need to choose between making its achievements accountable to the regional public, and making the process for the selection of these goals accountable to St. Louisans. St. Louis 2004 chose the latter option, and became engaged in an extraordinary effort to demonstrate participatory process - 39 initial community forums throughout the region, run by FOCUS St. Louis-trained consultants expert in participatory process.

In their late 1997 newsletter, 2004 wrote:

"We've learned that lasting, sustainable change comes from two mutually reinforcing sources: process and action. An inclusive process expands the range of possibilities and ideas, and leads to commitments by people to make things happen. Action creates momentum for ideas and encourages more involvement. Process and action, working together, make great things happen."

At the forums, participants went through envisioning experiential processes, were asked about their ideas, and could vote with 12 green stick-on dots for their favorite priority ideas.

The 1997 newsletter wrote that the leading choices were: redevelopment of abandoned St. Louis city and nearby suburban land sites; financing of new and rehabilitated affordable housing; revitalization of the riverfront; a regional park system joining the area's rivers, parks, and communities with greenways and walking; and bicycling paths; and safe places for children when they were not in school. They reported: "People tended not to support ideas that called for further study or the creation of a council or alliance or coordinating activity. . . ('People' said to). . . stop just talking. We want to do things that are productive and meaningful. No more talking, or just coming to meetings. Tell us how we can make an impact."

But 2004 was designed to be a "civic catalyst" (in the words of the Business Journal), not an organizing committee, or as operating agency. They advised participants that they should convene neighborhood or club meetings on bettering their communities, come to more forums: write letters to the editor, and volunteer. And 2004 itself would be attentive to the important issues they had heard in the forums:

  "We must have more open and honest discussions about 
  the issues, even the tough ones.  Don't sweep them under the 
  rug.  We can't make change, if we don't talk."

  "Government and big business aren't the solution to all of our 
  problems.  As residents, we don't want top down decisionmaking.  
  We want a greater role."

  "We need more collaboration on regional issues."

St. Louis 2004 however was especially well-situated to play its original role, regional leadership. Before its political and public relations experts (from out-of-town, and with too few local friends to vouch for them) had decided to "handle" the entire electorate, the organization had been launched with the funding and confidence of the corporate leadership, and with a board of directors including virtually all of the region's other power brokers. So, in 1998, they began to demonstrate what 2004 actually was good at doing: acting strongly to have an impact.

The envisioning and all the participative process could be viewed retrospectively as a very expensive buy-in to secure regionwide credibility, and appropriate targets for 2004 action surely could emerge on their own, regardless of how strategic they might prove to be. (The Business Journal, on October 6, 1997, reporting on the regional leadership's delegation visiting Seattle, had proposed that St. Louis could use a dose of each of the three principles of that city's mayoral administration: "social equity, economic opportunity, and environmental stewardship."

They were asked to step into the downtown planning process and, committed as they were to Downtown as an arts and entertainment center and business and 7/24 residential hub, they would become a key Downtown planning player.

Some clarity on the future of regional investment in the arts was sought, and 2004-paid consultants recommended some sorting out of the existing situation, and recommended against rehabilitating the Kiel Opera House as a major performance venue.

In order to provide managed care insurance coverage for another 100,000 St. Louisans, 2004 convinced Missouri's governor to support the federal waiver required to direct a disproportionate share of Medicaid dollars for this purpose. Since much of these funds otherwise directly would have been assigned to St. Louis's integrated delivery systems, 2004 facilitated these systems' agreement to the provision of that insurance product.

The boldest of St. Louis 2004's initiatives certainly is the Sustainable Neighborhoods Initiative, a $751 million endeavor funded by 18 financial institutions targeted for nine neighborhoods, five of which are located in the city. Each neighborhood is to receive 300 new or rehabbed housing units, 300 home improvement loans, 150,000 square feet of retail space, 500,000 square feet of industrial development, and a new elementary school like the Jefferson School model created by McCormack Baron west of Downtown (Post-Dispatch, December 17, 1998).

Also, on the list of 2004's priorities has been the development of the 26-mile Confluence Greenway, covering trails on both sides of the Mississippi River. "The broad gorgeously paved 10-mile path that runs all the way from laclede's Landing to North Riverfront Park (Riverfront Times, September 29, 1999)" has been a special success, involving the participation of both neophyte park rangers, working for the Grace Hill settlement house, and neighborhood residents themselves.

VITAL FEW

Mayor Harmon's administration developed a "Shared Vision" for the city government, describing its mission as: "...(to) improve the integrity and effectiveness of city government to restore public trust. In order to do that we must...focus on those 'vital few' priorities that will drive the most significant positive impact on the quality of life of St. Louisans and the financial health of the city."

The "vital few" priorities were: neighborhood and economic development, educational excellence, racial harmony, and government effectiveness. The first and last of these priorities are major subjects of this overall plan, but crucial to St. Louis's quality of life.

EDUCATIONAL EXCELLENCE

The Mayor's position paper on education was designed to provide guidance on how he might act in accordance with his view that "all attempts to revitalize the city, all attempts to elevate our region's national standing, are fruitless unless we address the fundamental issue of education." This issue affects the city's ability to attract and retain residents, field a quality workforce, and succeed in neighborhood and economic development.

Unfortunately the St. Louis mayor's office has little responsibility for the entirely independent and separately elected governance system of the public schools. The position paper recommended that the Mayor monitor "educational opportunities for all ages" in the city, support all (public, parochial, private, charter) such opportunities, make certain that city services successfully assist the schools, and promote and recognize collaboration, dialogue, volunteering, mentoring and parental involvement.

For the past two years, the schools' problems have led to discussions of possible receiverships, including the possibility of the Mayor as the receiver, especially if the schools were to lose their accreditation. In a Business Journal (December 15, 1997) interview, Mayor Harmon said, "There's a big snowball rolling down here. In the best of all worlds, these problems take care of themselves. That's a mayor's dream, but, while I don't necessarily want to take over the school system, I must be prepared to. I won't shrink from the responsibility, should it be offered." The Mayor believed that the School Board was shirking "chores" like ending principal tenure and accepting responsibility for student test scores and teacher performance. In his view, it needed site-based management and accountability, a strong superintendent supported by the Board, and experimentation with charter schools.

The Post-Dispatch (October 15, 1999) reported that the district had been warned as early as December 1996, but in October 1999 the state education commissioner recommended the district's loss of accreditation unless its performance turned around over the next two years. State standards were met in only three areas: ACT scores, vocational students placed in jobs, and students enrolled in college prep/advanced courses, while the school system failed to meet state standards in eight areas: Missouri state test scores in grades 3 - 5, 6 - 8, and 9 - 11, Reading Grade 3, Reading Grade 8, vocational students completing their programs, the dropout rate, and attendance. Accreditation requires meeting eight standards, or provisional accreditation can be obtained by meeting four standards. The Mayor said, "We have a serious problem. We have to ratchet up to meet this emergency."

