St. Louis City also has a problem with its beloved "earnings tax".
At one point as our office space lease renewal was approaching I plotted all of our 100+ employees at the time on a map, almost all software engineers, about 2/3 of them lived west of the city and 1/3 lived east, and only a single one lived in the city, and he was in a temporary apartment immediately post divorce, didn't get the house. To me that says 99+% of professionals don't want to live in the city. Our first office plan had been to put one in the city, but the earnings tax on our side and the employee's side was a deal breaker for a business with payroll as its predominant expense. So instead we got an office on each side of the river and teleported across the city as needed with the interstate highway system.
The fact that burbs are the most desirable places to live in STL is pretty much the reason I'll never move back. It's an incredibly depressing metro area.
There's a lot of city-living worship here. But (as would certainly be the case with myself) it's mostly for a very tiny number of mostly coastal cities.
You need to think bigger than the earnings tax (or any any particular difference between the City and the County). That's too narrow a lens through which to see what's really going on.
St. Louis as a region has a problem with the sort of divisions that allowed you to avoid the earnings tax by locating outside of city limits that were myopically drawn in 1876.
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(But, if I must comment on the earnings tax -- and I really can't help myself -- I'll simply say that a 1% tax is not enough to dissuade a professional earning a professional's income from living where they truly want to live or working where they truly want to work. To the extent that a 1% tax actually is a deal-breaker, it's a symptom of a much larger disease.)
Depends where you live and when you drive. Stay out of the evening rush hour in certain areas of town and you can count on 65mph to your destination. If you are popping across the river in the middle of the day there is no problem. Some people do have jobs that turn them out a 4-5pm in unfortunate locations. When I worked in one of those locations I shifted my schedule a bit so I worked until 6pm instead. Waiting 60 minutes turned a 45 minute commute into a 15 minute commute.
Some American cities have seen significant population declines since their infrastructure was built and thus have surplus transportation/housing/etc capacity.
At one point as our office space lease renewal was approaching I plotted all of our 100+ employees at the time on a map, almost all software engineers, about 2/3 of them lived west of the city and 1/3 lived east, and only a single one lived in the city, and he was in a temporary apartment immediately post divorce, didn't get the house. To me that says 99+% of professionals don't want to live in the city. Our first office plan had been to put one in the city, but the earnings tax on our side and the employee's side was a deal breaker for a business with payroll as its predominant expense. So instead we got an office on each side of the river and teleported across the city as needed with the interstate highway system.