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."

@PermanentUn Yes, black people are moving out of the city in droves because a small number of criminals are wreaking havoc in their neighborhoods and victimizing the law-abiding majority.

@makecitiesgreat Be honest, that's just black people.

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.

I get that, I enjoy living in the city, think it’s underrated and many people in the county have a hyperbolic sense of the risk of spending time east of Skinker. But even though crime is concentrated in the city, it’s still extremely bad that any neighborhood looks like what we see in North City. The people who live there deserve better.

@makecitiesgreat I agree with you that crime is much too high, but think some of the pushback comes from county people who don't like that the city as a fraction of the metro defines the metro's national image in terms of crime.

One challenge with talking about St. Louis is that many locals get very angry when you point out that the city has more crime than other places and this may be a big reason why the population continues to decline.

The late 60s-90s violent crime wave is *the* most important social phenomenon of the post-WWII era and we don’t even have a name for it!

@KICKandSTAND21 St. Louis has a metro population of 2.8 million and an urbanized area of 910 square miles. It’s comparable in population and size to Vancouver (metro pop 2.6M).

@makecitiesgreat St Louis would never look like Vancouver British Columbia Economically financially logistically or legally It's a small town in Missouri Vancouver is bigger than New York City What are we doing man

Tens of thousands of people have left North City over the past couple of decades. Why? Maybe because it’s a chaotic place to live and they don’t feel safe? (Old map but the trends have not changed, except maybe South City had stabilized)

44/55, Mill Creek, Kosciusko, and the riverfront were bad ideas, but those aren’t enough to explain 60% population loss. Any workable theory needs to be able to explain the ongoing emptying out of Jeff-Vander-Lou, The Ville, Walnut Park, etc - places that were generally untouched by urban renewal.

@makecitiesgreat Dawg they demolished half the city for interstates, urban "renewal" and sports stadiums.

It’s ok to acknowledge that St. Louis has more crime than other cities. Seems like an important problem to fix if we want the city to grow again!

Apparently a basic plot of # of homicides divided by population over the past 9 years is “cherry-picked” and “data clusters” (?). Remarkable behavior lol

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.

@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