The "Educational Excellence" mayoral position paper detailed the crisis.

• Of city K-12 grade children, in 1998-1999, 43,000 attended city public schools, 20,000 parochial and private schools (and home schooling) and 13,000 participated in the voluntary busing desegregation program to suburban districts (only a 57% vote for the system).
• A 1997-1998 survey by the City Living Foundation indicated that only 2% of those surveyed believed that quality public schools were consistently available.
• May 1998 legislation by the state, and the 2/3 passage by city residents of a new sales tax, resulted in the commitment of state funds to phase out the region's desegregation program (while leaving the voluntary busing program in place for some time; however court order-financed supplemental programs for city children seem to be contracting).
• "With teacher shortages a national problem, and the schools' salaries near the bottom of regional teachers' salaries, the teacher shortage crisis is likely to continue."
• The position paper asked: "How will the district address the problems of student mobility and staff instability of school and classroom assignment?"

According to the Post-Dispatch (August 17, 1999), thanks to Spring 1999 state legislation allowing retired teachers to return for two more years while still collecting their pension, the District was following up on 78 individuals (of 125 invited to a breakfast) licensed to teach math, science, or special education. (The District, earlier in the year, had recruited teachers in South Africa, where a teacher surplus was said to exist). The average St. Louis city teacher salary is 73rd among salaries at 76 area school districts. One retiree said that he would return "if they pay enough, if the price is right." Another retiree at the breakfast remarked, "If teachers weren't paid so poorly all these years, you wouldn't see this room full."

The operational problems of the District were dramatized (October 14, 1999 Post-Dispatch) at the point the accreditation decision was being made, by students and teachers at Gateway High School, a magnet school. The school desegregation legislation, in the spirit of "no good deed should go unpunished," decided to equalize magnet and regular school faculty-student ratios, by raising the ratio at magnet schools (an increase of 24:1 to 26:1). The District also employs fulltime substitutes to cover vacancies caused by the District's difficulties in addressing teacher shortages.

A Gateway junior pointed out that she so far had done nothing in the first seven weeks of her calculus course. She had no regular teacher, substitutes had not given out any assignments, and her mid-term report for calculus was left blank. She reported, "For an hour and a half, we sit there and do nothing."

On October 7, an English teacher at Gateway had been reassigned from her senior English classes to freshman course assignments. Because student mobility is so high, administrators have to estimate enrollments and teacher assignments and then juggle them to accommodate realities. In this case, the loss of staff due to the increased student-teacher ratio exacerbated the problem at the school. The District's high school coordinator pointed out to the Post-Dispatch (October 8, 1999) that this juggling was commonplace for decades: "This is nothing new."

In 1993, the School Board conducted an intensive retreat and came up with goals. They then published a report card on how successful they felt that the system proved to be in achieving these goals (all but one of these goals involved internal administrative implementation efforts, as opposed to instructional achievements):

  C+  The Schools as a model for urban schools for children, 
        teachers, parents and the community
  C+  Student achievement and academic performance
  B   Employee performance and accountability
  B-  Relationships with external groups
  B   Attract and retain staff	
  B-  Critique effectiveness and efficiency of their own organizational 
        structure
  B   Board business in a timely and efficient manner	
  B+  Sound fiscal planning and efficient use of resources	

By 1999, the Superintendent was hopeful about the two years left before losing accreditation (in the October 15, 1999 Post-Dispatch): "Given the same rate of progress, next year we'll meet the standards and certainly by the second year, we'll be o.k."

The school desegregation settlement (and the legislation authorizing it) however also had spelled out requirements for monitoring what would happen, as the settlement was implemented. Nine months after that settlement was reached, no monitoring committee, as required, had been established. In such a context, the active attention paid to the Schools by City Hall has to be seen as fostering democratic accountability.

RACIAL HARMONY

A second "Vital Few" priority, "Racial Harmony" also was studied in a July 1999 position paper. This is appropriate in a city that less than a decade into this century witnessed a genocidal slaughter in East St. Louis equivalent to a New York Draft Riot or a Wounded Knee, and, as recently as the 1950's, was governed by Jim Crow and discrimination. It is not surprising then that African-American St. Louisans might feel reluctant to paint a picture of the obvious current situation: a metropolitan area so demographically segregated that, in major portions of the region:

• It would be surprising to encounter a non-white retail clerk, because no non-white lives nearby, there are no customers to be made comfortable by finding checkers to be black like they are, and there is no transit system operating to enable people from "somewhere else" to commute to work. This bifurcating of the employment market accelerates minority unemployment.
• It is so surprising to see African-Americans driving in some all-white areas, that cruising police cars' suspicions are raised: why are these people here so far away from where they live, work, or shop? Police profiling procedures are only the padlock on the gate restricting where African-Americans are expected to be found in this metropolitan area.
• While attractive price-value ratios for suburban homes have ushered the out-migration process for St. Louis city residents of all races, African-American St. Louisans have been limited in their suburban shopping for single family homes. The desegregation program that enabled city African-American children to commute to suburban schools also provided a reason for their parents to remain (and even buy homes) within the city.

If this represents a bleak picture, it is equally important to observe the very real changes within the city, also recently segregated, but now largely integrated across neighborhoods. In the late 1970s, Roger Perry founded the St. Louis Public Schools' Partnership Program to provide corporate, cultural, institutional, and higher educational supplemental programs for city school children. He did so because he believed that, unless partnerships were to be created, the largely black school children would be forgotten by the largely white regional institutions. Now, in 1999, what if the entire city racially resembled the late 1970s public schools?

The Post-Dispatch (August 10, 1997) asked the question: should suburbanites care about the city? Consultant Richard Ward answered, "It's blind to think St. Charles has any independence whatsoever. It's blind to think the city of St. Louis has any independence whatsoever. Each is equally tied to the success of the region as a whole." But Harris-Stowe Professor Mark Abbott warned, "It's that virtually all activity is taking place on the periphery, and the traditional notion of suburbs has changed. You actually have more office space in the country than you do in the city, and much more retail."

Regional Commerce and Growth Association President Richard Fleming compared St. Louis to Denver, where he previously had worked: "There were people in the suburbs who were proud that they hadn't been downtown in 10 years. Part of the reason was that if they didn't work downtown, there really wasn't a lot to attract them as a recreation destination." He pointed out St. Louis's strengths - the Arch, two downtown department stores, sports venues - but he noted, "Still, you have to connect the dots. Let's begin to treat Downtown like the Galleria or Plaza Frontenac, which deal with making the experience of their customers pleasant. The experience of Downtown now is all connected to people in their automobiles. We need to take it to the next level, and make it understandable to people on foot."

