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St. Louis never developed heavy rail public transportation for the city itself the way other cities did, such as Chicago's L system. I believe that's what was being referred to.
It was, but as I noted upthread, St. Louis did draw up a plan for rail transit improvements that would ultimately have produced a heavy rapid transit system right around the time Pittsburgh did the same thing.
While we're on this subject, since it's relevant to this thread, Cincinnati actually started to build a subway in the late 1920s but pulled the plug on the project on the eve of the 1929 stock market crash after most of its route had been graded and the downtown subway tunnel completed. That, IMO, was a tragedy. One of the city's Interstates was routed over the above-ground portion of the never-completed line.
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Chicago historically has been able to annex, albeit nowhere near as much as many sunbelt cities and certainly not as recently. St. Louis, meanwhile, has had the same political boundaries since the 19th century.
But that's not what dethroned St. Louis. What did it were two decisions: Chicago to go all in on the railroads and St. Louis to shun the railroads in favor of river transportation until it was far too late. St. Louis would have been able to give Chicago a run for it had it thrown all in on the rails but it didn't.
And to add insult to injury, Kansas City grew into a bigger rail center than St. Louis, ranking second only to Chicago as a rail hub.
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When MetroLink opened in the 1990s it almost entirely utilized existing right of ways, especially in downtown. It wasn't zero as much as transforming the existing right of ways to work for light rail transit.
True. But those were mainline railroad rights-of-way. Bi-State was fortunate they were in place, for they've given St. Louis the kind of mass transit I'd love to see in Kansas City but certainly never will before I die, but the distinction I was trying to make was that Pittsburgh never completely got rid of its trolleys and could thus tie them into the downtown subway when they finally got around to building it while St. Louis had no such existing routes it could tie into MetroLink once they finally decided to build it.
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See my above comment about the decline in the urban core. KCMO is more of a story of growing suburban sprawl with a semi-rusty city at its core that benefitted from annexation.
It's sort of an odd hybrid to be perfectly honest.
I found the emptying-out of the old core Black neighborhood sad when I returned to KC in 2014. And you're right — what happened there is exactly like what happened on St. Louis' north side.
KC's population in 1950 was 456,622, and at that time, the only annexation it had completed was incorporating the city of Marlborough (~7,800) on its southern border into the city in 1944. I've noted that were the city still limited to its pre-1944 boundaries, we would be talking about a city of 250,000 to 300,000 now quite likely.
But that annexation also made KC "the first great city of the West" in the political sense too, for most of the Western cities have been (were, in several cases now) able to annex their future growth. (Residents of the areas around Denver and Los Angeles managed to put the brakes on those cities' physical expansion.)
Not sure I'd call Kansas City a "decline" city in the same way most of these rust belt cities are. Kansas City is definitely more a sunbelt city than a rust belt city.
I disagree with this for the following reason:
Kansas City 1950: 456,622 - 80.2 sq mi
Kansas City 1970: 507,087 - 316.3 sq mi
Kansas City 2019: 495,327 - 314.95 sq mi
Kansas City hid its true decline by annexing its inner ring and taking its fleeing tax base back. It's very evident that Kansas City hit its urban peak in 1950 like all of these other cities. Between 1950 and 1970 it quadrupled in land area. The fact that it doesn't even have 40k more people from when it was one quarter the footprint it is now is quite telling. I agree that it does appear to be doing better than these other cities at a metro level, but as for being more sunbelt I would say that it's a bit of a fraud in that regard.
If these other cities had been able to annex their inner rings the way KC did, their stories over the last 60 years would be very different, and this thread likely wouldn't exist.
Try as I might, I can't wrap my head around the meaning of "full potential" when it comes to these cities. On one hand, I could say that each has already met its full potential. On the other hand we cannot predict how future changes in transportation, climate, and demographics will impact which of these cities will again grow in relative importance of the rest of the US. I lean more toward the former, at least for the next 50-100 years, with at least stability being the norm rather than continued decline. Stable is not a bad thing.
Last edited by RocketSci; 07-02-2020 at 06:28 AM..
