In this episode of Banking on You, host Josh Rodriguez sits down with Jarrad Holst (lawyer, real estate developer, and proud St. Louisan) for a powerful conversation that’s equal parts civic insight and hometown heart. From the golden legacy of the 1904 World’s Fair to the current-day grit it takes to rebuild North St. Louis after devastating tornadoes, Jarrad challenges us to rethink how we advocate for the places we call home.
In this love letter to St. Louis, we celebrate its past, its challenges, and its potential. You’ll walk away inspired to get involved, speak up, and help write the next chapter of the STL story.
Links:
Missouri History Museum’s 1904 World’s Fair Exhibit
Missouri History Museum World’s Fair Overview
Jarrad Holst’s LinkedIn Page
The 1904 Group Website
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Transcript
Host Josh Rodriguez
On April 30, 1904, Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company President David R. Francis officially opened the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, also known as the 1904 World’s Fair, with the call, “Open Ye Gates. Swing wide, ye portals.”
A magnificent spectacle greeted the opening day crowd of 200,000. A dazzling display of nearly 1,500 buildings across 1,200 acres of a newly redesigned Forest Park. That magnificent fairground equated America’s expansion westward since the Louisiana Purchase with the nation’s cultural and economic progress.
For the next seven months, St. Louisans and travelers from across the globe experienced the latest achievements in technology, fine arts, manufacturing, science, civics, foreign policy, and education from 50 foreign countries and 43 of the then 45 states.
Fairgoers had ample opportunity to indulge in popular culture and entertainment. Visitors could enjoy 50 different amusements, including contortionists, babes and incubators, the Dancing Girls of Madrid, Jim Key the educated horse, and Hagenbach’s zoological paradise and animal circus, which featured an elephant water slide. The most spectacular concession was the observation wheel. From the top of the wheel, 265 feet above the fair, riders enjoyed the best aerial view of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.
That was from the Missouri Historical Society’s website dedicated to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. It was the quintessential fair of all fairs. 1904 was a banner year for St. Louis. The closing paragraph of the article sums up the sentiment and momentum St. Louisans felt in the early 20th century. Here it is. By the time the fair closed on December 1st, an estimated 20 million people.
had reveled in the wonders of the Louisiana Purchased Exposition. In 1904, the Louisiana Purchased Exposition thrust St. Louis into the global spotlight. Since then, the 1904 World’s Fair has forever been ingrained in our regional identity. It has become a powerful symbol of our city, a barometer by which we measure subsequent civic progress and the source of tremendous pride.
Well, 121 years have passed. And I have to ask, do St. Louisans of 2025 feel the same chest-swelling pride about their city? Does the rest of the world still view us as leaders in civic progress? St. Louis has experienced a lot since the glory days of 1904. Plenty of ups and downs. You know, some would say more downs than ups.
From a high of 850,000 in the 1950s, our population has dwindled down to less than 280,000. Now that’s the city alone. The entire region is well over 3 million, but the city is struggling, to say the least. The challenges St. Louis is facing today are many, diverse, and complicated.
St. Louis has seen some positive sparks of progress recently. Even so many neighborhoods have slipped into a dark place of hopelessness. Is there any hope for our city?
My guest today believes there is, and yes, unlike previous episodes, we have a guest, singular, on Banking On You. Listen up, because if you live, work, worship, attend school, or have any connection to the St. Louis metropolitan area in the slightest, you need to stick around for our conversation with Jarrad Holst, attorney, real estate developer, and champion, chair leader, and lover of the city of St. Louis.
I’m Josh Rodriguez, and this is episode seven of Banking On You. Banking on St. Louis, part one. Let’s get started. No wait, in true St. Louis fashion, I’ve gotta ask. So, where did you attend high school?
Jarrad Holst was born and raised in the St. Louis area. He’s lived in other cities, but his heart is forever in the Lou. Thank you so much for agreeing to come on and be interviewed for the podcast. I love following you on LinkedIn. It’s great. You make me think, which is really important. And you bring a lot of facts and lot of truth, which is good. And you open up a good forum for debate from all sides. Social media often doesn’t work like that.