According to East-West Gateway Coordinating Council, the city in 1999 is 51.7% African American and 46.8% white, with the South Side now thoroughly integrated. These changes were symbolized by the heady triumphalism of the city's first African-American mayoralty, where the Mayor spoke of both ebony and ivory keys making beautiful music, but whose appointments to office reflected his confidence in his friends and political colleagues with whom he had grown up and worked.

Will the vast majority of St. Louisans - suburban and white - identify with a central city that has become thoroughly integrated, for the first time? Under what conditions will the city receive the support of those suburbs? How much vitality is going to be needed to win the confidence of suburbs sufficiently to transcend a role for the city as the regional "charity case"? The question of "how rich in human resources the city is "is being raised at a time when the city's population includes not only those most committed to its future, but also those who so far have ignored the opportunities for mobility represented by an accessible suburban housing market. In a sense the same city that so long has been victimized by segregation is now being tested as to whether it can survive the benefits of greater integration.

The Mayor's Vital Few position paper on "Racial Harmony" is designed to make certain that city government is in alignment with all the forces fighting racism, especially the Ambassadors, the city's volunteer businesspeople committed to assisting the mayor's office on projects as needed, and the U. S. Justice Department's Community Relations Service office in Kansas City.

The position paper argues for the training of city employees themselves in understanding and opposing racism, for support of President Clinton's "One America in the 21st Century" Initiative on Race, and for the enlistment of the city's Youth Development Office and its Recreation Division to bring young people together. Substantively, continuing to review what city government itself could do - and with what partners - the position paper identified St. Louis 2004 in its diversity efforts and the Economic Development Committee of the Black Leadership Roundtable as being committed to goals which the city could help pursue. Among these actions would be purchasing more from minority business, as well as assisting them in acquiring capital and short-term financing, and monitoring job sites to determine whether there would be active minority participation at those sites.

Another ongoing community activity which the position paper saluted is the Bridges program of FOCUS St. Louis, an important and large citizens organization that includes the alumni of the region's civic leadership training programs, and is the successor to Cortluence St. Louis, the former regional citizens organization patterned after citizens league efforts in the Twin Cities. Bridges is made up of 8 to 12 volunteers who interracially dialogue together every 6 to 8 weeks. Both the President's Initiative and the Pew Memorial Trusts have designated Bridges as a promising practice, and the foundation will be exploring it as a model for dissemination for cities across the country.

One reason for emphasizing interracial dialogue in St. Louis is the longstanding tradition that African-American concerns in the region never appear on the screens of the white community. Police profiling practices are an example of such a concern. There also was the case involving Ellen Reasonover, a woman who served 16 years for the robbery-murder of a gas station attendant, convicted on the testimony of two jailhouse informers.

She recently was released - without apology - when it became clear that the prosecutor - now a judge - had suppressed exculpatory information pointing to her innocence. Greg Freeman (in the August 8, 1999 Post-Dispatch), breaking some of the silence about the racial implications of the prosecutorial misconduct, wrote, "The state shouldn't tolerate policies that allow defendants to be set up. . . After all, if this kind of judicial nightmare could happen to Reasonover, what's to prevent it from happening to anyone else?"

The African-American weekly American (August 5, 1999) editorialized, "Our daily elected to bury its coverage on page A-10. African-Americans know that if a young mother, who was not black, was vindicated after spending 16 years in prison separated from her child, there would be intensive, empathetic media coverage. . . if Reasonover was not black, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch and Steve N. Goldman (now a St. Louis County circuit judge) would not be so persistent in their arrogant, disingenuous attempts to justify this horrible miscarriage (either intentional or negligent) of justice."

MOKAN, the minority contractors association, has been willing to raise the issues of minority hiring and contracting to minority firms on state highway construction projects in the middle of African-American neighborhoods. In fact, the demonstration they staged brought together a large group of African-American community leaders willing to be arrested to dramatize the historic and current underrepresentation of minorities in the construction field.

Heightened media consciousness has led to more open discussion of different views between the races about a variety of current issues:

• Bringing professional basketball to St. Louis, which African-Americans believe left town in the first place because white fans believed that it had become a predominantly African-American sport
• Rejection of African-American Missouri Judge Ronnie White for a federal judicial appointment by the U.S. Senate, let by Missouri's two white U.S. Senators, especially after Senator Bond had been reelected with support from the African-American community (which had believed his opponent had pandered to anti-black voters with his opposition to school desegregation.
• Shock over a white driver who, after his car had been hit with a thrown object from a bus, stopped his car, got on the bus, and went after African-American middle schoolers he believed to have thrown that object.

The significance of racial polarization issues to the morale of the city was dramatized early on to the Harmon administration. At the oldest public park west of the Mississippi in Lafayette Square, restorationist families sought to eliminate the basketball court, utilized by nearby public housing development residents. The court was adjacent to a playground, the players used extremely profane language, and the restoration group president told The Riverfront Times (June 4, 1997): "This is about disorder, not basketball. Some people complained about harassment. There was public drunkenness, public urination, glass, litter."

An African-American resident said, "These are some people who are afraid, because they see a group of African-American males up there playing ball. They feel that in some way threatens them. They are afraid to walk by them. At some point we need to address this fear."

Demonstrations were fueled by an initial mayoral decision to respond to community wishes by taking down the hoops, but there is a great deal of available space - vacant buildings and lots - within which to work out such problems. But, by October, 1999 according to the Post's Jerry Berger (October 6, 1999), residents were disagreeing with the owners of a neighborhood quick-stop gas station and a new supermarket, over whether they were to acquire or keep licenses to sell beer and wine. Lafayette Square residents complained that public housing residents who are customers litter Lafayette Square. Underlying this dispute is the city's interest in the construction of a business-class hotel in the neighborhood.

Also in October 1999, another neighborhood issue emerged, when the activist group ACORN charged the Papa John's Pizza shop in Pershing-Waterman with not delivering north of Delmar, on the all-African-American North Side, since 1994, when one of their deliverymen had been murdered "north of Delmar." The Papa John's district manager told the Post-Dispatch (October 16, 1999), that she does not want her employees to risk their lives for $5.15 per hour. ACORN replied by identifying another (racially mixed) neighborhood with substantial crime problems where a Papa John's does deliver, and the district office responded by saying that they might reconsider whether they wanted to continue delivering in that other neighborhood.

The September 1999 St. Louis Journalism Review broke a story largely unknown to white St. Louisans. St. Louis has a Sunday night tradition of African-American youth borrowing their parents' cars and cruising areas that include Laclede's Landing, a district long concerned with whether their proximity to low-income, African-American neighborhoods would discourage white customers from patronizing their clubs, bars, and restaurants.

