We have been partners in spirit with St. Louis’ Downtown Partnership for many years, joining in the call to invest in our downtown as a hub for business, residence and entertainment. While recognizing that St. Louis is a region of distinctive neighborhoods, most with their own charms – and admitting that our neighborhoods and municipalities often compete amongst themselves for businesses and tax-paying residents – we side with those who argue that St. Louis’ downtown is vital for the entire region’s progress. A more vibrant downtown can help spawn more success for our region and ultimately our state, given how dependent this region is on attracting outside human and financial capital.
This past weekend Downtown Partnership hosted a consultant from the Responsible Hospitality Institute. We are sufficiently sensitive to outdated insults of St. Louis as a backwater “flyover” zone to applaud the fact that downtown St. Louis needs advice in how to manage its problems as a burgeoning destination, but after the applause dies down the problems remain. There has been heavy investment in turning the same real estate into a revitalized residential area and an entertainment district that does in fact sleep, though not as early as many residents might wish; downtown has 18 3 a.m. liquor licenses in a six-block area. All of this is happening with dire poverty at the margins of downtown moving in nearly every direction. Much as we embrace in general the theory that downtown is an “economic engine” that helps drive the region and state, that engine motors far too slowly to immediately effect our region’s substantial underclass, where the economic choice for many is selling narcotics – for which there are ample markets in clubs with 3 a.m. liquor licenses – and where problems often are addressed violently.
“We need to manage the vibrancy of downtown so it doesn’t evolve into chaos,” Maggie Campbell, president of Downtown Partnership, told us. But how, and what can we do to help?
Campbell would like to see St. Louis embrace a campaign for public civility, and in an age where hateful rhetoric is tiresomely mainstream, we believe it is a good time to call for greater civility in our public discourse. However, the young man who drops out of high school because he is making money selling narcotics and who carries a firearm as he goes about his business, willing to use it with the slightest provocation, does not care what we or anyone says. We encourage Police Chief Daniel Isom to delegate properly trained police officers to the downtown beat to keep dope dealers and thieves away from urban residents and visitors, but we recognize that too heavy of a hand from the police force will tamp down the vibrancy of the district, which is essential to its success. And there should be no profiling for anything other than criminal or inappropriate behavior.
“This is everybody’s neighborhood,” Campbell says of downtown, and while she is paid to promote downtown, what she says is true. The streets, parks and sidewalks of downtown are ours, and our tax subsidy has helped make the commercial resurgence of downtown possible. Downtown is everybody’s neighborhood, and now is the time to protect and nurture our neighborhood and seek to enhance its fragile success. We need police presence, strong but sensitive, in the short term. And in the longer term, we need more investment, more jobs, more opportunity evenly shared with our community. We also need more downtown residents, and we renew our call to form residential clusters downtown for entrepreneurs being attracted by opportunities such as Arch Grants and a relocated Saint Louis University School of Law. Downtown St. Louis has unique strengths in aggregating new investment, human and financial, whose benefits will accrue far beyond the boundaries of downtown.
