WUSTL Professor Spins Dishonest Narrative to NPR
Olin Business School scholar conveniently ignores the past 20 or so years
WUSTL is a consistently dishonest actor in the arena of urban planning and development in the central city. Whether we’re talking about their role in the destruction of McRee Town or its never ending support for incentive usage in the Central Corridor or the institution’s ever-increasing appetite for property around its campuses… the list goes on and on. WUSTL is the quintessential privileged brat of the metro region. That’s a big reason why folks shouldn’t have turned over so much of the city’s decision making power to the institution and its employees.
Still, seldom do you see and/or hear the level of extreme intellectual dishonesty displayed by Dr. Glenn MacDonald in a recent interview with NPR’s Marketplace program. I was pretty gobsmacked to hear his portrayal of Downtown’s current struggles. In Dr. MacDonalds telling, there have been 75 years straight of divestment in Downtown St. Louis, leaving it decimated.
“You know, you’ve got 75 years of decay in the downtown area, and people living somewhere else. So it’s just a very stable, entrenched situation that’s really difficult to change. And in particular, it requires a lot of money.” - Dr. Glenn MacDonald
There’s one big problem with this: Downtown had a renaissance, just a decade or so back. This ignores the reality that Downtown has been a huge beneficiary of the city’s development spending and subsidy for decades. It ignores the fact that St. Louis, at least until very recently, has used the growth of Downtown’s population as a bright spot and reason we need more incentive usage. This consistent 75 year slide didn’t happen. Downtown has been the beneficiary of massive amounts of investment, which brought many former industrial buildings back as residential and retail. That happened. You’re not imagining it. The city bragged about it for years. Amazingly, he ignores this when stating “Well, I think, you know, we’ve been talking about for a long time trying to sort of develop certain parts of the city.” He’s right, above all Downtown, which saw an incomplete, but very real era of revitalization. By ignoring this, he uses his authority as a subject matter expert to spin a narrative that is significantly divorced from reality. It’s a world where we never really examine what went wrong. Washington Ave.’s era of being recognized as one of the nation’s best streets just didn’t happen. Since it didn’t happen, there’s no reason to figure out what went wrong. His position as a subject expert is pretty questionable, as urban planning isn’t really what he’s got experience in. From his bio on WUSTL’s site:
Prior to join Olin, Professor MacDonald was Professor of Economics and Management at the University of Rochester’s W. E. Simon Graduate School of Business, and Professor of Economics at the University of Western Ontario. He has extensive experience, including consulting, mentoring and informal advising, and student projects. He has worked with startups, e.g., eMastered.com, RECORDS and DigitalMint, nonprofits, e.g. United Way and USOC, and large entities, e.g., MasterCard, LionsGate, Citibank, Universal Music Group and Nike.
I think one would be hard-pressed to see why the school offered him as an expert in urban planning. He obviously isn’t. Instead, we get a great example of what Epsilon Theory calls “fiat news”, where an “expert” is brought on to validate a narrative, even if what they are saying is misleading. It’s one of the primary ways that mis/disinformation is pushed through mainstream media outlets. This form of content creation has overtaken much of the media we consume. This is a localized version of why I almost never listen to NPR/St. Louis Public Radio. While there are occasional stories that are worth listening to, most of what they broadcast in just narrative management for the regional elites.
Same as it ever was…
What does this non-expert suggest we do? First off: make things safer. That’s definitely PhD-level analysis, there. While one can assume he means more policing, that’s not totally clear. Then he further offers “expand the Central West End”, which can pretty much only mean gentrifying Fountain Park. FPSE and neighborhoods to the south are mostly turned over to higher income professionals, many of whom work at WUSTL. To the west is WUSTL and Clayton, which don’t make good targets for neighborhood “expansion”. The space between SLU and the Central West End has also mostly gentrified. So, this basically has to be code for gentrification moving north. The only thing he sorta messed up on, as far as most WUSTL people would tell you, is that he used the wrong verbiage. He spoke way, way too honestly. They have no intention of integrating existing residents and neighborhoods into their prosperity. Instead, we get conversation of territorial expansion, which opens up other questions, such as if these neighborhoods would keep their names. His honesty serves as a wonderful example of the trickle down colonialism mentality, which he presents without the usual liberal masking. Finally, spend more money on Downtown West. Neighborhoods to the north and south don’t really matter, at least in this telling.