While police harassment traditionally has been part of the cruising experience, during Summer 1999, police blocked off Highway 40/64 exits from Downtown all the way (six miles) to Skinker Boulevard, herding cruising cars out of town and confusing tourists and others unfamiliar with Laclede's Landing's ability to obtain relief from this problem. The situation demonstrated just how far-reaching police powers (alcohol checkpoints, asset forfeiture, profiling) have been extended.

Nor is it easy to book rap on Laclede's Landing. J's, on the edge of the Landing has been the club that has booked gangsta rap and Southern bounce. The Riverfront Times (October 20, 1999) described what is played at J's: "The themes remain the same: sex, violence, and drugs, all with a bass-heavy beat you feel as much as hear. This music is far from universally popular."

And its audiences have no interest in eating nearby before a show or barhopping afterward. What they represent to the other businesses is the gridlock of cruising traffic, but J's would charge $50 per person or $5000 to the band. Meanwhile, J's owners have been slow to make repairs in response to building code violations, leading at one point, to the removal of their occupancy permit, while the police have been hassling their security (off-duty County police), and fining one of their owners for his driving. The Riverfront Times interviewed a New York hip-hop promoter who will no longer book his acts in St. Louis, saying that the owners of venues he had hired had been pressured and harassed by police within 24 hours of the scheduled performances. At places like J's, this conflict between owners and the police or early has led to riots when acts like Eightball appeared.

That promoter told The Riverfront Times his view of the St. Louis police: "At some point, they just made up their mind that anything that was geared to the young black kids - no matter what it is, whether it's a rap show or a party that they think the kids are going to come to - anything that attracts an under-21 black-youth crowd was frowned on." Of course, rap concerts were managed successfully elsewhere, even in Laclede's Landing, and the police had reasons to be concerned about how the rap crowds might respond to the performers.

St. Louis 2004, on the other hand, has demonstrated its ability to convene the powers-that-be in its own anti-racism initiative. Working with American publisher Dr. Donald Suggs, 2004 organized a top-level leadership summit in December, 1998, in which:

• Civic Progress companies pledged action in regard to job creation, recruitment, capital formation, and technical assistance to and increased purchasing from minority businesses, through its new Committee on Racial Economic Progress.
• The region's largest nonprofits promised to hire minority executives and to train minority volunteers.
• Government leaders committed themselves to the appointment of minority members of regional boards and commissions.
• Five universities promised to expand their utilization of minority vendors.

The American (March 4, 1999) pointed out that while 40 CEO's attended the summit, no specific goals were set, even if the point of the summit was to make the CEO's newly publicly accountable. Civic Progress President Richard Liddy of General American recognized the influence on the summit of the walk-out of 16 of the 17 African-American Civic Progress dialogue group members earlier in 1998: "it certainly put air under our wings, and, like other situations, we learned from it."

Also associated with these efforts is Covenant 2004, a best practice from Dallas introduced to St. Louis by FOCUS and the Minority Business Council, FOCUS Executive Director Christine Chadwick wrote (American, August 5, 1999) that Civic Progress had endorsed the Covenant concept, and that the Covenant's "primary objective is to secure corporate commitments to publicly support and participate in the development and expansion of minority business in the St. Louis region."

Sandra Moore of 2004 told Take Five Magazine (April 1999): "This is what Civic Progress does best. They grow business, mentor businesses, help build and sustain businesses. They want to make the most lasting change by focusing on economic disparity. I don't want to speak for them, but, instead of funding civic and social affairs, they would much rather help grow money in the African-American community."

One other aspect of race relations in St. Louis has been the work of the Missouri Citizen Education Fund in identifying racist hate groups in the state. St. Louis itself hosts the 1st Missouri Volunteers, while Franklin County and St. Peters respectively are the homes of he 58th and 59th Brigades of Missouri Militia. The American (August 26, 1999) reviewed the Fund's report which focused on the Christian Identity movement which believes that "white Christians are the true descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, and that Jews and other non-white people are subhuman offspring of the devil and Eve. . . This theology binds together groups like the Aryan Nation, the Ku Klux Klan, and Christian Patriot Militias."

The American (September 2, 1999) advised St. Louis to avoid resembling the South with its "lingering Jim Crow image that continues to stalk the South a generation after segregation officially ended. Even a New South campaign of the 70's and 80's, designed to bring in new business and reverse the brain drain of the most talented and the young, failed to do the trick. Many of the nation's best and brightest avoid the region like the plague."

One important aspect of the social isolation problem was described in 1996 by William Julius Wilson in "When Work Disappears," his study of African -American and Mexican-American low income neighborhoods in Chicago. Wilson wrote: "Neighborhoods that offer few legitimate employment opportunities, inadequate job information networks, and poor schools, lead to the disappearance of work . . . People rarely, if ever, have the opportunity to help their friends and neighbors to find jobs."

Wilson compared today to the 1950's inner-city ghetto life, when people were poor and segregated but still working, and employment rates were high. He noted how high today the proportions of jobless adults are who live in these neighborhoods, how the proportions of nonpoor families have declined, and how more strongly associated joblessness is with poverty than in the past. These factors also are undermining the support of vital community institutions, since so many residents lack the time and money to invest in their support.

Wilson noted the variations between African-American and Mexican-American low-income neighborhoods, showing that this was much less a problem for the latter group, immigrants more likely to share job opportunity information, and, for example, to carpool (helpful in networking) rather to ride public transportation. A welfare mother told the researchers, "A lot of people get good jobs because they know friends, and they work there. If you know somebody that's been working in an established company for a long time, and they tell you to come in and fill an application, you can get a job. It always pays to know somebody."

COSMOPOLITAN ST. LOUIS

One aspect of the quality of St. Louis life is whether the city provides an urban setting for those with cosmopolitan lifestyles - e.g. those who are single, enjoy nightlife, and perhaps do not view themselves as part of the family life fabric that characterizes so much of the region.

Underlying these concerns is one of St. Louis leaders' top anxieties: will single people in their twenties ever want to return/move to St. Louis? David Littleton, the owner of the club Indigo, told the POST (August 15, 1999) about whether he thought that people of his own age (twenty somethings) might return: "The last thing that they would want to do is come back to a bedroom community. At 26, 27 years old they'd rather be someplace where there's more excitement and there's more to do for their peers than just kind of settling into life."

To this, Post editor Robert Duffy replied: "There is the problem of swimming upstream in terms of residential development downtown and creating any kind of life that even resembles a 24-hour-a-day city." Washington Avenue has been struggling to keep a gym open, and was jubilant over the opening of the Bodega, a very small market.

A downtown resident told The Riverfront Times (April 29, 1998): "There's clubs, but there's no places to buy a prepared meal; there's no place to buy groceries outside what the Seven Eleven on 17th Street has. There's no place to grab a cup of coffee, no bookstore. There's no place to buy pet food. There's only a half dozen restaurants open past 9 P.M."

