Is St. Louis on the Verge of a Comeback?

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St. Louis has long been plagued by crime and unrest. Though homicides and sexual assaults hit their lowest marks in a decade last year, aggravated assaults and vehicle theft remain high. Meantime, the city’s library has effectively become a homeless shelter. Litter is pervasive, and the land surrounding the Gateway Arch is filled with vacant warehouses and unkempt lots.

Can the city turn things around? One redevelopment effort, “Gateway South,” seeks to turn 100 desolate acres into a thriving cultural, industrial, and residential hub. In the northern part of the city, former Guggenheim director Thomas Krens is looking into opening a model railroad museum. The St. Louis Lambert International Airport overhaul is underway. And the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra recently reopened after a massive renovation.

But challenges remain. “In my conversations with current and former elected officials, a theme emerges: St. Louis possesses first-class commercial and cultural amenities but lacks political maturity and civic discipline,” Jordan Duecker writes. And the city still hasn’t spent all of its pandemic relief funds, even as the 2026 deadline nears.

Read more about the city’s challenges and prospects for recovery.

Recent data show that 81.3 percent of seniors graduated from Boston Public Schools last year—the highest share in history. Yet even as that figure has soared, standardized test scores have not. Scores on the reading and math portions of the SAT, for instance, have remained flat. And between 2017 and 2025, low-income students’ graduation rate rose by 12 percent, while their math scores declined by 5 percent.

What’s going on?

Neetu Arnold points to credit-recovery programs, which “often encourage schools to prioritize graduation rates over actual learning,” she writes. And Boston has eased its grading policies, too, pushing for “equitable learning.”

Read more about how the city’s efforts are harming student preparedness.

Harm-reduction activists have long touted supervised consumption sites (SCS)—places where drug users can get high under close staff observation—as a means of saving lives otherwise lost to overdose deaths. But a new peer-reviewed study of Canadian SCSs in the journal Addiction suggests that these sites don’t save lives.

As Adam Zivo notes, after the closure of an SCS in Alberta, “its former clients saw no statistically significant increase in deaths, emergency department visits, or ‘opioid-related emergency medical services (EMS) events,’” compared with the clients of a control site that remained in operation. The study also found a “marked increase” in the share of clients from the closed SCS who received anti-addiction medications like methadone and Suboxone.

While the authors caution that more research on SCS is needed, their study “gives a sense of how the harm reduction movement’s best arguments melt away when subjected to proper scientific scrutiny,” writes Zivo.

“It’s just a program to give millions to unproductive leftists.”