On Tuesday afternoon, a who’s who of civic leaders, big donors and neighborhood organizers packed into the Northside Movement Center to grapple with a blunt question: can St. Louis really follow Detroit’s comeback script, or is that wishful thinking? The panel walked through just how steep the climb would be and what kind of coordinated push it would take, with public agencies, anchor institutions and philanthropies all pulling in the same direction.
As reported by St. Louis Public Radio, the numbers came fast and grim. The city is staring at an estimated 24,000 vacant parcels and more than 9,000 empty buildings. Mayor Cara Spencer told the crowd that “driving through north St. Louis is heartbreaking” and admitted she sometimes feels she is falling behind in dealing with vacant properties. Kelvin Adams pointed out that the region also has a sprawling nonprofit scene, roughly 23,000 organizations in all, which signals both serious capacity and some serious fragmentation.
Rip Rapson of the Kresge Foundation urged business, government and philanthropic leaders to “band together toward unified goals,” warning that “no single sector can pull off a city turnaround alone,” according to St. Louis Public Radio. The discussion, hosted by the St. Louis Development Corporation with support from the McDonnell Foundation and the St. Louis Community Foundation, was essentially a live stress test of Detroit’s playbook and how much of it could realistically be copied here. Over and over, organizers stressed that alignment, not just piles of money, is the real heavy lift ahead.
How Detroit Built Its Comeback
Detroit’s rebound started with a brutal reset. The city filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy in 2013 with roughly $18 billion in liabilities, a process that cleared the way for coordination among government, foundations and private investors, according to Wikipedia. From there, foundations like Kresge pumped programmatic grants and social investments into parks, public markets and neighborhood efforts, and Kresge details that long-running, place-based strategy in its Detroit program.
Those moves, including investments in the RiverWalk and Eastern Market and the so-called “grand bargain” that helped stabilize pensions while protecting the Detroit Institute of Arts, are the case studies St. Louis leaders were dissecting on Tuesday. The question was not whether they worked in Detroit, but which parts of that formula have any hope of translating across the Mississippi.
St. Louis's Different Starting Line
St. Louis lives with similar levels of blight but plays under a different set of rules, with more fractured politics and smaller capital flows. The city’s web of municipal and regional entities makes the kind of centralized push Detroit pulled off a lot tougher to replicate. Still, local organizers say there are new strengths to build from. The Northside Movement Center, which opened earlier this year, now serves as a hub for organizing and legal services, a sign that neighborhood capacity is quietly growing.
The center’s debut was covered in detail when a new nerve center on Goodfellow brought co-working space, clinics and other services into north St. Louis. It is the kind of neighborhood anchor that could become a key node if big money and public policy ever line up behind a shared strategy.
What It Would Take Here
Panelists sketched out a few concrete steps that, taken together, might actually move the needle. One idea was to steer philanthropic dollars toward a handful of priority neighborhood “nodes” instead of scattering small grants across the map. Another was to lean on land bank tools to get properties legally cleaned up and market ready, so they can be transferred or developed without years of red tape.
They also argued that demolition should be paired with targeted rehabilitation, so neighborhoods gain services, homes and businesses, not just empty lots where buildings used to be. Throughout the conversation, speakers circled back to the same warning: money is necessary but not sufficient. Any serious turnaround will need resident-led planning and clear anti-displacement protections baked in from the start, so longtime neighbors are not pushed out just as conditions improve.
Several panelists said the immediate next step is more formal coordination among the city, county and major funders. Whether St. Louis can match Detroit’s momentum will depend less on copying a checklist and more on tailoring the strategy to local realities. Detroit had large-scale bets and a few headline-grabbing projects. St. Louis, by contrast, may have to stitch together a series of smaller, neighborhood-level wins while keeping current residents at the center of the story. One message from the afternoon was unmistakable: the era of simply talking about a renaissance is fading, and the clock is now ticking on whether leaders and foundations are truly ready to back a slower, messier climb.