In 1996, when a prominent St. Louis arts executive was invited to tour the graffiti displayed on abandoned warehouse walls north of Laclede's Landing, she replied that the "official" line on graffiti in St. Louis was that it was vandalism (e.g. like gang graffiti) and needed to be removed.

But a year later and two years later, the new Harmon administration welcomed the hundreds of painters who, over Labor Day weekend, created over a mile of mural on the downtown flood wall (according to Post-Dispatch writer Paul Hampel on August 30, 1999: ranging "from menacing dragons to tender angels, from abstract designs to quotations from Milton").

"Taste St. Louis" began in 1992 as a one-day downtown restaurant festival, expanded to two days in 1994 and three days in 1996, when the restaurant booths grossed $190,000 (according to the September 15, 1997 St. Louis Business Journal), either getting "close to breaking even for the first time," or turning "a modest profit," depending upon the source of the information. Located on the Gateway Mall blocks, families would picnic with food purchased at the booths and listen to the continuing musical performances from the concert stages.

But in December 1996, St. Louis Development Corporation closed down its special events office, leaving the project to Downtown St. Louis Inc., whose president viewed the event as mediocre and needing a redesign. He promised a Spring event for 1998, and, in fact, a small number of restaurants participated in an "Art and Soul" event in 1998 and 1999, highlighting Washington Avenue's lofts. The producer of Taste St. Louis from 1994 to 1996 wrote in the Business Journal that "...sometimes what St. Louis needs is for our leaders to get out of the way and let St. Louis shine. Let the entrepreneurs and creative folk do their work."

DOWNTOWN ST. LOUIS

The revitalization of Downtown is a priority for St. Louis's mayoralty, for St. Louis 2004, and for the Regional Commerce and Growth Association. And, on their behalf, waves of consultants have washed ashore, in most cases far ashore past the Riverfront.

The Downtown Development Action Plan recommends focusing these efforts on Washington Avenue and Laclede's Landing, two areas where at various points there have been authentic signs of market activity. Then they highlight their interest in Old Post Office Square, Riverside North, and the Mall, sites that at various times have captured the hearts of planners and (currently) the attention of the external consultants, but where there is more room for their imaginations to run free. The consultants envision bringing on 2,826 new residential units (1,300 on Washington Avenue), and 1.7 million square feet of non-residential space at the five sites..

What is most exciting, in a sense, is that while Downtown has 88,000 daytime workers and perhaps 8,000 residents (mostly at Mansion House, Columbus Square, and Plaza Square, on the peripheries of Downtown), it is sufficiently undefined that it can represent an enormous stage for the desired revitalization, if it can be properly fashioned and implemented.

Some of the plan's "biggest" ideas are among its most powerful:

• Washington Avenue as St. Louis's first 24/7 community.
• Laclede's Landing and Riverfront North catching on as a Downtown residential neighborhood.
• St. Louis Centre's survival as a street-level entertainment center.
• Recapturing the Arch Grounds for festivals from the National Park Service.
• Adding another major destination attraction Downtown.
• Making the streets (and the Old Post Office) an attractive environment.
• Opportunities to be developed to bring educational (and high-tech) center functions to Downtown.
• Treating the Gateway Mall as a "river" extending from the real river and Arch Grounds.

The Post-Dispatch editorially asked (August 14, 1999) about the source of the $1.2 billion financing required to pay for implementing the full package of plans. They did note Bank of America's commitment and the successful initiation of projects at the Cupples Warehouse and the Marquette Building. Would Webster University, they wondered, really take over the Old Post Office if there were no concrete plans for the nearby Arcade/Wright, Paul Brown, Syndicate Trust, and Century Buildings; (which the plan supporting saving).

One answer to their financing question discussed at 2004 and leaked to the Business Journal (October 18, 1999) was a regional 4/10 cent tax for Downtown, estimated initially to raise $56 million in the County and $14 million in the city, but, to many, this seemed a bridge too far. Earlier the Business Journal (October 27, 1997) urged "a speed trap," slow and deliberate planning for Downtown, just because "the wish list is endless," and capitalization needed to be secured to see to it that the planning was realistic.

What is happening Downtown are major projects: Cupplies Station is a giant mixed use project across from the Stadium, 10 turn-of-the century warehouses being converted by McCormack Baron into a luxury Westin 230-room hotel for Fall 2000, housing, and office space. With the vacancy rate for Class A and B office space at 9.2% for Downtown in 1997 (compared to 11.6% nationally and 13.2% for Class A and 27.2 % for Class B locally in 1993), it was possible to commit to a half million square feel of Class A office space across four buildings. McCormack Baron believes Cupples will be the new doorway to Downtown, and will fit into a context shared by the Eagleton building's new mall and the Gateway Mall.

The Edison Brothers warehouse will become the Breckenridge, described in the Post by Daniel Tseng (October 3, 1999) as a suburban transplant - 300 hotel suites and 43 condos in the 13-story building.

Another hotel developer, Charles Drury, is saving the Fur Exchange, American Zinc, and Thomas Jefferson Buildings across from the Arch and turning them into an upmarket 275-room Drury Inn. The Business Journal (September 29, 1997) wondered whether the hotel might be too big and the rooms too inexpensive to qualify as a "boutique hotel," but the buildings won't be demolished to furnish more surfree parking under Drury's plan.

The dominant project Downtown of course is the Gateway Hotel, a Marriott Renaissance hotel to be built by New Orleans-based Historic Restoration, Inc. The project will feature a 38-story tower and the renovation of the Gateway and Lennox Hotels, as well as the use of the American Theater, and the construction of a pedestrian plaza linking the new hotel to the American and to the Mayfair Hotel. The Mayor told the Post (December 19, 1997): "I liked the historic renovation part of the plan. All too often, what we hear is that they want to knock buildings down."

By 1998, the project was defined as a 30-story hotel, but projected costs had increased from $172.5 million to $190 million, $35 million coming from the sale of state historic tax credits. As Board of Aldermen President Francis Slay told The Riverfront Times (September 23, 1998), "Everyone is watching this particular project to see whether or not we can make it happen....(affecting) the confidence they would have in the city when making a decision on whether or not to invest or locate in the city." By June 1999 (June 28 Business Journal), the 1081 rooms expected to open in August 2002 would cost $244 million, including $42 million in state assistance.

By that point, Morgan Hill, a Houston-based historic rehabilitation developer, according to Business Journal (October 4, 1999) was considering purchasing the deteriorated Paul Brown and Arcade Buildings and turning them into a hotel, with some retail, residential, and parking components to the deal.

Further West, the 18-story GSA building at Olive and Tucker, built in 1970, was purchased as a potential telecommunications center.

