The Emerging City of St. Louis: Smaller, Younger, Better Educated

ONE OF THE MOST frequently documented facts about the city of St. Louis for over half a century has been its dramatic shrinkage. From a high of almost 857,000 in 1950, the number of souls in the city has fallen to just 303,000, according to the most recent estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s a decline of almost two-thirds.

Yet other data point to a complex picture of demographic changes churning away below the headline population figure: a city where thousands of people are either arriving or departing each year, and where some Central Corridor and South Side neighborhoods are getting denser and wealthier, while others, mostly on the North Side, continue to hollow out.

Some of the most noteworthy recent changes involve young adults, an analysis of Census Bureau statistics by McPherson shows. Consider the following:

• The number of young adults (those aged 25-34) has risen sharply over the past 15 years to around 62,000, even as the overall population has continued declining, according to annual estimates by the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS). The most recent estimates are for 2017.

• At almost 29 percent, the rate of increase in young adults in St. Louis City between 2005 and 2017 far outpaced the rates in St. Louis County and St. Charles County (see Figure 1, below). (In terms of raw numbers, St. Louis County still has more than twice as many young adults as the city.)

• Underscoring the city’s allure, young adults there now tend to be more educated. The most recent ACS data show that around half of these Millennials have a bachelor’s degree or higher, up from about 35 percent just a decade or so ago.

• Most strikingly, young adults in St. Louis City are now more likely than their peers in St. Louis and St. Charles counties to have a bachelor’s or higher (Figure 2). And this upward trend in the city shows no signs of reversing.

These changes capture only one facet of the broader story for the city of St. Louis, where thousands of buildings sit vacant, job growth and tax revenues are lackluster, and other Census Bureau figures show around one-third of the city’s children continue to live in poverty. Still, the demographic estimates provide a glimpse of a partially transformed city that, like other legacy urban areas around the country, is slowly emerging from decades of population decline as a younger, better educated and more dynamic place.

“One of my favorite spots in St. Louis is the Euclid MetroLink stop; you look around, and you see the great diversity of people here in St. Louis,” says Don Roe, executive director of the city’s Planning and Urban Design Agency, referring to the light rail system’s busy Central West End stop in the heart of Washington University’s medical center campus. “Being an urban place means there’s a mixture of people and activities, and there’s density of things like housing and transport. That’s the character and feel of what we want to have.”

Roe’s agency works with Census Bureau officials, for example by supplying them with information on where new housing units have been built, to help ensure accurate counts of the city’s residents.

Roe lists several examples of “placemaking” attributes he believes are helping to attract educated young adults and put the city in a “sweet spot”: Historic neighborhoods, universities and museums, Forest Park, the Cortex business and technology district, and the Cherokee Street business district.

There’s still plenty of work to be done in terms of addressing blight and vacant buildings, especially on the North Side, but regarding the city’s prospects overall, Roe says confidently: “I think we’re in the catbird seat.”

Still shrinking

The hemorrhaging of the city’s population is by no means over. Recent ACS estimates suggest that families with children, in particular African-American households, continue to leave the city and that these households account for the bulk of the city’s population loss since the 2010 census. As a consequence, whites may already be the city’s biggest racial group for the first time since the early 1990s, and could constitute a majority by the middle of the 2020s. (McPherson plans to address other aspects of the city’s changing demographics, such as neighborhood abandonment and gentrification, in future articles.)

The ACS is a nationwide survey the Census Bureau conducts each year to produce estimates of social and demographic changes in cities and counties. Its 1-year estimates reflect a single year of data collection, while its 5-year estimates reflect five consecutive years of data. (McPherson used 1-year datasets to build the four charts accompanying this story with the exception of Figure 2. There, 5-year datasets were used for the statistics on educational attainment, since the 5-year data have a much lower margin of error in that category.)

Adding young adults has helped shield St. Louis City from even steeper population losses in recent years. The number of middle-aged adults (those aged 45-64) has started to decline gently during the current decade and is now around 78,000, ACS estimates show (Figure 3).

As a result of these and other factors, the median age of city residents in 2017 was 35.6 years, hardly changed from 2005. In St. Louis County, the median age crept up during the same period to 40.3 years, while in St. Charles County it jumped by over three years to 38.8 years.

The extent to which St. Louis’s new arrivals may be uprooting existing residents from their neighborhoods is often the subject of fierce debate. A study in April by the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law School noted that in some of St. Louis’s census tracts the college-educated population has doubled since 2000, indicating displacement of poorer residents. Even so, the study noted that St. Louis — like most other cities around the country — still has far more neighborhoods where poverty and neighborhood decline, rather than gentrification, are the main problems.

The number of educated young adults moving to (or choosing to stay in) St. Louis City is encouraging, but there are plenty of other cities they could choose instead — and many of them are doing just that.

In fact, when it comes to all young adults, regardless of education level, St. Louis is not adding raw numbers of them as quickly as peer cities such as Nashville (Figure 4). Pittsburgh, often lumped with St. Louis under variations of the “Rust Belt” descriptor (and now a center for groundbreaking technologies such as autonomous cars), may also be moving ahead.

Local institutions like Cortex win continual praise for keeping St. Louis in the race to attract bright young residents. Even so, the forces driving people back to the city are weaker than in many other metro areas, says Todd Swanstrom, professor of public policy administration at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Swanstrom, who has studied neighborhood trends and housing policy in the city, notes that 74% of jobs in the city’s Central Corridor (which includes Cortex) are held by suburbanites. This indicates the city still has major challenges in attracting and keeping residents.

“We have simultaneous re-urbanization and de-urbanization happening in St. Louis right now. There are pressures for people to move in and to move out, but suburbanization is still the dominant force,” Swanstrom says.

A critical mass of institutions, job opportunities and the talent to fill them exists in some sectors in St. Louis, such as medicine and plant sciences, he adds. But that pales in comparison to the urban economic powerhouses on the east and west coasts.

“In the modern world, a ‘winner take all’ urbanism is taking hold: The bigger you are, the better you do,” Swanstrom says ruefully. “We are falling further behind the Bostons, Seattles and Washingtons of the world.” –McP–

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