The Grade in the Window

Let’s start with the moment nobody talks about: When someone flies into St. Louis, they look out the window, walk the concourse, step outside, and register something they can’t quite articulate. Not danger. Vacancy. The silence between footsteps. The space between buildings. The absence of pedestrians where a city should hum.

That first impression keeps widening as they move along the highway, through the hotel lobby, down the block. The quiet isn’t catastrophic. It’s uncertain. Before they’ve grabbed a bite or seen a neighborhood, the story has already begun to write itself. If this is the opening scene, what does the rest look like? They look around and wonder, sometimes out loud: Where is everybody?

This perception is the civic equivalent of a big, bold D taped to the glass of a restaurant window — one that might as well say, “Keep Out.” You can have a star chef, redo the menu, or have the best happy hour in town — none of it matters. From the sidewalk, that paper wins. The grade defines the experience before the food has a chance.

That’s St. Louis.

Weighing the risk

Our “grade” isn’t literal, of course. It’s what the passenger sees — a finalist, parent, scientist, nurse, a couple with a stroller gate-checked in Houston — when leaving the concourse. Or go back further, to what people see when they type “St. Louis” into a search engine or a chatbot: crime charts, fragmentation, segregation, and top-5 most dangerous lists from the likes of WalletHub, Forbes, U.S. News, Wikipedia, and the rest. (That’s if they have reason or bother to look us up at all. Most don’t.)

You can shout, “That’s unfair!” or point to our free zoo and world-class parks and brick architecture and soulful music. None of it moves the sign. Meanwhile, locals — and especially the transplants who’ve stayed — know the opposite is true. The culture runs deep and weird in the greatest of ways. You can raise a family here, have a magical life, and hold your head high.

But no one ventures in because the glass reads: “Don’t Risk It.” 

The losses start upstream — long before most ever know what they’re missing. Planeloads of talent, investors, developers, and students passing us by for North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Arizona, Texas, or Florida. The candidates I meet are the ones who applied despite what they’ve read and heard. One can only imagine the incalculable masses who never make it to that stage.

Even the executives and site selectors who give us a chance and fall in love go home to boards and search committees who can’t defend moving a headquarters here. Their employee families search “St. Louis safety” and recoil. The young professionals they want to recruit can’t imagine a future here because they didn’t see anyone walking downtown after 5:00 p.m.

I’ve watched it play out in smaller ways for years. We pick up a spouse at the airport; they step off the jetway and call home: “I’m safe. I’m OK.” For the longest time, I thought that was just courtesy — a polite “I’ve landed” text made out loud. It wasn’t. It was relief. Later, they’ll often admit to bracing for what our Google reputation had told them to expect.

Search engines and chatbots throw them off in other ways, too, such as size and scale. Visitors see the terminal, office park, stadium, and a quick loop downtown, only to assume they’ve seen the whole city. They think their orientation “tour” shouldn’t take the better part of 45 minutes. So when you say, “metro area of nearly 3 million,” they’re shocked. When you drive them through the neighborhoods that actually fit their lives, they’re shocked again. Nothing in the pre-visit search suggested that anything so cool and charming existed. (And before you say the onus is on them to look closer, these are some of the most renowned data scientists and geospatial analysts in the world, who still can’t figure it out.)

But even when they say yes to the offer, the grade still shapes the outcome. At one major employer, more than 80 percent of incoming hires landed in a distant prairie pop-up suburb they didn’t actually want, because they believed everything inside the 270 ring was on fire and that traffic would be coastal-level if they tried to live near urban and walkable areas they liked. Turnover followed. Months later, one foot already out the door, they’d “discover” the city pockets they wished they’d known were here day one.

That’s what a D on the glass does: It quietly reroutes people’s lives.

Priorities and choices

It’s neither an accident nor fate. It’s a structural choice. If the city and county alone combined the crime numbers for the FBI, and were taken together (as is the practice in every other region in the country), St. Louis wouldn’t just fall off the top five on the “most dangerous” lists — it would barely crack the top one hundred. We are the only major metropolitan area left in which the municipal denominator is this far from the lived region. Our independent-city structure is a 150-year-old anomaly that skews every metric, splits every system, confuses every outsider, and gives the world a picture that doesn’t match reality.

We tell ourselves it’s just who we are — a city under a curse, stuck in its ways — debating kids’ menus and décor: the next district, rebrand, and ribbon-cutting meant to “change the narrative.” Meanwhile, that same failing letter hangs in the window while the powers that be press it to the glass, insist, “It’s not about the nail.”¹

If this region were a local or family business, we’d be losing our minds. You would never let someone stand outside your store holding a sign that says “Syphilis and Murder” and shrug. You’d rip the poster from their hands.

Yet that’s effectively what we don’t do every day. Instead, proprietors, chefs, universities, developers, property managers, parents, and institutions watch layer after layer of civic and local government circle each other instead of the problem. They didn’t create the image, of course, but the baffling inertia, feudalism, fiefdoms, turf wars, misaligned priorities, endless caution, and bickering — all of it keeps the region from moving in sync and lets it stand.