Uses of the GSA building would include high tech applications, such as calling centers and other back office technical support facilities. The new owner also owns the Valley Building near the Stadium that houses switching and other equipment for more than a dozen telecommunications or high tech firms. Every square foot of the Valley Building is leased out, and the renters specifically selected it, knowing of its sophisticated uninterrupted power sources and significant cooling requirements. Their space will be filled with workers and contain few private offices. The owner told the Business Journal (October 27, 1997) : "All the wires come to Downtown. The major telecommunications companies have their equipment Downtown. We think that we can make this a hub that's unparalleled in the Midwest."

Among the other significant projects in various stages of development are the 238-room, low-cost, extended-stay Mark Twain Hotel, the intermodal transportation center, the opening of a satellite of the County's Museum of Transportation in Union Station, the St. Louis Public Library's William Gates Foundation-funded computer instructional laboratory, and the grandest practical proposal (even if it is never funded), the pedestrian walkway to be built over Highway 70 to link the Old Courthouse with the Arch.

One area of Downtown life always in flux is the mix of nightclubs serving twentysomething St. Louisans. The Riverfront Times (November 18, 1998) has spelled out the rules of the industry:

1. Clubgoers are fickle and different clubs have filled the same geographic location: Galaxy was once 1227, Evolution, and the Mill; the Rocket Bar was Pablo's; Velvet was Sanctuary; and Deep Cool was the Green Room.
2. The Locust corridor is separate from the rest of the clubs, especially what used to be Paul Weiss's venues: the Side Door, Hot Locust, and the Rocket Bar; as well as the Tap Room.
3. Chains have opened franchises, not only the Hard Rock Café and the Have a Nice Day Café in Union Station, and Planet Hollywood in Laclede's Landing, but also, right in the middle of Washington Avenue, Polly Esthers. Co-owner Ty Neal told the Business Journal (March 16, 1998) that they were friendly and nice, not dark and intimidating; a majority of their customers were women.

The St. Louis Core (October 15, 1998) listed the first set of mixed-income projects: ArtLoft with all 63 units low-income, Lucas Lofts with 20% of the 65 units low-income, and 1627 Washington with 50% of the 26 units low-income. Also relatively early on were the Rudman building at 1228 taken over by the Regional Housing and Community Development Alliance, that agency's project with Washington University'' Fine Arts Department to subsidize loft rentals as a way to retain talented artists in St. Louis, ex-firefighter Bob Winfield's lofts at 1216, Chase-Park Plaza developer Bill Stallings's lofts above his nightclub, the Cheetah, at 1224 (Business Journal, November 24, 1997), and the Sporting News building at 2018 with its 84 rental lofts and basement and 1st floor parking (Post-Dispatch, September 9, 1998).

More recently there has seemed to be a new market in pricey condominia (Post-Dispatch, September 2, 1999): 31 units in the Merchandise Mart Annex on North 10th listing from $120,000 to $275,000; 22 units at a former shirt factory on North 13th Street selling for between $119,000 and $275,000, and 80 units at two Lucas Park buildings to be sold for between $72,500 and $110,000.

A developer, formerly with Pulitzer, pointed out to The Riverfront Times (November 18, 1998) that no one was developing affordable housing and he believed that there were limits to the number of households interested in paying $1,200 per month for 3,000 square feet. Just as the lofts above the Cheetah have been renting for $1,200 per month, a resident who is leaving the area noted, "rent above Deep Cool's been $900 and now it's going to $1,200. It was already ridiculous at $900. A lot of the real artists are moving away. I've been there 2 1/2 years and everybody that lived here when I moved in, has already left the area." Another developer rued the reality that the for-sale market for condominia was operating only in the $60-$80,000, and $150-$200,000 range, and not "in between."

Another developer told the Post (October 17, 1999) that "Artists are a magnet for the neighborhood," and that he discounts market rates for artists "because they are good anchors for the community." But the artists moved to Washington Avenue to pay modest rents for large amounts of space, and the real estate economics have changed-quickly and decisively after quite a long period of market inattention. Artist Judy Child, whose King Bee building at 1709 Washington has just been acquired by a new developer, told the Post, "For so many years, we've heard 'Oh, the Washington Avenue Loft District!' Then, we'd look out onto the street and say, 'Oh, yeah, well, where is it'?"

It is more visible now thanks to Senator Bond who, on the October 10 before his successful re-election last year (Post-Dispatch, October 11, 1998), announced that he would be arranging for $4 million in federal funds to be spent on Washington Avenue street improvements. When former Senator Danforth appeared at the announcement to represent 2004, Bond's opponent, the state attorney-general, mentioned 2004 non-profit tax status, but Senator Danforth said, "I don't think that this is a partisan thing at all. Leaders should get credit for doing something for the community, no matter what party they belong to."

The consultants viewed retailing Downtown as a problem and, of course, as an opportunity with its 43% vacancy rate. St. Louis Centre, the plan said, "does not support the vision for a viable Downtown." Just as retailing seems not to be at the heart of Downtown revitalization, so the Riverfront appears not to be at the geographic center of the process. It is that much more remarkable then that Rick Yawkey, who owns Norton's in Soulard, apparently has succeeded in his efforts to finance the refurbishing of the Robert E. Lee Riverboat. Work already is underway on the boat, and The Riverfront Times did select this effort as its 1999 "Best Potential Restaurant Rehab" (September 29, 1999). Although the city came up with $600,000 in tax increment financing, Yawkey said, "You say 'boat' and 'restaurant' and you have bankers running away over the hill." But Yawkey and his partners found Bremen Bank, and they hope to have a millennial party aboard the boat, which has not been open since the 1993 flood.

Finally, the greatest of Downtown projects is the proposed new Mississippi River Bridge. The Post editorially (September 22, 1999) has resisted the temptation to cheerlead. The Bridge will open up to Missouri at Tucker, its height and some of its ramps' height has been reduced, and plans have been designed to avoid disrupting neighborhoods. But the Post properly has asked how exactly it will strengthen Downtown, and what its impact will be on traffic, public transportation, and air pollution. For $500 million, "why is the bridge necessary?" Exactly the kinds of questions to be asked of great public purposes with $1.2 billion price tags.

ARTS AND CULTURE

In Where We Stand, the East-West Gateway Coordinating Council ranks St. Louis 23rd among 35 metropolitan areas in its "Culture and Recreation Index" (at a 7.39 index, compared to an average 6.75 index). The last Places Rated Almanac (David Savageau and Geoffrey Longest, 1997, Macmillan), an important source for EWGCC, rates St. Louis 18th among American cities, employing five libraries, three museums, and five lively arts (theater, opera, ballet, travelling performers, symphony) criteria.

Much of the current performing arts debate has been centered around the questions of available venues.