I’m finding that LinkedIn is the last platform out there that you can actually have somewhat of an intelligent discussion, most of the time. But it doesn’t always go that way even then. It seems like all the others have just veered off into craziness and it’s not helpful. But I was listening to a couple of other podcasts that you’ve done and another local St. Louis podcast gave you the moniker, the LinkedIn Truth Bomber. I’m sure you’ve heard that a few times. How do feel about that? How does that make you feel?
Jarrad Holst
I’m kind of surprised that I get some of the reactions that I get because to me, think speaking the truth is a very good thing. I think critical thinking is a good thing. And…
Josh
Jared proceeded to drop truth bombs all over the first part of our conversation. Before we dive deep into the story of St. Louis, I’ll share some of his common sense, wisdom-filled mic drop moments.
Jarrad
This fear that people have of still being themselves and feeling like, Chris Rock once said that when you meet somebody, you’re meeting their agent, you’re not meeting the real person. And I think a lot of what you see on LinkedIn are people’s agents. They’re not their real person.
One of the beautiful things about this country, and it’s our foundation, is our ability to speak freely. And I think that’s something that we need to exercise on a regular basis. And I think the more that you do that, the more that you put that power out there and you not only show thanks to the armed forces that fought for us in the past and continue to uphold those rights today.
We don’t allow enough disagreement in public forums. It’s kind of like either my way or the right way. And there’s no other way that I can see it. And if you’re not on my team, then you’re on the wrong team and I hate it.
I think that we need to be more open with one another. And I think the more open that we are with one another, I think that you’ll find that we have more in common than we do not in common. But that only happens through discourse. That only happens through us being around each other and being exposed to one another. And then it takes some of those prejudices that we have or assumptions that we have about one another and it helps eliminate them.
Josh
Drop me a note if you’re interested in listening to the full interview. Maybe a bonus episode will drop sometime.
Let’s talk a little bit, Jarrad, about something more specific because you’re very passionate about the city of St. Louis. So where does that passion originate from? Where does that come from?
Jarrad
I’m always amazed when people have asked me that question, like, where does this passion come from or this love for St. Louis and why do you fight for it so hard? And I kind of look at that and I’m like, why wouldn’t you fight for your community? Why wouldn’t you love where you are from? Why wouldn’t you try to do everything you could to help make it better? Like, why isn’t that inherently in everybody? And I’m learning that it’s not, you know, and it’s, I think, somewhat unfortunate because, you know, for me, why would you live in a community if you didn’t love it? Why would you pursue anything? But especially living in a community, why would you continue to exist in that environment if you didn’t truly love it? I remember I spent a couple of summers in Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh has more overcast days than Seattle does. Things can kind of get a little gloomy in terms of people’s mindsets.
And I remember there were a couple of folks in the office that I was in and they would comment all the time about how much they hated living in Pittsburgh. You know, I guess primarily because of the weather conditions or the potholes or something. But, you know, I just told them one day after hearing this over and over again, I was just like, why are you living here? Like, I think Pittsburgh’s great. I think what you guys have here is incredible. You know, you have these really neat mountains, Mount Washington, and you have these rivers here and these bridges and amazing architecture.
Like, why do you guys see this? I see it. And so, for me, I’ve always been surprised that people don’t exhibit the same passion that I have for St. Louis. Because for me, that’s the same passion that you would have for your own family. You know, I think that you should look at it you should love it and fight for it the same way. And so, that’s where that stems from is that, you know, I look at St. Louis as providing me with this incredible life. You know, they have amazing cultural institutions and beautiful architecture and incredible food, great sports teams, you know, and they’ve provided me with a lot of success. Why wouldn’t you pay that back? Like, why wouldn’t you repay that debt? Because a lot of other folks going back centuries had to sacrifice to make your life possible. And so for me, it’s a disservice to them and it’s a disservice to my ancestors that came before me. If I didn’t pay it forward.