Kansas City 1950: 456,622 - 80.2 sq mi
Kansas City 1970: 507,087 - 316.3 sq mi
Kansas City 2019: 495,327 - 314.95 sq mi
Kansas City hid its true decline by annexing its inner ring and taking its fleeing tax base back. It's very evident that Kansas City hit its urban peak in 1950 like all of these other cities. Between 1950 and 1970 it quadrupled in land area. The fact that it doesn't even have 40k more people from when it was one quarter the footprint it is now is quite telling. I agree that it does appear to be doing better than these other cities at a metro level, but as for being more sunbelt I would say that it's a bit of a fraud in that regard.
If these other cities had been able to annex their inner rings the way KC did, their stories over the last 60 years would be very different, and this thread likely wouldn't exist.
KC didn't annex just its "inner ring." It annexed its future suburbs for several decades to come on the Missouri side, or at least those that had not yet incorporated as separate cities (note how the city limits almost completely surround Raytown and do completely surround Gladstone and the Oaks Villages).
In 1970, I would say that at least half of those 231.1 square miles the city had annexed since 1950 were still planted in corn and soybeans, including about 2/3 of the territory annexed north of the Missouri River.
The Northland has exploded since then, and the city's boulevard system has even been expanded into it, in contrast to the territory annexed south of Bannister Road (95th Street).
If not for the state line, it might have become one of those "cities without suburbs" David Rusk says do better on most metrics of governance and economic growth.
Kansas City is doing great, so I don't understand that option. I wouldn't be surprised if CSA passes 3 million in 20 years. In fact, it surpassing Saint Louis is a near certainty before 2050 in my opinion.
I would be extremely surprised if KC passed 3M in its CSA in 20 years. What are you basing that on?
If you extrapolate KC's average growth rate from the last 9 years, over the next 20, you don't reach 2.9M. Plus, as it is with most metro growth, growth rates tend to decrease as the baseline population gets larger. Of course, there could be some spike in interest in the city caused by one thing or another, or by being "discovered" as the next "it' city.
That said, KC sure feels like a good answer to the question posed by the OP. During the legacy city heyday (1900-1950), it was never really much more than half the size of St. Louis.
I would be extremely surprised if KC passed 3M in its CSA in 20 years. What are you basing that on?
If you extrapolate KC's average growth rate from the last 9 years, over the next 20, you don't reach 2.9M. Plus, as it is with most metro growth, growth rates tend to decrease as the baseline population gets larger. Of course, there could be some spike in interest in the city caused by one thing or another, or by being "discovered" as the next "it' city.
That said, KC sure feels like a good answer to the question posed by the OP. During the legacy city heyday (1900-1950), it was never really much more than half the size of St. Louis.
KC CSA is at 2,501,151 and has grown by 158,169 over 9 years, 3 months (or +1,425 per month).
1,425 per month x 252 months (July 2019-July 2040) = 359,100
So at baseline, KC will have 2,860,251.
Considering that mid-size interior cities have been increasing in growth though as the decade has gone by (2019 being the exception due to low immigration), not just KC but Omaha, OKC, Des Moines, etc. then all KC would need is increase its average annual growth by 6,655 people, which is not just eminently doable, but I'd say closer to the truth than assuming it stays at current growth.
And Kansas City is definitely in the middle of an expanding renaissance. It just clipped 500,000 in the city proper this year!
Lastly, I didn't say it would happen for sure. I said I wouldn't be surprised. Is it really that surprising that a city that's growing 17,000 a year go to 23,000 a year in a world of global warming and legacy cities lacking affordability?
St. Louis, Cleveland and Detroit would be much better cities today if they weren't surrounded by suburbs on 3 sides and a Great Lake or Big River on the other. Those suburbs around all those towns should have been annexed into their core city way back in the day. Most of those suburbs owe their very existence to their core city. The ones who had the money, left the city for the suburbs leaving the city with a high population of residents of mostly low income people who require social services and government assistence and no one to pay for it.
Why didn't St Louis, Cleveland and Detroit annex and expand their city like Indianapolis, Columbus, Houston, Jacksonville, Nashville, Charlotte, Louisville and Oaklahoma City have been able to? Indianapolis was a Rust Belt City but it seems to be doing pretty good as one of the fastest growing big cities in the Midwest.
