This will
be the last post in my meandering series on the psychology of decline. Since I
have gone in several directions, and my own understanding has evolved while
working on these posts, I want to bring things together and offer more clarity
and definition on the role of decline and how I think we should both
conceptualize it and work to address it. My biggest point is that “decline” is
not destiny, and it is not monolithic. While it may not be fun to discuss, how
we understand and approach the issue of decline will play a crucial role in the
future of a place like St. Louis. Here are some suggestions for how to better approach
decline.
1. Stop calling it “decline.”
This may seem like a strange, or
hypocritical, suggestion coming from the guy who has used the term more often
in the past month than everyone except certain narrow subsets of topographers
and grammarians, but it’s an important one. “Decline” is an icky word with all
kinds of connotations of failure and decay. This does not have to describe a
place like St. Louis. An alternative term that is growing in popularity is “shrinkage.”
Although this has the misfortune of conjuring up a
famous Seinfeld scene,
it has the advantage of describing the phenomenon of losing population in more
clinical terms. Shrinkage is a statistical fact; decline is an attitude. They
do not have to be synonymous.
Shifting from a mindset of decline
to one of shrinkage requires rethinking how we define success in a city. In the
19th and early 20th-centuries, success and growth were
one in the same. In St. Louis, this manifested itself in the Million Population
Club, a booster group that had as its goal that St. Louis reach 1,000,000
residents. If only they could see us now!
The St. Louis Million Population Club, With
Their Balloon, 1910
Source:
Missouri History Museum.
This is not a sustainable or even applicable
definition of success. Although size offers some advantages, it is not the
be-all and end-all of urban life. The “success” of a city should be defined in
terms of the quality of life it offers its residents, and the opportunities it
offers to improve that quality of life. Often, quality of life increases along
with population. Often, it doesn’t (this is when I politely decline to make a
Phoenix joke). While more residents could be seen to be an objectively
beneficial thing in a city as hollowed-out as St. Louis, we should not let this
dominate efforts to improve the city. Shrinkage might not be ideal, but a
shrinking city can still be a place that’s getting better.
2. Put shrinkage in context. Be humble about knowing
what the future holds.
St. Louis’ shrinking did not occur
in a vacuum. Over the same period, nearly every major Midwestern city saw
significant losses in population. However tempting it may be to provide the
causal story humans crave by weaving a narrative that shows how St. Louis
brought about its own demise, the reality is that this shrinkage occurred in
the context of greater macroeconomic and demographic changes that all worked heavily
against a place like St. Louis. This is not to say that we are helpless victims
of a predetermined fate (more on that later!), but it is important to recognize
the context because, in the absence of this recognition, we tend to pathologize
the people and places that experience shrinkage. Those who live in a shrinking
city must be backwards, incompetent, morally corrupt, etc. As I’ve mentioned
before, this pathology has definitely been internalized by many St. Louisans,
to their own and the city’s detriment. The converse of this—to heap praise on
and attempt to mimic those places that have grown—presents just as many
problems. For a ridiculous example of
pathologizing the fate of a place, look at the St. Charles County Executive’s
statement that the county had a low poverty rate because
“residents
are avoiding behaviors that lead to poverty.”
The reality is, as much as great
thinkers and pundits might like to claim otherwise, we do not know what the
future has in store. Although in hindsight troubling signs appear obvious,
nobody (that I know of) predicted St. Louis’ rapid loss of population in the
1950’s and 1960’s. The city of Seattle offers an example on the other side of
the growth spectrum. Enrico Moretti, in The
New Geography of Jobs, describes how Seattle in the 1970’s was seen as a
declining place. Manufacturing and timber industry jobs, on which it relied
heavily, were declining, as was its population. The Economist called it a “city of despair.” This is the same
Seattle that today boasts a rapidly growing population and a position as one of
the flagbearers of the “new economy.” Its growth is due to any number of
things. Moretti cites Microsoft—then employing 13 people—relocating there in
1979 as helping to kick start the tech economy there. Seattle also benefited
from greater demographic trends that see population shifting to the West Coast.
Whatever the exact cause of this growth, people in the 1970’s were not
expecting it to happen.
