Missing from the St. Louis merger story: Clayton

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The WSJ reports,

A group of business leaders with bipartisan political backing see a common issue behind the problems—the region’s multitude of local governments.

They are pushing a plan to explore the reunification of the city and county to make the region of 1.3 million people more efficient and economically competitive.

My first thought was, “This is a hostile takeover of Clayton,” but the story takes a different focus. For example, it quotes the mayor of Olivette, which is where I lived until 6th grade, on the street with the white-trash folks that I have mentioned before. Of course, in other streets not far away, there were respectable professionals, and I became friends with their children when I started going to elementary school (while keeping the friends from my street).

Back to Clayton. That is where we moved when I started 7th grade. Super-affluent. I was just back there visiting last week, and it is sort of like Bethesda in Maryland or Brookline in Massachusetts or Menlo Park in northern California or Beverly Hills in southern California.

I am sure that all of the other municipalities, including the city of St. Louis, would love to get their hands on more of Clayton’s wealth. I am guessing that Clayton’s wealthy are not so keen on it. But a Ctrl-F for “Clayton” in the story comes up empty, so I do not know.

6 thoughts on “Missing from the St. Louis merger story: Clayton”

  1. There have been quite a few other city-county consolidations, and the transitions I’ve seen up close have not produced any impressive results. One thing that has happened in several Kansas cases is that the merger does not go all the way to completion, and some municipalities are left with some degree of independence. It’s hard to know how much difference that made for life in the “Clayton equivalent” neighborhoods, but my impression is not much except for maybe more or less local geographic wealth redistribution (i.e., ‘grabbing’). So I’m guessing there’s no good efficiency case to capture Clayton against its will.

    However, if I’m right that taxes and real estate prices are both Neo-Ricardian sectors competiting in a “floating” sense for the same pool of income, then higher taxes just lead to lower prices, but with perhaps no effect on overall standard of living. If the taxes were spent locally and wisely, there’s even a case for an overall improvement, at the cost of the windfall gains of incumbent owners. But since that kind of spending is unlikely, don’t tell the progressives, because they’ll run the wrong way with the argument.

  2. I find the casual use of “white trash” in this post interesting. I don’t think equivalently disparaging terms would be used about other racial or ethnic groups.

    If what was meant was “white underclass,” why not say that?

  3. This battle seems to be at the heart of economic battle of America:

    1) Business wants a lot of skilled labor supply in cheap areas. However:

    a) Expensive areas tend to have high taxes and strong teacher unions while being a good place to live where skilled people want to live. (Note all the new hires in Socal schools right now are Hispanic-Americans and teachers from the Mid-West.)
    b) Cheap areas are not great places to live and pay low teacher salaries so skilled labor does not want to live there.

    I am not sure how you fix this reality.

  4. At the heart of a lot of our cities seems to be a divide between a bad area run by minorities and a good area run by whites/asians. Sometimes its different sections within the city (Boston) and sometimes its a city/county split (Baltimore). This division is inefficient (why should the productive people have to live away from where they work and commute in), but if we ever lose the ability to “exit” from bad municipalities we are sunk. It’s the only thing keeping them remotely honest. One should fear when state governments start to look like city governments, there will be nowhere left to run.

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