The Psychology of Decline

Living in a “declining” city is baked into the experience of being a St. Louisan these days as much as baseball or beer or complaining that Danny Meyer hasn’t opened a Shake Shack here. The more I learn, the more I see how the decline narrative and its attendant neuroses and insecurities creep into every other aspect of life here (Case in point: the “sky is falling” reaction to the Rams leaving).  However, decline is not that simple, and maybe not even the right word to describe what is happening (but I’m going to keep using it for simplicity’s sake, at least for now).  This post, and probably at least a couple of follow-ups, will delve into what it means to be a declining city, what it means to live there, and what it can mean for the future.[1]

Nobody’s forcing us to live here, and it sure seems like most of us are mostly happy, but I think it’s important to admit that it’s not always easy.  It can be a discouraging thing to live in a city that’s seen as being in decline. People don’t exclaim “cool!” when you tell them where you’re from. Friends in other cities don’t have you at the top of their list for visits. You deal with a lot of dumb jokes that smack of borderline classism and racism, often from fellow St. Louis residents. Every explanation of why you love the city runs the risk of sounding like an apology, like the fact that you choose to live in a place like that rather than a hipper area or one where the economy is booming must be evidence of some kind of moral or mental defect. These slights are superficial and almost entirely external to the day-to-day things that make up the real pieces of a  great city and a quality life, but they must have an impact on how we view the city and ourselves. Decline becomes internalized.

One of the hard things about discussing decline is that there's no easy definition or metric to rely on. I don’t think understanding the dynamics of decline is as simple as looking at population. It’s more complex and fickle than that. Pittsburgh offers a good example. Whatever it means, Pittsburgh has received some amount of attention in the past decade or so as a “revitalizing” Rust Belt city. It is held up as an example of a city that has successfully navigated the transition to a post-industrial economy.  If someone tells me they are from Pittsburgh, I usually say something like “oh, I hear there’s a lot of cool stuff happening there.”  It can't also be a declining city, right? If you are looking at population, it is. For comparison, here are some Census data[2] for the population of Pittsburgh and St. Louis. I also added Cincinnati into the mix, since it is often grouped with Pittsburgh in the Rust Belt revitalization conversation.  

	St. Louis	Pittsburgh	Cincinnati
2000-2010 % Change in Population	-8.1%	-8.3%	-10.0%
2010-2014 % Change in Population[3]	-0.59%	-0.10%	0.41%
2010-2014 % Change in MSA Population	0.66%	-0.01%	1.65%

Looking at the decennial census, it is clear that all of these cities face a declining population. Out of these three cities, St. Louis actually had the least population loss between 2000 and 2010, as a proportion of overall population. Pittsburgh and Cincinnati both fared better between 2010 and 2014, but just barely, and that’s a shaky comparison. The third row shows that St. Louis falls in between the two when looking growth in the metro area, so it’s not a case where the perception of revitalization is due to a flourishing region. I present these statistics not to argue that St. Louis is the booming city out of this bunch (although it might do better relative to peer cities than we give it credit for),  but to show that decline is a hard concept to put a finger on. Like pornography, do we just know it when we see it?[4]

I’m not going to go around in circles trying to define “decline” right now, but I would argue that this is more than just an intellectual exercise. Perceptions and attitudes towards a city, regardless of the “concrete” underlying forces, affect how both residents and outsiders engage with a place, with real consequences. Moving forward, I plan to further explore what we mean by "decline" and whether is is or should be seen as wholly negative, how it can impact residents and leaders in their approach to policy decisions, economic development in the context of decline, and what, if anything, cities can and should do about decline or perceptions thereof.  Coming at it from multiple angles might offer some insights into our lived reality in this present day. I will not have the answers, but I hope that this can contribute to furthering a challenging and necessary conversation about our future.

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[1] It’s important to note that this is not just a discussion of the city proper. The metropolitan area is growing at a minimal rate, and St. Louis County lost population in the 2010 Census, the first time since the City-County divide.

[2] Retrieved from these Wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistical_Areas

[3] This and the following row compare American Community Survey data with Census data, which is generally not recommended. However, I am writing this instead of working on the 98 assignments I have due, so it will have to be good enough for now.  

[4] There’s a “ruin porn” joke here that I will let someone else write.