For example, the then-Kiel Partners, Civic Progress companies, committed themselves to the restoration of the Kiel Opera House when they built the Kiel Center after demolishing the previous facility, attached to the Opera House. But after spending $2.5 million on the Opera House roof and mechanical systems, the Kiel Partners chose to interpret this expenditure as the fulfillment of their legal commitment. This left the Opera House without water on its top three floors, no air conditioning, only 40% of its steam heat capacity, code-violating elevators, and ADA-violating restrooms.

Reopening the Opera House might result in traffic problems for Kiel Center customers on nights when events simultaneously are being held in both facilities. More politically sensitive is the competition the 3,500-seat Opera House would represent for the 4,500-seat Fox Theater at Grand Center not far away. The Riverfront Times (May 27, 1998) pointed out that all other top-20 markets have at least two such facilities, but St. Louis civic leaders are concerned about the viability of the University of Missouri - St. Louis's new 1,600-seat performing arts center, as well as the Fox's interests, if the Opera House were to reopen. UMSL's chancellor rejected pressure from the Mayor to site their new facility at Kiel, and it will compete with the Fox, the 1,000-seat Westport Playhouse, the 1,800-seat American Theater, and the 600-seat Sheldon Theater.

Dedicated preservationists are fighting for Kiel, but they must contend with the vagueness of the goals of a performing arts venue without specific bookings, or the ability to project revenue streams. They talk of enormous, elegant turn-of-the-century-style dinner theater (as Baltimore has), but a consultant hired by 2004 recommended not to save the Opera House, but instead to build a new 1,800-seat venue at Grand Center (since the Opera House renovation would be costly and then unnecessary competition for the Fox Theater). The St. Louis Cultural Assessment Study itself phrased it this way: "The Kiel is too large to be renovated in its current configuration and is too cumbersome to be downsized to create a smaller venue." Additionally, there are operational logistical problems because it adjoins the Center, and, further, it is not located in Grand Center.

Now that the Bill and Nancy Laurie have purchased Kiel Center, the Post editorialized (September 9, 1999): "A moribund Kiel Opera House is like the moribund Old Post office. It sucks the life out of its surroundings." Perhaps Mrs. Laurie, who founded a dance center in Columbia, Missouri, might become a patroness of the Opera House.

The Cultural Assessment Study also focused on strengthening Grand Center, which they believed was a "loose collection of theaters and support buildings that are not tied together in any substantive way." The area, they felt, needs workspace for artists, day time pedestrian activity, and the restaurants, cafes, and bookstores to serve audience members. (And for St. Lousi generally, the consultants suggested an international public sculpture festival, and the identification of a celebrity St. Louisan as an "arts champion").

Grand Center itself has had a difficult time defining its role sometimes as a facilitator and sometimes as a developer. Managing the Grandel Square Theater, a small venue that previously was a church and each Fall hosts a Manhattan-quality cabaret series, has led Grand Center to $100,000 annual losses for the facility. With the construction of the new Pulitzer art museum, the move-in of KETC-TV (public television), and a real possibility of housing development, Grand Center would seem to be entering a more promising period, but the challenges of bringing to life this area are great. While St. Louis University has taken great strides in beautifying its own campus, this neighboring community has resisted community development efforts in the past.

Cultural development in St. Louis has varied meanings:

• Joanne Gladney took St. Louis's sister cities committees to new levels of cross-cultural communication and fostering of international friendships - in Stuttgart, Galway, Lyon, Nanjing, Suwa (Japan), Bologna, Szczccin (Poland), Samara (Russia), Georgetown (Guyana), and St. Louis (Senegal). The value to St. Louis of these friendships was underscored by Yeltsin's appointment of Samara's Mayor as his 3rd deputy premier.
• Gateway Greening, Inc., formerly Gateway to Gardening, has helped city gardeners develop 80 community gardens along with 70 school gardens and 12 neighborhood projects, "turning vacant lots and trash-filled areas into green spaces (Post-Dispatch, March 20, 1997)."
• For film lovers, the reopening of the Union Station Cinema by the Honolulu-based Wallace Theater Corporation provided 10 more screens for the city. The property owner said about Wallace, "This company has a long track record of taking theaters with less than stellar histories, and making them very successful (Business Journal, March 9, 1998)." Best of all, flashing its new marquee, the Chase opened up five "screening room" - type theaters as one of the first aspects of the reopening of the Chase-Park Plaza Hotel.

SPORTS

The Rams began their 1999 season with a 6-2 record, a happy reversal from its previous steady negative progression -- 7-9 in 1995, 6-10 in 1996, 5-11 in 1997, and 4-12 in 1998. Bringing the Rams to St. Louis had required what Charles Korr in St. Louis Currents called "the most lucrative offer made to any franchise looking for a new home." The National Football League previously had humiliated St. Louis' bidders by passing the city over to award new franchises to Charlotte and Jacksonville, even though St. Louis already had lost its own franchise, represented the largest untapped media market for professional football, and had made plans for the Trans World Dome (with construction eventually to cost $260 million).

The Rams proved to be so expensive that, as in Charlotte previously, Personal Seat Licenses from $250 to $4,500 had to be sold to 46,000 of the 74,000 fans requesting the right to purchase a seat ($74 million was "earned" from PSL's, $16 million going to the NFL). The League also extracted a relocation fee from St. Louis, which additionally had to buy the Rams out of its stadium indebtedness in Anaheim, and the Rams, according to the Post-Dispatch (September 17, 1999) would have to forgo its share of the next two "new franchise fees."

As they contemplated raising ticket prices for 2000, the Rams however offered the NFL's lowest average ticket price of $33.99. This figure did not include PSL costs, and earlier the Business Journal (March 2, 1998) described a market for "dumping" PSL's before the period of their lease was over. The Rams replied that only 600 PSL's, or 1% of the licenses, turn over each year. The Post (September 23, 1999) however said the following year that ""he team is making a big push this year to win back fans, who have been turning away in droves."

St. Louis's most recent sports business mega event was the purchase by the Lauries of the Blues, and Kiel Center for $100 million, and the Vancouver Grizzlies, perhaps soon to become a St. Louis National Basketball Association team. The Grizzlies, a relatively new start-up franchise, were purchased for between $150 and $160 million, and were said to have lost $20 million during the 1998-1999 season (Post-Dispatch, September 24, 1999). That last season, they were 8-42, worst in the NBA, and, in their first 3 seasons, they were: 15-67, 14-68, and 19-63. An average NBA ticket price would be 42.54, but it is too early to project a St. Louis price, given the likely resistance by at least some elements of the NBA to the move from a city that had worked hard to make their new franchise successful (the last NBA move was in 1985).

Four professional sports teams in St. Louis are less likely to overwhelm the ticket sales market, when it is the Lauries who own two of them plus their arena. While the two franchises compete for fans during the same season, the Lauries would have the shared financial goal of filling Kiel Center's seats for both games, and some opportunities to make luxury boxes available for more than one sport.

