The Gravois

Gravois at Jefferson, looking northeast, in its previous six-lane configuration.

Note: This goofy poem tells the story of a very cool grassroots effort called the Greater Gravois Initiative, which advocated successfully to make Gravois road a better place for people. I highly recommend you read more on the effort here.

The Gravois

On the South side of town

And curving toward West

Is a long winding thoroughfare that seldom does rest

A rumbling road that the neighbors detest.

It’s the street called the Mighty Gravois.

Now come a bit closer and sit at my knee boy

I’ll tell you the tale and I’ll make it quite quick

Of a momentous feat that few would predict

I’ll tell you the taming of the Mighty Gravois.

An asphalt behemoth, a bustling beast

Funneling cars to the North the South West and East

Like a concrete river

It carved a curved path

Through historic neighborhoods it cuts a wide swath.

And they cars they did love it

It’s not hard to see why

The street was built for their comfort

It was built six lanes wide!

So the semi-trucks trucked and the convertibles cruised

And speed limit signs were ignored and abused

Where they were going well that we don’t know

We just know they were going and they’d go go go go!

The crosswalks were few and appeared only rarely

And to try to use them could prove quite scary

Among bicyclists only the most intrepid breed

Would hazard the cars and their harrowing speed.

But one day a question came from the grassroots

From walkers who walk and scooters that scoot

From small businesses too quickly passed by

From neighborhoods split by the Gravois divide  

From parents with strollers and bussers who bus

 “Well why can’t this road be also for us?!?!”

Small businesses along Gravois. Pedestrian-oriented commercial buildings can struggle along high-speed roads. 

And so began efforts to create a new plan

Of crosswalks and bike lanes and places to stand

And lanes for the cars of course they’re still there

With restrictions in place that they’ll just have to bear.

Unused to this challenge oh MODOT did wail

“We’ve been trained to use hammers why can’t we just nail?”

But this broad coalition continued their stand

And re-explained concepts like induced demand.

And against all odds a new road appeared

And showed that MODOT overcame their old fears

A road on which people can walk, bike, and survive

Restricted from six lanes, it now counts just five!

Grumps predicted confusion and traffic kerfuffles

And cars moving along at barely a shuffle

But to their surprise if not their delight

Even at rush hour the cars are alright.

Sure, it could be better I have to admit

The bike lanes often just suddenly quit

Car speeds are still reckless especially at night

But the improvement is major not merely just slight.

So heed my words now that I’ve told you this story

The champions for change have sure earned their glory

It’s cause for celebration but there’s no time for rest

We’ve tamed the Mighty Gravois now which road is next? 

Gravois at Jefferson, looking northeast, in its new configuration. A lane of traffic was removed in each direction, and replaced with bike lanes and a center turn lane. The road now also has several "zebra crosswalks" that increase pedestrian visibility. 

Another Side of St. Louis' Startup Story

The St Louis region has garnered a lot of attention for its startup scene. In the past year, the Washington Monthly has called St. Louis an “entrepreneurial boomtown,” while FiveThirtyEight dubbed it the “New Startup Frontier.” While it can be difficult to separate truth from hype when it comes to amorphous topics like innovation and entrepreneurship, it appears that something very real and very positive is happening. Attention tends to be directed towards a relatively narrow subset of firms. The Washington Monthly article used tech, bioscience, and craft beer firms as examples to establish St. Louis’ startup bona fides. These are the types of firms that often dominate the startup conversation, which can reinforce a conception of entrepreneurship as typically young, white, and male. Data on business starts in St. Louis suggest that this is not the case. In fact, Black-owned firms account for the majority of new firm starts in St. Louis. This incredible growth in Black-owned firms demands further investigation into what is happening to drive such growth, and what can be done to leverage this entrepreneurial activity as a community asset.

Black-Owned Businesses Driving Growth in Startups

So what do we know about Black-owned firms in St. Louis? Not as much as we’d like, but enough to know that something significant is happening. The Census Survey of Business Owners (SBO) includes “all nonfarm businesses filing Internal Revenue Service tax forms as individual proprietorships, partnerships, or any type of corporation, and with receipts of $1,000 or more.” This survey population does not include informal enterprises but is otherwise fairly comprehensive. The Census completes the SBO every five years, and the most recent data available is from 2012. Although somewhat old, the data on firm growth in St. Louis City paint a dramatic picture:  

The City saw the total number of firms increase 27% between 2007 and 2012. Disaggregating this into racial groups reveals highly uneven growth. White-owned firms outnumbered Black-owned firms by more than 3 to 1 in 2007, but Black-owned firms grew more rapidly in the subsequent five years, nearly doubling their overall number. The City’s impressive growth numbers are largely thanks to these Black-owned firms: of the 6,408 new firms formed between 2007 and 2012, over 75% of them were owned by Blacks or African Americans. This represents stunning growth in the number of Black-owned firms.

