The following op-ed is an edited version of Hank Webber’s keynote address at the Community Builders Network Annual Awards Reception on March 19, 2015.
By Hank Webber
Hank Webber is Executive Vice Chancellor for Administration and Professor of Practice at Washington University in St. Louis. His career has focused on community development, universities and cities.
My topic tonight is community and economic development in St. Louis: what we have achieved and what we must do to achieve even more.
I want to begin with a story. Seven years ago my wife Christine Jacobs and I announced to our friends and colleagues that we were leaving Chicago and moving to St. Louis. When we said that I was joining Washington University in a senior leadership position, most people were very supportive. When we said we were moving to St. Louis they thought we were a bit crazy.
Our friends were wrong. Chris and I love living in St. Louis. We love living in the Central West End, walking down Euclid on a cold winter night, stopping in for an informal dinner. We love running and walking in Forest Park. We love the Tower Grove Farmers Market, watching adults doing yoga and the little kids playing in the fountain, and listening to the often not very good bands in the background. We love the fact that you can eat outdoors in St. Louis in months other than July and August.
It is a delight to live in St. Louis. And much of the reason for that delight is the work of the community development professionals and community leaders who have helped to rebuild urban neighborhoods, invested in critical community initiatives and revived the St. Louis economy. Thank you.
But for all of our many successes there are also challenges. Some of those challenges are long-standing. They are the challenges of the transition away from a manufacturing economy: the challenges of reviving neighborhoods whose economic base has been lost. This year however, we faced a new and potentially devastating challenge when on August 9, 2014, a date that many of us will remember for the rest of our lives, Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson. Denny Coleman, the CEO of the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership, noted that in the first 52 days after Michael Brown’s death there were 100 billion media impressions of St. Louis. Most of those impressions of St. Louis, probably 98% of them, were very negative. I spent late August in Copenhagen, Berlin, and Amsterdam. St. Louis led the news in each city almost every day.
The question for every citizen of St. Louis and for every community leader is “What are we going to do in the wake of Ferguson?” Do we allow St. Louis to become an international symbol of the divides of race and class? Will we become to the next decades what Selma has been to the last fifty years? Or is this the time to do what we’ve done well in the past, but with the foot on the accelerator, with a new dedication to action. Are we going to build off the recent successes of CORTEX and T Rex and build a new economy for the twenty-first century? Are we going to extend the success we have had in revitalizing the Central West End, Botanical Heights, Forest Park Southeast and Soulard to fifteen more neighborhoods in the next ten years, including many of the neighborhoods north of Delmar? Are we going to face our Achilles heel, which is race?
That’s the choice we have to make. It’s a choice that New Orleans had to make after Hurricane Katrina. To me, and I expect to you, there’s only one acceptable answer. To go backward is to condemn our children and our grandchildren to a St. Louis that is not a place they want to live.
From my point of view the only option is to put the foot on the gas. And we will only succeed at that if we do it together. Community and economic development are team sports. You can’t succeed as an individual superstar. The deal that brought IKEA not to Chesterfield, not to O’Fallon, but to the City of St. Louis took two years. Success required the efforts of probably 20 people, all of whom were necessary and none of whom were sufficient in and of themselves. Almost everything that matters has that characteristic—success requires big diverse teams of people dedicated to working together.
So if we are going to put our foot on the gas, and if Ferguson becomes not a step toward decline, but a moment of positive transformation—if it becomes our Katrina—then what should we do? I offer three simple propositions.
First, we need to build a stronger and more collaborative community development system. In St. Louis, we work together predominantly through personal relationships. We have relatively few institutions that bring us together. We have a lot of great CDCs in town, but they tend to work independently. The Community Builders Network has produced a useful task force report on strengthening St. Louis neighborhoods. It makes a set of important points about how to build a community development system; about the need to focus on both the most distressed neighborhoods and middle neighborhoods; about the need to build capacity; and about the importance of collaboration in order to make progress.
Second, community development is not just about housing and retail development and parks, but it’s also about schools and safety. If we want to attract families to neighborhoods we must offer high quality school options and neighborhoods that people feel safe walking in. On the school side we are making progress, but we have a long way to go.
Finally, attitude matters. History is not destiny. The past is not the future. The first time Chris and I ever visited Seattle, which was in the early 1980s, there was a big billboard that said, “Will the last person that leaves Seattle turn out the lights?” Boeing was downsizing dramatically, just as McDonnell Douglas did in St. Louis. The future of Seattle was unclear. Now Seattle is one of the high tech hubs of the world. Twenty years ago everyone wanted to leave Brooklyn. Now Brooklyn is where our children want to live. Cities can transform themselves.
All cities go through cycles. Sometimes those cycles are longer than we would like, but after cities decline, they can experience tremendous rebirth. I have absolute confidence that by working together the 2020s can be the greatest decade in St. Louis’ history.
Articles in “From the Field” represent the opinions of the author only and do not represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis or the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