St Louis had such a promising first half of the 20th century, and a massive city population in 1950 of 856,000.
Flash forward to 2020, and St Louis is struggling with crime, continued population decimation, and urban blight. With its population just below 300,000 today, St Louis is a shell of what it was 70 years ago.
Such huge potential, but it has fallen far from what it could be.
Kansas City 1950: 456,622 - 80.2 sq mi
Kansas City 1970: 507,087 - 316.3 sq mi
Kansas City 2019: 495,327 - 314.95 sq mi
Kansas City hid its true decline by annexing its inner ring and taking its fleeing tax base back. It's very evident that Kansas City hit its urban peak in 1950 like all of these other cities. Between 1950 and 1970 it quadrupled in land area. The fact that it doesn't even have 40k more people from when it was one quarter the footprint it is now is quite telling. I agree that it does appear to be doing better than these other cities at a metro level, but as for being more sunbelt I would say that it's a bit of a fraud in that regard.
If these other cities had been able to annex their inner rings the way KC did, their stories over the last 60 years would be very different, and this thread likely wouldn't exist.
Land expansion is one of the secrets of success for many fast growing Sunbelt cities as they grew in the mid/late 20th Century boom years through new suburbanization, but Kansas City is one of the few examples that I can think of that leveraged it as a mechanism to stop the bleeding. Perhaps Louisville is another such example? It bled for decades following its peak in 1960 until it consolidated and bumped up its population in the early 2000s through consolidation. Maybe Nashville is an example, though it's sort of a hybrid that's living somewhere between a legacy city and a Sunbelt boom city IMO.
It's pretty stunning that KC grew 4-fold in land area, but lethargically grew in population over 20 years. I assume that many of those 50,000+ residents in the annexed areas were already residing on that land area, and don't represent actual growth.
FWIW, and similar to its city limits, KC's CSA is also enormous in land area relative to its population. I'd love to see a resource that shows what Census population was back to 1900 (and each subsequent decade) for the current land areas associated with our current MSAs and CSAs. I bet that data would tell a fascinating story.
St Louis had such a promising first half of the 20th century, and a massive city population in 1950 of 856,000.
Flash forward to 2020, and St Louis is struggling with crime, continued population decimation, and urban blight. With its population just below 300,000 today, St Louis is a shell of what it was 70 years ago.
Such huge potential, but it has fallen far from what it could be.
I feel that the MO side of STL metro reached its full potential, just earlier than what is typical for a legacy city. After all, it had TWO MLB teams during that sport's heyday like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston (NYC of course had three). It had a big World's Fair in 1904, and it still had a nice central location between points east, west, and south regarding trade. It was one of 12 cities chosen by the Fed over a century ago with a central Fed Bank branch that it holds to this day. It had a nationally renown arts/culture scene with jazz, ragtime, blues, as well as fine arts. It was unfortunate in that it was perhaps the first major city to suffer from the affects of redlining, blockbusting, and white flight, basically as early as the 1930s when the inner suburbs of St. Louis County were still streetcar-based. The IL side, not so much. The opening of the Eads Bridge was sort of its Brooklyn Bridge moment, but even at its peak, downtown ESL was nothing more than a small retail center, and this side never really got the typical big city benefits like employment, and what industry it had has never been replaced.
Its cities like Birmingham that never quite made it since that had the double whammy of segregation, outflow to Atlanta, deindustrialization, and a deep red state that held it back. It didn't decline as much in the city limits as others listed here, but it certainly was there. That had all the makings of a major city, but for now, will remain a pretty stagnant midsized one. Richmond, VA or Winston-Salem, NC suffered this to a lesser degree as well due to the decline of tobacco and in W-S case, textiles, in addition to Jim Crow laws forcing a lot of northern-based companies reducing their investment in those cities. Unlike St. Louis, which in addition was more liberal with segregation laws than those aforementioned cities, they never had the true big city amenities like major league teams, luxury retail, a nationally famous cultural scene, or massive public events. At least the later two have turned around and are on a pace of steady growth nowadays. And although those cities are not in the traditional Rust Belt and didn't decline as much before bouncing back, they're still "legacy" cities in many respects, with a significant pre-war urban footprint in all of those cities.
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