Monthly Memos

The Road To East St. Louis

Charles I. Mundale
Executive Director of MCCR

January 1994

"East St. Louis is where cities go to die." This is the apocalyptic vision of urban expert David Rusk, who came to town at the height of the Christmas shopping season to poke around in the statistical underbrush beneath the Twin Cities' glittering seasonal canopy of bright lights and warm, fuzzy media features. Mr. Rusk has been going through the past five censuses with a fine-tooth comb. The statistics have taught him 24 "lessons" about urban development, all of which are reported in his recently published Cities without Suburbs, but he condenses his new knowledge into a few disturbing images:

• Central city trapped inside a ring of growing suburbs.

• City neighborhoods increasingly a catch basin for poor Blacks and Hispanics.

• Flight of middle-class families of all colors.

• City population dropping steadily.

• Income gap between city residents and suburbanites steadily widening.

• City government unable to tap suburban economic growth and increasingly reliant on federal and state aid.

• Suburbs fragmented into multiple towns, small cities and mini school systems.

If that doesn't sound like the Twin Cities area to you, you haven't been paying attention.

In contrast to such "inelastic" cities, Mr. Rusk found a number of metropolitan areas in which an "elastic" central city has been able to expand, either by annexation, consolidation, filling in substantial internal space or -- all of the above. Where this has happened both central city and suburbs have fared better economically.

Lesson number 25? Indeed.

In making his comparisons, Mr. Rusk has identified a Point of No Return. When the central city has lost 20 percent of its peak population, when its population is 30 percent minorities, and when personal income in the city has dropped below 70 percent of the average in the suburbs, it's at the Point of No Return. No city with those numbers has ever recovered, and there are now 37 American cities in that tragic group, with East St. Louis -- no longer able even to collect its own garbage -- at the bottom.

The Twin Cities are clearly not East St. Louis. But Minneapolis has lost nearly 30 percent of its peak population and slipped from 91 percent of average income in the suburbs in 1980 to 84 percent in 1990. St. Paul's percentage of population loss is still only 13 percent, but its income figures slid from 83 to 78 percent during the 80's. Minority percentages are 21 in Minneapolis, 19 in St. Paul, and heading upward in both cities. And both cities have more than twice their share of the area's poverty.

On the last point, Mr. Rusk is emphatic: "Concentrated poverty kills cities."

No single institution can halt the slide. As Mr. Rusk put it to a group of business leaders brought together in December by MCCR and the St. Paul Foundation, cities and suburbs will have to act together, and for that to happen business leadership will be critical.

"Business," Mr. Rusk pointed out, "is the only institution that looks on the area as a single unit -- a single labor market, a single market for products and services." That perspective is urgently needed.

We are still a long way from East St. Louis, but we're on the road, and the Point of No Return is on the not-so-distant horizon. We'd better find an exit. Soon!

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