I have to agree with Archpundit on “The Austin Model”.
Having lived in Austin, I can say that both Saint Louis and Austin are great places with plenty of advantages and some disadvantages, but there’s no denying that the citizens and leaders in Saint Louis and Missouri have made some poor decisions over the last century that have led to a long slow decline of one of America’s great cities. Austin, on the other hand, has grown from a city of around 350,000 in 1990 to a metropolitan area of over 1,000,000 today. It has a vibrant downtown, a quirky local culture, a great live music scene with multiple festivals each year, and out of this world restaurants.
That doesn’t mean Saint Louis is awful and can never rise again. But there’s no use pretending tht just because we have a few pro sports teams (which are themselves legacies of a prominence now faded) that we can thump our chests and ignore what has happened.
but the KMOV coverage last night really irked me. It strikes me that KMOV often performs as a somewhat spastic (in terms of the issues they take up) advocacy outlet, rather than a news station and when they reported this little nugget, their goal was to gin up the outrage that anybody would dare criticize St. Louis. Unfortunately, the best response they could elicit from St. Louis citizens in response to observations that the city has suffers from serious urban blight, was that St. Louis must be the best place on earth because it has the Cardinals and Ted Drews! Does such complacency perhaps suggest why St. Louis is having problems in the first place?
Also notable, the NewsHour on PBS has been doing a week of segments that deal with St. Louis, and their initial segment made most of the points that McCraken makes, with the requisite facts and figures to back it up.
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