DATE: Thursday, April 10, 1997              TAG: 9704100005

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B15  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: OPINION 

SOURCE: Patrick Lackey

                                            LENGTH:   93 lines

TO WATCH A REGION REALLY SQUABBLE, MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, LOUIE

Too often, Hampton Roadies have inferiority complexes.

We try to sell Hampton Roads to others as a metropolitan unit of 1.5 million citizens, one worthy of a big-league team. But we often think of it, ourselves, as merely a collection of medium-sized cities that squabble over water, light rail, sports arenas, waste recycling or whatever.

On the theory that an ugly person is happier after finding somebody uglier and that a slow runner feels better after finding somebody slower, I sought a region less regional than Hampton Roads.

I found St. Louis.

The 12-county, two-state metropolitan region known as Greater St. Louis is the poster child for white flight, wasteful urban sprawl and competing small governments. It is the patron saint of uncooperative spirits.

White flight played a key role in the city's shrinkage from 856,796 in 1950 to an estimated 356,000 today. More people fled St. Louis than live in Virginia Beach. Housing in Greater St. Louis remains highly segregated by race.

Talk about urban sprawl, over four decades the amount of developed land there has increased 10 times faster than the population. That kind of elbowing out costs a fortune in sewer lines, roads, schools and other infrastructure. Greater St. Louis is a region attempting to flee itself. The city is marked by abandoned buildings and vacant lots.

You want to hear about fractured government? Greater St. Louis has separate organizations attempting to recruit business to 44 different areas in the region. That's right: 44 competing economic-development groups, though they recently pledged not to poach from each other. Greater St. Louis has 771 units of government, including 90 municipalities, most small, in St. Louis County alone.

Do they all get along? Of course not. Because Greater St. Louis speaks to the state legislators with hundreds of competing voices, practically in tongues, the region lacks the clout it deserves, given that it contains 36 percent of Missouri's population and produces 52 percent of the state's business payroll. A region that ought to be a 12-ton gorilla subdivides itself into dozens of howler monkeys.

Most of the numbers in this column, by the way, are taken from a recent report on Greater St. Louis by urban experts Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson. For a fee, they spend months in a region, talk to anybody who might know something, and compile what's called a Peirce Report on the state of the area.

Greater St. Louis is the most-distressed of the 14 metropolitan regions they have reported on. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch partly funded the report and ran it throughout the second week of March.

Because Greater St. Louis has long lacked unity, a golden opportunity was blown in the mid-'70s. There was movement toward building a regional airport in the Illinois part of the region, but two key airport supporters were defeated in elections. Such an airport, built comparatively cheaply 20 years ago, might have come to rival Chicago's O'Hare as a national hub.

St. Louis probably peaked in world renown in 1904, when it hosted the Olympics and a seven-month national exposition that inspired the song that goes, ``Meet me in St. Louis, Louie, meet met at the fair.'' While Hampton Roads prepares to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the 1607 founding of Jamestown, St. Louis makes ready to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the exposition and Olympics. Who knows how small St. Louis will be by 2004? It lost 7.2 percent of its population just from 1990 to 1995.

Greater St. Louis has 2.5 million people, and the city is ideally situated at the confluence of the nation's two greatest rivers, the Mississippi and the Missouri. In this half of the century, few major cities have done less with more than St. Louis.

Many of its business leaders say the entire region would be better off if its parts pursued shared goals. A strategy statement by the Greater St. Louis Economic Development Council declares:

``We're all in this together, `one for all and all for one.' The region is our economic lifeboat, and our competitiveness as an overall region is much more important to our future than interjurisdictional rivalry within the region. Simply moving economic resources around within the region is a wasteful `zero sum game' that impedes effective competition and real economic growth.''

But as they say, talk is cheap. And even when business leaders reach agreement, they still must cope with a clutter of jealous governments.

``Like a runner told he has to run his race in several feet of water,'' says the Peirce Report, ``any civic actor with an ambitious agenda feels like he's fighting through layers of resistance and reluctance.''

One regional success story in Greater St. Louis was the completion in 1993 of the 18-stop MetroLink light-rail system from East St. Louis 18 miles west into St. Louis County. It has attracted twice the ridership predicted, in a region not thickly populated. Money is being sought to lengthen the line.

St. Louis, of course, has advantages over Hampton Roads. It has 1 million more people. Its name can be found on national maps and sports pages. More large companies are located there.

On balance, however, Hampton Roads has fewer strikes against it as a unit than does Greater St. Louis. If two-state, 12-county Greater St. Louis qualifies as a metropolitan unit, without question so does Hampton Roads.

By comparison, we're cohesive. MEMO: Mr. Lackey is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot.

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