Could New Urbanism Save the Midwest?

St. Louis, Missouri is the prototypical Midwestern city. It’s large in size, boasts a rich local history, and lays claim to a set of wildly popular major sports teams. It’s enviably affordable, and hosts several world-class medical and educational institutions. And its weather? Relatively pleasant (albeit sticky in summer).

But most importantly, it suffers from a staggering city-county disparity which has left its inner city devestated and outer suburbs thriving and highly livable.

The Lou is not an outlier. From Detroit to Ohio’s three C’s to as far west as Kansas City, Midwestern downtowns have been on the decline since forced desegregation, dating back to Brown v. Board in 1954 (see Clotfelter). Each big city is working towards renewal in their own ways. Most relevant here in St. Louis’ efforts, where a main downtown drag—Washington Avenue—has become a budding area for new bars, fancy restaurants, and airy lofts.

Sadly, apart from affluent yuppies and partying suburbanites, the place hasn’t reached sustainability. Which is why this has been such big news:

The new Schnuck Markets store set to open downtown on Tuesday is not your typical grocery…That’s because the supermarket, on Ninth Street across from the Old Post Office, is the first of its kind downtown since 1985. In the quarter-century since, the neighborhood has changed tremendously. It has fallen and bounced back, and in the last decade its residential population has doubled to roughly 11,000. But residents had to leave downtown to buy groceries.

Mixed-use development and other New Urbanist tendencies clearly hold great potential for places like St. Louis. So long as suburbanites can take of the easy risk of re-imagining the cities their relatives left long ago. And then take the hard risk of actually moving there.