The last point he raises also plays into a very commonly used and important tool in the narrative maintenance toolkit, at least when it comes to city incentive spending. The truth is that recent years of dumping more money into Downtown West and Midtown have worked to the detriment of Downtown. In many ways, and this isn’t really controversial, constantly incentivizing more competition for Downtown restaurants, shopping and entertainment venues is actually a cause of Downtown’s troubles. After investing million into revitalizing Downtown, the city then proceeded to dump millions in TIF, tax abatement and CID spending on neighborhoods directly west, while not really stabilizing many of the neighborhoods to the north and south. As has been widely reported, the city’s population hasn’t been expanding, meaning that we’re incentivizing businesses in parts of town that are in direct competition for consumer dollars with other neighborhoods that we’ve incentivized. As one would expect, the areas that are newly incentivized are often able to out-compete earlier investments, due to the amount of hype that accompanies each newly incentivized project.
All in all, the professor’s interview is essentially free of any meaningful analysis or thought. It’s just what the rich people want to hear. That then gets served up to as an expert opinion by NPR. Once heard, their liberal listenership integrates this into “their truth”, which is mainly just the narratives that elites want us to believe is actually true. This version of events around Downtown’s current downturn are not true, though. Really, what we are given is just someone carrying water for development interests, which certainly include his employers at WUSTL. This is a big part of what we worked on challenging in #TeamTIF. Unfortunately, too many members decided to cash in and get on the local developer gravy train, ending that important work. In the absence of such a group of people advocating for a more honest accounting of our urban planning and development incentive usage, we’ve simply reverted back to the point where it doesn’t matter how dumb elites’ analysis is or if the “expert” really has much of any depth of experience in what’s going on. Frankly, the more ignorant, the better, at least from the perspective of our city’s leadership. They couldn’t be happier, than when one of their ignorant lackeys is given the mic. By using people who don’t really know what they are talking about, they get assurance that nobody’s gonna talk about how they keep missing the mark. These folks aren’t even trying to vaguely change how they approach development.
Who, me?
Probably the most unhinged part of this is the fact that the professor acts like the government, which he tacitly blames for not fixing the situation, is at fault for this. It was just poor public policy decisions. That’s insane. Above all other private actors, WUSTL has had maximum influence over STL city development policy for the past 20 years. He totally ignores the fact the institution he is speaking for not only drove massive amounts of the city’s development policy (via WUMCRC, Cortex and more), its graduates also disproportionately lead the community development organizations that continue to not fix problems. If you’re looking at the scoreboard, these folks are losers. That’s not how things work in an oligarchy, though. Despite not accomplishing their goals, the kleptocracy we city government keeps moving these folks up the social ladder.
It is supremely sad that we live in a time where folks like this can get on NPR and espouse total nonsense, full well knowing that it won’t be challenged. It’s just a full circle of lacking self-awareness. The person from WUSTL rattles on about the failures of local development policy, not recognizing that their employer was a major driver of said failed decisions. Then NPR just runs it, without any kind of fact checking or counterpoint. At the same time, they hold themselves up as a bulwark against misinformation. At the end of the day, both are elite institutions that feel no sense of accountability to the broader community. They know what’s best, and folks shouldn’t complain. This isn’t how a functional democracy works. Instead, we get this embarrassing parade of “experts”, and they are never accountable for their mistakes. Not unlike his narrative, which pointedly didn’t hold WUSTL accountable for its leading role in the city’s urban planning decisions.