St. Louis harder hit by the "doom loop" that's crashing most big cities. Why?

Hey citizen, are you loving this booming economy or what?  Inflation down to a barely-noticeable 3.5%--well, that's if we don't calculate inflation the way the government did for decades.  But we're sure the new method is just as accurate, right?

And look at all the cities that are BOOMING!  Philly, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, L.A.--all going great guns!

Wait, was that an unfortunate metaphor?  Oh well...  Unfortunately one big Democrat-run city hasn't yet been kissed by the blessing of bidenomics.

Wait, did that word "blessing" offend anyone?  It's so hard to know when something you say or write will get the attention of the Department of Speech monitors, right?  Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Anyway, amid all this joyous optimism as we eagerly read the inspiring headlines there's this one tiny cloud on the horizon, as the Wall Street Journal explains (edited):

The Real Estate Nightmare Unfolding in Downtown St. Louis

Sub-head: Downtown is empty, with boarded up towers, copper thieves and failing retail.  Desperately trying to reverse the ‘doom loop.’

For a century the heart of downtown St. Louis was the Railway Exchange Building--an ornate 21-story office building.  Had an entire department store on its lower floors.

Today the entire building is empty, its windows boarded up.  The only visitors are thieves who steal copper plumbing and wiring.  Signs tell the rare visitor to “park in well-lit areas.”

Three blocks away is the city’s largest office building—the 44-story AT&T Tower.  It was built in 1986 and has the most floor space of any building in the state.  In 2006 AT&T sold it to a real estate investment firm for $205 million and leased back the space it needed.

In 2017 AT&T left the building, and it's been vacant since then.  With no lease income, the real estate investment firm defaulted on the loan and the bank foreclosed.  In 2022 the building was sold again, this time for just $4 million.  So in just 16 years the value of the tallest building in the state dropped by 98 percent.  How?  Why?

Empty offices, shops and restaurants closed,  abandoned buildings multiply. Normal people find boarded-up buildings depressing and empty sidewalks scary, so they stop coming downtown.

Most adults quickly recognize this as the familiar "vicious circle," and once those hit there are two big unknowns: First, how long before everything turns around?  And second: How much worse will it get before that happens?

Is this the future for America’s downtowns?

Nah, duh WSJ jus' threw in a scary line ta add drama!  St. Louis jus' hasn't gotten the full benefit of duh faabulous biden recovery, eh?  Maybe biden's very well-spoken Transportation Secretary should give St. Louis $100 billion for a high-speed rail line to...um...Detroit!

Downtown is so empty that there isn’t even a McDonald’s. Car break-ins are common.

Wow, just like San Francisco and Oakland, eh?

When the pandemic arrived in 2020 and millions of employees got used to working from home, pundits predicted the demise of big coastal cities. But office districts in New York, Miami and Boston have bounced back better than skeptics thought.  Businesses are even starting to return to San Francisco.

That claim will come as a big surprise to anyone who knows fuck-all about that city.  But the WSJ loves the biden regime, so we need to throw in some vague, unverifiable success stories here.

It’s the cities in the flyover states that are suffering most.  Six of the 10 downtowns with the biggest drop in foot traffic between 2019 and mid-2023 are in the Midwest, according to one study.

As in other Midwestern cities, the St. Louis office district has suffered a slow demise for decades. Population loss, competition from newer offices in the suburbs and failed urban planning left behind a glut of empty, scary buildings.

Wait...what?  "Failed urban planning"?  How can government planners fail?  They've got so many brilliant entrepreneurs, eh?

The district’s downward spiral worsened when the department store in the Railway Exchange Building—by then a Macy’s—closed eleven years ago amid a wave of department-store closures in downtowns across the country. Not long after, offices in the building—the city’s second biggest office building in the city—began to empty.
 
Four years later AT&T moved out of the massive 44-story building that carried its name.  Immediately, nearby shops and restaurants had fewer customers, so they closed or moved.

Reversing the doom loop spiral isn’t easy once decay has set in.

You don't say.  SO...any ideas to reverse the "doom loop"?  Sure!  The folks running the city just put a fresh coat of paint on everything, plant landscaping, and...

To revive its downtown the city is adding landscaping, bike lanes and traffic barriers.  A business and civic organization is paying amateur musicians to play on street corners.  The "chief downtown officer" of the group says the goal “is to put more people on the street doing positive things.”

Sure, cuz the first thing corporate planners look for when deciding where to build or lease is "Does the city pay amateur musicians to play on the streetcorners," right?

Recently the "chief downtown officer's" organization and the St. Louis Development Corporation launched a program to give up to $50,000 in taxpayer dollars to retailers that move downtown.  That cash was to help the business pay for remodeling. The program also plans to give cash to people who open sidewalk cafes and pop-up shops.

Interesting.  "Cut taxes and fees?  Nah, we needs dat cash.  "Give money to pipo we like?" "What a great idea!"  Am I the only one skeptical of this "revitalization plan"?

The city wants to encourage developers to add hundreds of apartments by converting empty office buildings.  But such projects are expensive, and high interest rates haven’t helped.
 
For example, take the Chemical Building, a 128-year-old former office building a block from the Railway Exchange. Three times between 2006 and 2017 different investors bought the building with plans to turn it into apartments.  None actually built any.  The building now has a new owner who wants to turn it into a hotel.

The real estate investment firm that bought the Railway Exchange building in 2017 announced grand plans to redevelop it into apartments and retail.  But few shops and restaurants are left to attract future tenants, and the firm eventually defaulted on the mortgage.  Last year the city condemned the building.

Fifteen years of copper thieves have also made any remodel a lot more costly.  Thieves rip through all the interior walls to steal the copper pipes.  Now developers are claiming it's too expensive to convert the buildings without...subsidies.

Think the city pols will give huge subsidies to affable brothers-in-law?  Let's see...did all Dem cities have taxpayers build faaabulous stadiums for their pro-football team?  Why yes, they did.

But big money is surely on the way, in the form of a billion taxpayer dollars from the biden regime.  See, three months after biden was installed St. Louis elected a black female as mayor, and the city is 44% black, so biden's handlers are surely working on a big gift, which will surely fix the problem.

Does anyone really think a billion dollars will fix St. Louis?  Well Democrats probably do.  And if biden's handlers would have cut the HUGE giveaway to students who hadn't paid anything on their college loans by just a billion or so, the regime would have been able to siphon that billion to St. Louis (not that would do any good).

But biden's handlers won't do that...because he knows the blacks in St. Louis will always vote Democrat, so the Party doesn't need to bribe 'em.  By contrast, the Democrats need to motivate tens of millions of student borrowers to vote Democrat.  And a gift of $20,000 apiece--possibly way more--will do that, eh?

Source
 
https://archive.is/AzOdw#selection-3541.1-3700.1