If I didn’t try to make my community better. I mean, the job of every parent, I hope, is that you try to provide your kids with a better life than what you had. Really sound close to it, right? I think that’s, everyone has that kind of mindset, or at least most people do. I think it’s even more than that. I think when your kids are looking at you, they’re saying, what impact are you having on the community around you? How are you making it better? And when you look at how influential parents are to their kids, think of that, like how infectious that would be then for a child to see their parents enthusiastically supporting St. Louis and donating to all these different causes and helping rebuild it and doing all these things. I mean, that then just permeates to the next generation and the next generation where they have this just true passion and love for the city and they want to help make it better rather than being disassociated with it. And I think that we’ve become that in some respects where, you know, as we get farther and farther away from the city of St. Louis and move out into suburbs and, you know, adjacent counties, we lose that connection that we once had to what made us St. Louisans. And so because of that disconnection, then we don’t feel the same love for it anymore, the same passion for it anymore. And so when things come up, you’re like, you know, that’s the city’s problem. That’s not my problem.
I’m out here in the county, you I’ve got my white picket fence and no crime and great schools and nothing ever happens here. And, you know, that’s the life I want. I don’t want to participate in helping, you know, make things in the city of St. Louis better. To me, I don’t understand that mindset. You know, it’s a half-assed mindset in my mind because what happens in the city of St. Louis is going to affect what happens to you in the county. It eventually will come and it’ll get to you. It’ll spread. And so, and how you are identified as a St. Louis and comes from the city of St. Louis. It doesn’t come from Chesterfield. It doesn’t come from Kirkwood. Those are nice places, but I’m sorry. When you go to other parts of this country or other parts of the world and you tell people that you’re from Chesterfield, 1.9% of all the people that you talk with will have no idea what you’re talking about. And you can show them the local Topgolf or the local Chick-fil-A. Once again, there’s no markers in those areas that identify that you’re from St. Louis.
And so for me, I think we need to have a reversion, so to speak, where we start to bring the people back into the fold that have gone out to the county and kind of become disassociated with the city and bring them back into the fold and let them know, look, you’re a part of this process. You’re a part of our rebirth and we need your help to help turn this thing around. And that way the entire region benefits.
Josh
You know, he has a great point. Those who live in the suburbs, yeah, that’s me. We love our mostly bland, greige suburban landscape. National chains, strip malls, wide streets. You know, the city really is where the cultural and historic gems reside.
So it sounds like, and correct me if I’m wrong, but…Sounds like that’s part of your motivation to your why behind the 1904 group. Starting there. Tell me a little bit about that.
Jarrad
Yeah, so I have a real estate development company. I actually got into the business in 2007. I didn’t have two nickels to rub together. I had a friend of mine who runs a very successful mortgage company now offer me 100 % financing, which I’m probably one of the reasons why we went into the Great Recession, that I’m the people like me. They literally, I kid you not and like…I know folks in the financing industry will be surprised to hear that they were giving me money to people like me. But I had no experience whatsoever in rehabbing buildings or doing business or just being in apartments in general. And thankfully somebody took a chance on me and they provided me with these loans.
I didn’t really formalize the name of my company until I had gotten to a point where, I mean, I was managing over 100 units by myself. I mean, literally like doing all the showings, handling maintenance requests, paying all the bills, signing leases, depositing checks. I mean, I was literally doing everything, which is crazy in hindsight, but you do what you have to do when you’re starting a business. And I didn’t really formalize the organization until 2017. So that’s kind of when I really decided to go full tilt into it.
You know, prior to that point in time, you know, I was splitting a lot of my time both as a partner to law firm and, you know, as a developer. So 1904, where I get that from is from the 1904 World’s Fair and the Olympics. And that number is incredibly important in St. Louis’s history because that’s when we hit our zenith, so to speak, on the world stage.
And so St. Louis at the time was known as the realm of the West. You know, we were one of the top five largest cities in the country. We had so much clout in this city that they actually awarded the Olympics to Chicago. And we said that we were going to host our own Olympics and they moved it to St. Louis. Like that’s how much power we had. And you know, our next four World’s Fairs regarded as one of the greatest World’s Fairs of all time.
Right. you talk World’s Fair, it pretty much goes directly to St. Louis. Any location, this is the one.