The Blues in fact have been among the top five National Hockey League clubs in ticket sales, as they begin their 33rd year. In one of the club's first 3 years, the Blues reached the third round of the play-offs, a feat they also accomplished in 1986 (a 4th round now is required to win the Stanley Cup). Eight other teams as new or newer than the Blues meanwhile cumulatively have won the Stanley Cup 17 times.

Financially, according to the Business Journal (September 15, 1997), the Kiel center Partners, who have sold the club to the Lauries saw Kiel's construction costs increase from $70 to $200 million, consequently were paying from $10 to $12 million in debt service, and losing $16 million a year. This problem was exacerbated by the loss of 22% of season ticket holders before the 1996-1997 season. The Blues the next year then lowered prices on 62% of their tickets, and were able to obtain a 93% renewal rate of their remaining season ticketholders.

There also will be minor league hockey, the River Otters in St. Charles, as well as an International Basketball League team, the Swarm, in that city, and the independent baseball Frontier League Rascals in nearby O'Fallon (who drew the all time League-leading attendance figure of 152,000 ticket sales in the Rascals' first year in 1999).

Meanwhile, noticing the brand-new facilities subsidized for other sports' franchises the Cardinals have been campaigning for a new stadium. New models of stadiums have been replacing their relatively new predecessors very rapidly in sports, and obsolescence is defined as underworking a regional market for luxury boxes and high-end annually purchased seats and boxes.

The baseball Cardinals have completed four years under manager Tony LaRussa with a 319-328 record, reaching post-season play only during the first of those four years, but benefiting from two years of McGwire - Sosa home run races. For those last two years, fans were most troubled by the incompleteness of the pitching staff, bedeviled not only by injuries, but also seemingly by management's inability to finance midyear reinforcements to fill in for the injured.

Fans remember how Mark McGwire specifically deferred some of his own salary to help finance additional player acquisitions, and 1999 was a franchise record with 3,230,356 tickets sold (an average ticket sale per game of 40,891). Post-Dispatch columnist Bernie Miklasz (October 3, 1999), reviewing the 1999 season, listed the Cardinals's problems: the team record for most season strikeouts, fifth place in National League errors, 21 blown saves in the bullpen, 2nd place in walks given up by the pitching staff. Yet, said, Miklasz, owner Bill DeWitt, Jr., was upbeat about on-field performance, and negative only about a projected 1999 $3 million loss by the owners. Miklasz (September 29, 1999) has argued that "the owners are complacent and not fully committed to winning because of McGwire's capacity to fill the stadium and generate revenue." While the Cardinal payroll has been held at $46 million, another $9 million also is being paid to players who have been traded away or released.

Cardinal management is working hardest to convince the St. Louis public that they need that new largely-to-be-publicly funded stadium. By 2005, Busch Stadium will be the major's 2nd oldest stadium (opened in 1966). The new stadium would cost over $240 million, but the owners point out that they pay $1.4 million in annual upkeep (although new stadiums require maintenance, as well), and already have paid for new grass, new seating, and new party areas. They told the Post (March 1, 1999) that more seating and the replay board will require replacement during the next five years. It also is true, as the Business Journal (November 10, 1997) has reported, that the physical plant contributes to increased revenue, when, for example, in 1998, four new luxury suites are added on the concourse between home plate - when two are priced at $175,000 and two at $155,000 per year.

Unsurprisingly, the Blues have joined in on this debate. They too play in a privately-financed venue. Due to those cost overruns, all of the Kiel Center signage, concessions, and luxury suite revenues are pledged to debt service for Kiel's $62.4 million in long-term, tax-exempt debt at 7.8% interest. The Blues President told the Post (October 21, 1999): "The owners of both teams pay for maintenance and capital improvements, and that puts a drain on their respective teams. They compete against teams that don't have to pay that."

Finally, St. Louis is a great city for amateur sports. While the 1999 Marathon was cancelled after 28 years and the race director retired after 18 years (Post-Dispatch, August 29, 1999), participation had declined from 1500 to 850 runners in 1998. With a new race director in the wings however, the sports commission director pronounced this event: "An idea that is absolutely not dead." Another example of St. Louis amateur sports pride is the Budweiser Gateway Football Classic, played each Fall for the last 6 years between teams from two historically black colleges. Sylvester Brown, Jr., writing in the Post (September 3, 1999) extolled the virtues of its executive director: "He insists that blacks take responsibility for filling the Dome. He's turned down money from corporations that, he thought, wanted him to compromise his values, or the mission of his foundation."

ACCOUNTABILITY FOR ST. LOUIS' QUALITY OF LIFE

The Danforth Foundation for the last two years has been eager to join the national benchmarking movement and has developed and funded its Regional Report Card. If an inquiry into St. Louis's quality of life is to begin with the perspectives of outsiders, then it should property conclude with an assessment of the community's self-awareness.

East-West Gateway Coordinating Council has published every two years an issue of Where We Stand, examining the St. Louis metropolitan area in comparison to 34 other metropolitan areas according to a great many social & economic indicators. Once St. Louis's comparative positions can be seen, it is possible to know where to look for ideas, if needed, on how to be more successful. Others - United Way, Sustainable St. Louis, St. Louis's Community Development Agency, Vision for Children at Risk - also have worked on benchmarking indicators. So, an important question is how the Regional Report Card might fit into this world of indicators.

The project stressed its interest in polling and then in public engagement processes. It broke down the set of possible indicators into five areas: social justice and racial equality, economic security and opportunity, children prepared for life, citizens safe and healthy, and rich and vital lives. Each indicator must be available and already collected, collected regularly (at least annually), be collected at a small unit level of geography, and be valid and generalizable as data. They hoped to avoid indices, have as few measures as possible, and measures that are unambiguous as to what is good or bad, and as to causality. Each indicator should be a good proxy measure, and be easily communicable. While all these criteria may prove clarifying, they do not necessarily establish how the Regional Report Card might play a unique role amid other valuable ongoing efforts.

In the project's Steering Committee's Executive Summary, however, the report makes two compelling points:

• The Regional Report Card will identify areas that need improvement. It will assess performance against community goals. It will hold us accountable for achieving progress.
• In the 2004 spirit, the summary says that "democracy is not a spectator sport. For the St. Louis region to really enjoy a high quality of life, it must first and foremost engage its citizens in creating and maintaining a livable community, then hold its leaders accountable for achieving it."

It is in this area of holding the community accountable that, if it is serious, the Danforth Foundation can perform a unique role. In the area of "social justice and racial equality," for example, all of the indicators that point to regional segregation, and to silence about its perpetuation, can serve as the basis for holding government, the private sector, and all of us accountable. A unique report card indeed.