This growth indicates a tremendous amount of entrepreneurial activity, but underlying data suggest that it might not be having the economic impact the striking firm numbers suggest. Table 2 breaks down total sales, receipts, or value of shipments for firms in St. Louis over the same period. Revenue for Black-owned firms grew by 12% over this period, which is far slower than the growth in the number of Black-owned firms. In fact, revenue-per-firm decreased dramatically over this period, from approximately $98,000 to about $56,000 per firm. Not only did per-firm revenue decrease, it is far lower than that of White-owned firms. Total annual payroll for Black-owned firms also decreased slightly over this period after adjusting for inflation. These declines suggest that many of the Black-owned firms formed in this period did not generate large amounts of revenue or employ many people. However, that there is revenue or firm growth at all in the context of an economic recession and population decline is notable.

Although these indicators may dampen the enthusiasm that the 95% growth in Black-owned firms inspired, they still represent real growth. The low revenue figures are likely due in part to the fact that the period examined, 2007-2012, encompasses the Great Recession. During the recession, the probability of folks entering self-employment was higher, despite the challenging economic environment (Beckhusen, 2014). The Survey of Business Owners includes the self-employed, and it is likely that sole proprietorships make up a large proportion of firm growth. New data may show a drop in firm numbers as workers transition back to wage employment in a healthier economy.

The data suggest that many new Black-owned firms are low-revenue, low-payroll firms—what which some might dismiss as “marginal.” This does not mean that those firms will always be marginal. After all, firms have to pass through being small before they become large, and have to have low payrolls before they have high payrolls. Those formed between 2007 and 2012 had not had much opportunity to grow. 

Black-owned business as an antidote for unemployment?

The major growth in Black-owned firms is encouraging in and of itself, and it could mean more jobs in the parts of the city that need it most. The Census data do not offer more reliable geographic precision that the city scale, but it is reasonable to assume that a large number of new Black-owned businesses are located in North St. Louis, which is home to the majority of the city’s Black population.

North St. Louis suffers from high unemployment rates. This widespread unemployment is due, at least in part, to lack of access to jobs. Figure 1 illustrates how North St. Louis has become a jobs desert. This map shows the top 25 census tracts of employment for residents of North St. Louis. Of the top 25 tracts where North St. Louis residents go to work, only one is within North St. Louis. Employment locations are instead concentrated in the city’s Central Corridor, and in mid and north St. Louis County. This indicates that North St. Louis residents often have to travel far to find work. Considering that fewer than ¾ of North St. Louis residents travel to work via private vehicle (either alone or in a carpool), transportation could prove a major barrier to finding and maintaining employment (Social Explorer, 2017). If Black-owned startups continue to grow, they could potentially play a major role in providing accessible jobs in North St. Louis.

Figure 1: North St. Louis Residents Travel Far to Find Work

Bringing Black Entrepreneurs into the Conversation

There is still a lot that we don’t know. One huge missing piece: reliable information on which sectors firms are entering. Anecdotally, it appears that many of these new Black-owned businesses are not in the sexy high-tech fields that garner national attention and magazine articles. Sole proprietorships and neighborhood retailers are unlikely to achieve the mythical “100x growth” of tech entrepreneurship. However, we would be doing these entrepreneurs, and St. Louis’ entrepreneurial ecosystem, a disservice by ghettoizing their efforts. It would be far too easy to slip into stereotypes and bifurcate the conversation into “good” and “bad” (or at least unlucrative) types of entrepreneurship. Our treatment of entrepreneurs in St. Louis needs to be a both/and approach rather than an either/or. Both the zeitgeisty entrepreneurship of Cortex and the grassroots entrepreneurship in working-class neighborhoods deserve recognition and support. What is more, they deserve and need each other. Rather than running parallel—heading in the same direction but never intersecting—these entrepreneurship ecosystems could be feeding and building off each other. Even though they may operate in very different contexts, many of the challenges entrepreneurs face and skills they need to succeed are likely to be very similar.

