We deserve better cities

I would like to submit my own definition of what it means to be "plagued by crime." Crime has fallen... from "insanely high" to "very high." St. Louis has a long way to go until it's no longer "plagued by crime."

I’m sorry you can’t conceptualize that people may have different opinions than you do. I want to see St. Louis succeed and that starts with being honest about why the city can’t attract more than 10% of the metro population to live in it. Thankfully I live in the city and can vote for the policies I think will help, just like you 😊

@makecitiesgreat “Abandoned to criminals” Fuck off bot. Playing to on an old bigoted stereotype on a new bluecheck burner account is some obvious Russian troll bullshit tryin to spread hate and fear. 3/10 bait & Alt+f4 yourself.

Off-topic but interesting observation: Vancouver has about the same population density as St. Louis did at the peak of its population in 1950. This is what St. Louis could look like if the city hadn’t been abandoned to criminals and disorder. Our Rust Belt cities have massive potential.

@bobbyfijan Cracking down on crime will solve the housing crisis. Fantastic city fundamentals in West Philly, Baltimore, St. Louis, many others

@PermanentUn Not the city's job to regulate taste and the site is already subject to the FPSE form-based code, so compliance with that should've been the start and end of the conversation. Now we get a vacant lot on Kingshighway for the foreseeable future, which is a huge loss.

@makecitiesgreat Why should the city accept dogshit construction on a prime site? Build better shit and it will be accepted. Want to build slop? Take that to Eureka.

Great job everybody. Consistent theme in St. Louis where the city / aldermen play games with developers only to find out they don’t actually have much leverage. Developers can and do just walk away because STL is not hot enough to be worth poor faith negotiation.

It is a choice that we allow reckless drivers – such as the driver associated with the SUV in this photo, which apparently has $760 in speeding tickets – to continue wreaking destruction and death on our roads.

The thing about crashes is that in ~95% of cases, you know someone did something wrong. Someone drove in a way that was incorrect and dangerous, and they caused a collision. Crashes are so frequent that we treat them as background noise, natural occurences – but they are almost entirely preventable through enforcement (removing bad drivers from the roads) and technology (self-driving cars).

I remember being confused by the 'crime happens because not enough youth clubs' discourse when I was a teenager. Hanging out together with nothing to do is literally the essence of being a teenager, that's what we did on the weekends, all without committing crime. No youth clubs = crime discourse is possibly the lamest and most embarrassing excuse for crime the left has ever come up with, they've been banging the same drum for decades.

Giving developers a temporary property tax discount in exchange for building something that will generate a far larger amount in property, income, and sales taxes for perpetuity is an obvious win for St. Louis, but politicians are so captured by progressive ideology that they kill the opportunities they get.

This is directly behind SLMPD headquarters lol

Kind of wild you could be walking in an entirely anti-urban, insulated neighborhood like this (one access point) and still be viciously murdered by someone on a schizophrenic break

Curious if this would’ve been prosecuted as swiftly and harshly if it hadn’t taken place on NPS land.

Again, as soon as the temperature rises above 80°, people in this city lose their minds.

Seriously, think about how absurd this statement is if you know anything about the history of cities like Pittsburgh and St. Louis. You think those great brick buildings and bridges were built by people who shunned "developers" and "business hubs"? Exactly the opposite!

You encounter this slop in St. Louis too. Sadly these cities - that were built by the ambition and labor of more formidable people - attract these downwardly-mobile, arrested development types who think cities are playgrounds for their artsy fantasies. They cannot recognize the suffering and loss that depopulation and degrowth create.

Lefties explaining their hopes for a city: “the worst thing that could happen to us is that middle class people with jobs might move in”

If adding lanes slows traffic down, why do we have anything other than 2-lane roads everywhere? Do cars even occupy space? If you expand a road from 2 to 4 lanes, is it really true that the road will not move more vehicles per hour?

No, expanding a 2-lane urban street to 3 lanes is not the same thing as widening a 5-lane freeway! The congestion dynamics are totally different! I think the bump-outs on Broadway are a good idea, but of course the defenders are using the sloppiest logic possible.

This is classic r/StLouis logic. Takes a specific, narrow finding (adding lanes to a highway induces demand, erasing the congestion benefits of the expansion over time) and generalizes it to "adding lanes slows traffic down" in any scenario, even where it violates basic logic.