And worse still, we bankroll the political theater.

Front-of-house management

Businesses, voters, residents, and stakeholders keep funding efforts that appear to work on everything but the one repair that would actually change the grade: fixing how we govern. We underwrite summits, slogans, studies, and panels while the city-county divide stays untouched. It’s performative inaction, paid for naively by the very people it harms — tantamount to everyone starving downstream while the people upstream debate better napkin colors. We’re not just tolerating the trespasser holding the sign by the door; we’re bringing them hot chocolate and paying them to stand there.

So the question isn’t “Can we grow?” We can. The question is “Do we even want to?”

If a mayor, councilmember, alderman, or state rep put their hand up and said, “I’m here for the status quo. My constituents don’t want to expand and prefer to be left alone. NIMBY.” I might disagree, but I’d respect the intellectual honesty. Just say it out loud, then admit the cost, and tell the people what they’re voting for by proxy:

• Kids who leave.

• Grandkids who grow up somewhere else.

• A contracting workforce.

• Hollowing neighborhoods.

• Donor lists that shrink.

• Flights that cancel.

  
  

Who benefits from a barely passing grade?

Along these lines, here’s the raw truth that also needs air: Perhaps some people like the grade where it is. And if you had the means, who wouldn’t want the quiet, the parking, the world-class exhibit without a line? Without a doubt, there are benefits to life off-grid and under the radar. And maybe that’s the point. But it’s high time to acknowledge that we’ve spent so long trying not to become Chicago or Atlanta that we’ve fallen so far behind in the race, many in the establishment actually think we’re leading.

Perhaps that’s by design. Perhaps not. But what we can’t keep doing is pretending — the double-speak, the grift, the charade, the aspirational press releases about regional growth and population gains from the same voices guarding a divided status quo. We can’t talk about economic mobility and equity for all while defending a structure that makes both laughably impossible. That leaves us groveling for drops at the bottom of a sink instead of fixing the faucet. That acts as little more than a distracting subterfuge about what maintaining this structure actually costs, which is far more than “redundant” city services. It’s:

• Every open job.

• Every early departure.

• Every boarded storefront.

• Every graduate who leaves before the ink on the diploma dries.

That’s the paradox to confront. We cling to both Chesterton’s fence² and the Buddhist raft³, refusing to set down what no longer serves us, mistaking nostalgia for virtue, dragging the old forms behind us like heirlooms. The fence keeps us divided; the raft keeps us heavy. Together, they make sure we never move.

It’s more than a narrative problem or a pride problem. It’s also an ownership problem. The everyday St. Louisan — voter, employer, funder — has not been briefed on what’s truly at stake when they hear talk of city-county reform, the Great Divorce, or even — (gasp) — some kind of “merger” whispered on a ballot. Focusing on things like snowplows, potholes, and recycling ordinances is needed, but the people need to understand this structural anomaly is why there are no pedestrians on the sidewalks, no lines at their businesses, and the tax base remains anemically dripping at best.

Campaigns are fine. But we need to fix the grade.

Until then, every wonderful initiative aimed at shaping our region — economic mobility, revival, safety, desegregation, transparency — is cosmetic. None of it works without new talent, inbound migration, loss abatement, and visible life on the streets that makes a city feel inhabited.

This has to be more than branding. More like hygiene in pursuit of civic health — a serum that’s going to be hard to swallow and even harder to keep down. But until we have our reckoning, every new district, press conference, gala, and booster speech is just another menu printed under the same failing letter.

The day that grade changes — when people look through the glass and see an A, or hell, even a solid B — we won’t need a sizzle reel or a marketing plan to explain ourselves. The line will already be forming at the door. Businesses, families, students, founders, tourists, transplants. Momentum, density, warmth. The feeling of a city inhaling again.

Unless, of course, we prefer dining alone.

Footnotes:

¹ “It’s Not About the Nail” — Jason Headley (2013)

“It’s just — there’s all this pressure, you know? And sometimes it feels like it’s right up on me... I can just feel it in my head. And it’s relentless, and I don’t know if it’s gonna stop. That’s what scares me the most — that it might never stop.”

“Yeah. Well... you do have a nail... in your head.”

“It is not about the nail.”

² G.K. Chesterton — The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic (1929)“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road... Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

³ “Alagaddūpama Sutta” (The Simile of the Water Snake), Majjhima Nikāya, 22nd text“ A man walks through the forest and comes to a swift, deep river... Now, having crossed the river, that man would be crazy were he to lift the raft onto his back and carry it through the jungle in case he should sometime encounter another swift and deep river.”

Anthony P. Bartlett is President of Talent and Cultural Affairs at Acclimate. Helping St. Louis companies win hearts, minds, and long-term commitment.