There are many amazing things happening when it comes to entrepreneurship in St. Louis, and only some of those things are getting the recognition they deserve. Efforts are underway to promote inclusion. The Equity in Entrepreneurship Collective is working to promote racial and gender equity in high-growth startup fields. This is a promising effort. A further step would be to recognize the entrepreneurship that is occurring outside of the highest-growth fields. Working to better understand and include a diverse array of startups is not only the right thing to do, it will build on a real and unique asset to make St. Louis’ entrepreneurial ecosystem even more competitive.    

Wrong Side of the Tracks

Willis Avenue, Looking South at the Railroad Tracks. Source: Google Maps Streetview

For the past two years, I led a split life, geographically speaking—driving up to Champaign to attend graduate school during the week, and back to St. Louis to be with my wife on the weekends. This meant putting about 500 miles per week on my 2000 Toyota Corolla. Needless to say, I became close friends with auto mechanics in both cities.

I would ride my bike to pick up my car from the mechanic in Champaign. I took back roads for this.The route, which mainly used Willis Avenue, was split almost perfectly in half by a railroad track. I never actually saw a train using this track, a spur of the Norfolk Southern. Nevertheless, it formed a formidable physical barrier. Not only did the road stop abruptly, there was no pedestrian path to the other side. Crossing required getting off my bike and walking it over the tracks. This was a minor inconvenience for me, but it had a remarkable effect on the neighborhood.

Railroad Tracks Form a Barrier on Willis Ave

Source: Google Maps

North of the railroad tracks, the neighborhood shifts notably. Some homes are less well-maintained. The cars parked in front are generally lower value. This is, apparently, “the wrong side of the tracks.” The data back this up. Conveniently (for the purpose of this blog post, at least) the railroad tracks also divide two census tracts. Here are 2014 median home values in these adjacent tracts:

•        Tract 10 (South of the tracks): $131,700
•        Tract 9.01 (North of the tracks): $84,200

Home values in the southern tract are over 50% higher than those to the north. It is no secret that neighborhoods change, and home values fluctuate between areas. In fact, median home values continue to rise as you move in a straight line south of this point. What is notable here is the scale of the change—comparing adjacent tracts for the next three tracts to the South shows an average of only a 15% increase in median home value—and how quickly it occurs.

Looking more closely at the area surrounding the tracks indicates that the tracks themselves play a role. I pulled assessed value data for the 10 homes I estimated to be closest to the Willis Ave tracks barrier, for both the north and south sides of the tracks. This is an admittedly unscientific approach. Despite is flaws, offers a picture of how quickly property values change. The 10 homes north of the tracks had an average assessed value of $18,533. The 10 homes south of the tracks assessed for $28,899, on average.[1]

Homes just south of the tracts assessed for about 56% higher than homes north of the tracts. This is the same percentage difference that existed between census tracts. The differences in home value between the two tracts may be less of a gradual progression, and more of an abrupt jump at this physical barrier.

What does this mean, and why does it matter? To some, this may just be a function of how the world works. Given a choice between sides of the tracks, people will pay a premium to live on the “right” side. I would argue that its implications are actually much more troubling. The very fact that there is a right side of the tracks means we have created a built environment that works against social mobility and reinforces inequality.

Social barriers tend to coalesce around physical barriers. These simple railroad tracks can become the dividing line between different neighborhood associations, youth sports teams, and elementary schools. The sum total of all these divisions means that people living on opposite sides of the tracks are far less likely to intermingle and form social bonds. Children growing up on the wrong side of the tracks miss out on a million little opportunities, like seeing the different professions of their friends’ parents and becoming inspired to pursue a career path. Poorer households north of the tracks have less political capital and ability to resist unwanted or noxious development, like liquor stores. Over time, disparities reinforce and calcify.

This is not to say that the purpose of these railroad tracks is to divide, or that they were built with malicious intent.[2] However, we must acknowledge that they have a very real effect. Physical barriers beget social barriers. This doesn’t just apply to railroad tracks, either. Highways, blocked streets, and inhospitable intersections are just a few examples of the physical barriers we erect that harden social barriers. If we believe social mobility and integration are good things, then we have to reflect on our built environment and its role in either supporting or hindering them. If we want to prevent stark disparities between places, then we must make our built environment as permeable and connected as possible. We must work toward cities where no child has to grow up on the wrong side of the tracks.  

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[1] In Champaign County, assessed value if 1/3 of market value.

[2] Although some certainly are. Kevin Fox Gotham’s Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development documents how the Kansas City Public Schools promoted Troost Avenue as a physical and social barrier in order to preserve segregated schools.