Your guess for the next major
demographic or economic structural shift is as good as mine. Could advances in
technology that facilitate decentralized work finally outweigh the benefits of
agglomeration and physical proximity, leading to increased migration to
low-cost areas? Sure. Could changes in Federal antitrust laws reverse the trend
of firms merging and locating in the largest cities? Maybe.
(If
you haven’t read this piece on how evolving antitrust laws impacted St. Louis,
you should.) In the more distant future, could climate change impact the
calculus of where companies choose to locate and people choose to live? Morbid,
but definitely plausible. Smarter people than me could list off 100 more major
shifts that could occur—or not—in the next 20-50 years. Simply extrapolating
current trends might be among the least likely of these scenarios, yet it’s
what we naturally do when we think about the future.
At the same time, it would be a
mistake to give up all sense of efficacy in the face of these larger changes. Particular
aspects of St. Louis (its fixed boundary, extreme fragmentation, a historically
hostile state legislature) certainly contributed to or exacerbated its
problems. It is important to work to address the issues we can control while
recognizing the greater forces at play. What does this mean in a practical
sense? Batten down the hatches, memorize the Serenity Prayer, be hopeful for
what the future can bring, and keep working hard to improve.
3. Think regionally.
“…postwar urban decline fused urban
ambivalence to widespread anxieties about racial relations, prosperity,
national identity, upward mobility, and personal safety. The city became the
discursive site for society’s contradictions, and anxiety emerged as the
discourse’s dominant quality.”
-Robert Beauregard,
Voices
of Decline
There’s a
certain playbook to follow if you are live in the St. Louis area yet don’t want
to be associated with the “declining city.” You make it clear that most of the
St. Louis area doesn’t live in the city. The area you live in is actually very
nice. If you really want to convince people, you can even add in a tasteless
joke about crime. It is tempting to think of problems as occurring only “over
there,” and the dynamics of jurisdictional boundaries only facilitate this
dissociation.
Part of thinking regionally is
avoiding the zero-sum games and scarcity mindsets that are all-too-tempting in
a context of shrinkage. This kind of thinking seriously threatens the long-term
future of the region. I talked about how this mindset plays out in the TIF and
sales tax wars, but it is not limited to that realm. Education offers another
great example, as school districts work to ensure that only the “right” kind of
students who will help them maintain their test scores attend school there.
My intent here is not to “suburb
shame” or paint those who live in the city as heroes. On the contrary, I firmly
believe that people have the right to choose where they live, and that people all
over the region are contributing to make it a better place. What we need is to focus
more on what is good for the region as a whole and less on how to stay ahead of
our immediate neighbors. Like it or not, the fate of the region is singular,
and it is tied up in the fate of the city itself. Ultimately, you can’t push
your domino far enough away to be immune if they start to fall. This might be a
tough pill to swallow if you feel like your little slice of the area is
actually doing pretty well, but it is a necessary step for righting the course
of the region. If we want our little slices to still be doing pretty well by
the time our grandchildren are living there, we need to start thinking
regionally sooner rather than later.
4. We need brave and hopeful leadership.
The need for strong leadership is
an undercurrent running through all of the challenges related to being a
shrinking city. Effective and visionary leadership is absolutely crucial for shifting
how we view the problems of the present and possibilities for the future. Within
a context of shrinkage, there is a tendency to see every policy or program as a
failure or as insufficient if it doesn’t lead to growth. Good leaders can frame
problems and talk about a success that is achievable, to translate the
complexities of where the region is and where it could be heading into understandable
and actionable terms, and inspire residents to participate in bringing about
their desired future.
Good leaders can also avoid the
biases I’ve discussed, that might present themselves in a context of decline.
They can pass up on risky “big fish” projects if they are unlikely to improve
the city. They can push people away from scarcity traps to think with a sense
of possibility about the future. They can make clear that providing a strong
social infrastructure is not a liability or charity but a path to a better
future. In short, they can help a place like St. Louis make the decisions of a
smart city of 300,000 people, as opposed to a desperate city that used to have
800,000 people.
*****
If anything, I hope that the idea
of decline or shrinkage feels less imposing and less predetermined than it is
frequently made out to be. Population loss happened, and is likely still
happening. That doesn’t mean we have to throw up our hands and allow fate to
take its course, and it doesn’t mean we can’t be generous, hopeful, and excited
for the future. In fact, those qualities are more important now than ever.
