“STAY HOME ST LOUIS” the downtown traffic signs read during the pandemic. The locals obeyed then. And they are still staying out of downtown St. Louis today.
“The office district is empty,” the Wall Street Journal recently reported, “with boarded up towers, copper thieves and failing retail — even the Panera outlet shut down. The city is desperately trying to reverse the ‘doom loop.”
Yet another downtown has fallen in the post-COVID, post George Floyd era.
While America’s largest metropolises are persisting in reduced states, the middle tier of cities is hollowing out.
The stay-at-home orders in Spring of 2020 temporarily emptied out cities like St. Louis. After that, capacity limits, mask mandates, and social-distancing orders kept the downtown populations small. All the time, employees got used to working from home, and employers started questioning the value of their office space.
Then George Floyd was killed by a policeman in Minneapolis, and all hell broke loose.
In St. Louis, protestors blocked the highway. One protestor was dragged to death accidentally when a FedEx deliveryman tried to slowly make his way past a crowd blocking the road.
Rioters shot four police on June 1, and amid looting and arson, criminals shot and killed a retired police officer named David Dorn.
In the nearly four years since then, the Lou’s business district has been spinning in a Doom Loop. Fewer workers means more vagrants, which means more petty crime, which means fewer shoppers and diners, which means closed businesses, which means even fewer workers and diners and shoppers, and so on.
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In New York City (outside of the subway), there was no doom loop — there was a COVID/Floyd downturn and then a comeback. In Chicago, businesses and employers are trying to hang on, and crime is falling from its recent peaks.
But in smaller cities like St. Louis, there is less resilience. The decay marches on.
