Originally published in St. Louis Business Journal
If we’re serious about improving the St. Louis region in any meaningful way, we first have to recognize a fundamental truth: St. Louis doesn’t have a single problem — it has a system of interconnected challenges.
Most of us who care about St. Louis would recognize some version of this list:
- Declining population, particularly among younger residents and working-age adults
- Sluggish economic growth and a declining rank among peer regions
- A hollowing out of the urban core
- Difficulty attracting and retaining talent for businesses
- Barriers to attracting new residents and sustained private investment
- Concentrated disinvestment and high concentrations of poverty and decline
When we talk about moving the region forward, we often treat these challenges as if they exist independently — as if solving one, in isolation, will unlock the rest.
The reality is that none of these issues exists in isolation. Each reinforces the others.
Population loss weakens the tax base. A weaker tax base strains public services and affects schools, safety, and infrastructure. Those conditions influence whether businesses expand, where talent chooses to live, and how the region is perceived — internally and externally.
This is not a collection of challenges. It’s a feedback loop.
That’s why the region’s path forward has to be multi-pronged: many solutions working in concert, not a competition among worthy priorities.
Creating a regional opportunity compact
Here is a big idea St. Louis should seriously consider: a regional Opportunity Compact that treats community transformation not as a social add-on, but as a core strategy to drive economic growth and regional vitality.
By “compact,” we mean a shared, long-term agreement among public, private, philanthropic, and institutional leaders — one that aligns investment, expertise, accountability and execution around a balanced set of reinforcing priorities, including:
- Neighborhood investment and community revitalization
- Workforce development and career pathways tied to living-wage jobs
- Investment in strengthening educational outcomes throughout the region
- Employer commitments to hiring, advancement, and retention
- Small-business development and commercial corridor revitalization
- Access to capital for entrepreneurs and minority-owned businesses
- Strategic marketing and storytelling to reshape the region’s narrative
- Policies and incentives that attract new businesses and talent
- The recruitment of skilled immigrants who are currently priced out of coastal cities
Creating this compact would not replace the many strong efforts already underway. It would align them — reducing fragmentation, attracting additional partners and capital, and multiplying impact far beyond what any single initiative can achieve on its own.
Other regions have shown what this kind of alignment can accomplish.
Detroit offers a powerful example. There, major employers and institutions — including Rocket Mortgage, Ford, General Motors, and JPMorgan Chase — aligned with municipal government and community-based nonprofits around a long-term, place-based strategy. The result was not a single program or pilot, but a coordinated effort spanning housing, workforce, small business, infrastructure, and neighborhood revitalization.
That multipronged, cross-sector collaboration has been a critical ingredient in Detroit’s ongoing turnaround.
St. Louis should pursue a similar approach: identifying key needs across city and county and making long-term commitments that align public, private, philanthropic and institutional investment.
Not one-time grants. Not scattered pilots. But sustained investment, shared goals, and a clear delivery structure built to last beyond election cycles and leadership changes.
A Regional Opportunity Compact should also publish a transparent, shared dashboard of outcomes — such as economic mobility, housing stability, safety, school readiness, employment, small-business growth and neighborhood conditions — so the region can track progress, learn quickly, and hold itself accountable over time.
Community development is a growth strategy
Investing in our under-resourced communities must be part of the overall strategy.
Concentrated disinvestment does not stay contained within neighborhood boundaries. It shows up in workforce participation, talent attraction and retention, business expansion decisions, public costs and the broader narrative we tell — and others repeat — about St. Louis.
We also know what works.
When families have stable housing, safe neighborhoods, access to education and health care, and real pathways to work, outcomes improve — not only for those families, but for employers, municipalities, and the region as a whole.
Bringing more St. Louisans into the economic mainstream strengthens the workforce, expands the tax base, stabilizes neighborhoods and improves the conditions that attract people and private investment. This is why so much of Detroit’s progress has centered on neighborhood-level revitalization.
A decade-long analysis by JPMorgan Chase underscores this point. In “Lessons Learned from 10 Years of Investment in Detroit,” the firm concludes that “investing in our neighbors, neighborhoods, and local businesses is not about charity. It’s about acknowledging the fact that companies cannot outgrow the communities they serve.”
Beyond Housing offers one example of how this kind of integrated, place-based work can be organized and sustained. Our experience shows that progress accelerates when local governments, anchor institutions, businesses and nonprofits align around a shared plan — and that this level of coordination is not only possible, but effective.
Over time, Beyond Housing has helped build a network of corporate, nonprofit and public partners addressing housing, economic development, health, education and pathways to economic mobility — all within a defined geography and a long-term framework.
Replicating and scaling this kind of coordinated, place-based approach across St. Louis City and County — and explicitly aligning it with a broader regional growth strategy — would be mutually reinforcing. Stronger communities fuel regional growth. Regional growth, in turn, creates more opportunities to reinvest in communities.
The opportunity in front of us
St. Louis has spent decades debating which problem to fix first. That debate has cost us time — and momentum.
If we want a stronger economy, a more competitive workforce, and a region people choose with confidence, we have to stop operating in silos and start thinking — and acting — at the scale of the challenge.
The question isn’t whether St. Louis can do this.
The question is whether we are ready to commit, coordinate, and stay the course long enough for progress to compound.
That is the opportunity in front of us.
