St Louis MO Is Dying—The Cause Is Liberalism

We all know the coastal Blue cities are in deep kimchi, but a recent report in the Wall Street Journal reminds us that almost all large cities are run by self-aggrandizing, corruption-minded idiots driven by destructive liberal ideology.

This from hotair.com.

St. Louis, Missouri, once home to thousands who made it an Industrial Power Base. Now a liberal slum.

Saint Louis, it seems, is seeing its central business district die a slow and painful death. Office buildings have been clearing out, and with them the businesses that supported the workers have been leaving to set up in greener pastures.

The Railway Exchange Building was the heart of downtown St. Louis for a century. Every day, locals crowded into the sprawling, ornate 21-story office building to go to work, shop at the department store that filled its lower floors or dine on the famous French onion soup at its restaurant.

Today, the building sits empty, with many of its windows boarded up. A fire broke out last year, which authorities suspect was the work of copper thieves. Police and firefighters send in occasional raids to search for missing people or to roust squatters. A search dog died during one of the raids last year when it fell through an open window.

Nearby, the city’s largest office building—the 44-story AT&T Tower, now empty—recently sold for around $3.5 million. It anchors a neighborhood with deserted sidewalks sprinkled with broken glass and tiny pieces of copper pipes left behind by scavengers. Signs suggest visitors should ‘park in well-lit areas.’

Dennis Jenkerson, the St. Louis Fire Department chief, said:

It’s a very dangerous place.

Once the doom loop sets in, it is very difficult to reverse. Businesses leave, and the people follow them. As the people leave, more businesses close down. Rinse, repeat, and the city hollows out.

Larger coastal cities can tolerate a lot more ruin than cities like Saint Louis. New York has a huge concentration of money and power, plus a nearly infinite variety of things to do. Even in the depths of the 1970s New Yorkers hung on. Even after 9/11 they did. And not even Bill DeBlasio could destroy what makes the city unique.

San Francisco—a city that has fallen far indeed–has so much natural beauty and is surrounded by so much wealth that it has survived despite some of the grossest mismanagement of city resources imaginable. “The city has been harmed grievously, but it’s hard to imagine a fatal blow.”

Saint Louis and other midwestern cities—minus Chicago on the shore of Lake Michigan—have much less cushion to absorb the damage, and whether they will is doubtful.

Cities such as San Francisco and Chicago are trying to save their downtown office districts from spiraling into a doom loop. St. Louis is already trapped in one.

As offices sit empty, shops and restaurants close and abandoned buildings become voids that suck the life out of the streets around them. Locals often find boarded-up buildings depressing and empty sidewalks scary. So even fewer people commute downtown.

This self-reinforcing cycle accelerated in recent years as the pandemic emptied offices. St. Louis’s central business district had the steepest drop in foot traffic of 66 major North American cities between the start of the pandemic and last summer, according to the University of Toronto’s School of Cities.

With the decline in property values comes a corresponding decline in city revenues, exacerbating an already serious problem. When people and businesses leave, their taxes go with them, and without a sufficient tax base, city services inevitably suffer.

Saint Louis is rotting from the center outwards. This pattern was evident in Detroit, essentially a donut hole of collapse amid a donut of prosperous activity. The region is prosperous while the city is not. An aerial view depicts an approximate 100-block are collapsing in on itself.

Empty streets have made the office district more dangerous. Drivers speeding on wide, mostly empty roads are a menace. In early 2023, a 17-year-old volleyball player from Tennessee lost both her legs after a car smashed into her. A barbecue joint’s smoker has a bullet hole. Local shops and restaurants pay for private security guards to walk the streets and some have installed security cameras flashing warning lights.

Simply put, there is no reason to go there, so nobody does but people with bad intentions. That makes the area even less attractive, and things get worse. Buildings deteriorate, making it even more expensive to refurbish them. Etc. etc.

Hence the name “Doom Loop.”

As with so many things, COVID-era policies made modest problems in cities immeasurably worse. It turns out that turning your business district into a ghost town for months or years ran the risk of turning it into a ghost town forever.

Who could have guessed?

As with so many policies pushed by the Left, the unintended consequences of a solution have dwarfed the intended benefits, and of course those benefits themselves were stood up with false pretenses.

Final thoughts: The Doom Loop by definition is “a self-reinforcing cycle of risk and negative consequences arising from the interdependence between numerous entities.”

This article presented the concept as businesses and people leaving with economic opportunity and personal safety being two important details. Absent from this Doom Loop explanation is the election of liberal politicians who institute senseless liberal policies.

I submit, large cities have long—two-plus centuries in America—demonstrated the capability to survive and thrive even as the racial and ethnic makeup of the population changes in one area or another because Conservative political leadership has been interspersed with liberalism at the helm. In other words, the Doom Loop is I believe set off by unending liberal political leadership—whether as a result of honest or fraudulent elections.