And so that name 1904, our company, full company named 1904 Group, that’s trying to tell St. Louis that we need to get back our swagger. We need to get back that hop on our step that we used to have on wanting to be great. And the architecture is there, like I said, the cultural institutions, the foundation is there for St. Louis to be incredibly successful.
We just have to have the chutzpah, so to speak, to go after it and make it happen. And, you know, I’ve said this before, I think St. Louisans are the worst cheerleaders in the world for their own community. And we don’t do enough to promote how wonderful of place that we have here. I think that’s also ties into, you know, our nature as Midwesterners, you know,
Josh
Why is that? Why do we struggle with that?
Jarrad
I think that ties into the Midwestern or Midwest nice. We’re very humble. You know, we don’t like to boast, and I think that that part of Midwest nice, we need to kind of set aside and become Midwest loud, you know, and like start speaking up and sticking, sticking out for ourselves again, and talk about all the great things that St. Louis can, you know, provide not only to the state, but you know, to the rest of the country.
I’ve commented about this a number of times. St. Louis’s impact on the state of Missouri is massive. More than 40 % of the state’s GDP comes from the St. Louis region, which is astounding. If you took away St. Louis from Missouri, our GDP for the state of Missouri would be lower than Nebraska. Okay? And no offense to Nebraska, but I’d rather be Missouri. You know, we’re almost the dead center of the country located on one of the, state has the fourth largest river system in the world. We have the second largest inland port in the United States. We’re the only U.S. city that has four highways, interstates running directly through it. So logistically, there’s not a better location, but we need to start acting differently. We need to change our, our character, our mantra, so to speak, and start promoting ourselves a lot more. You know, I’ve talked about this before.
You know, if I was running things, one of the first things I would do is I would take some money and I would go to other cities that were really expensive, like in New York and LA, Miami, maybe Dallas, and I would put up billboards comparing the cost of living in those cities to St. Louis. And I would just keep reinforcing that again and again and again. And they say, you know, with advertising, takes, you know, roughly 15 to 20 times of having something repeated to you again and again before it sets in.
And I would just like that to get in the back of people’s minds, like get rid of the, you know, St. Louis has all this crime and it’s going down and all this stuff and replace it with, hey, we’re kind of like Walmart or like Amazon, you know, come here for low price, good quality, you know, you’ll get what you need. You’ll have a great life and you won’t always be in debt and be behind like you are in these other cities. And we need to promote that.
Josh
So you’ll be running for mayor next election? We just had one which I got a lot of good information from you off of LinkedIn about the mayor race and everything. Yeah, we won’t go into politics. That’s very true. Very affordable. Still a great place to live even though we do have our pockets of crime and pockets of difficulty. So does Chicago. They can’t boast a crime-less city in any way. Neither can Kansas City, although for whatever reason Kansas City gets you know, gets the polish and shine from Missouri. seems like, it seems like they, they’re not afraid to boast about what they have there. We shouldn’t take a backseat to Kansas City at any time.
Jarrad
I love Kansas City to death. My in-laws are from Kansas City. I visit there often. They have incredible barbecue. The chiefs are amazing. It’s a wonderful, wonderful place. But Kansas City also has beaten out St. Louis almost every year this decade in murders. But we don’t talk about that. It’s always St. Louis is the murder capital of the country. And so, once again, it goes back to the fact that St. Louis is horrible at marketing itself. And if we just changed how we market ourselves, then I think that we, and granted, I don’t think that’s the sole issue. Obviously we have to take care of crime and our infrastructure and have a lot of investment in downtown St. Louis, but I think that helps change our brand outside of St. Louis and we need to do that.
Josh
Yeah, we’ve also allowed the Ferguson narrative to just overtake anything about the city. And it was a terrible incident. I would talk to others around the country, tell them I was from St. Louis area, and they’d were you involved in the Ferguson rise? Well, no, I was cut away. He removed from that. But it wasn’t a good thing. But let’s move past that narrative and continue to mend those fences and those relationships and move forward from there. Because we have so much more to offer than just the memory of what occurred during that time.
Jarrad
Well, think the thing with St. Louis is that people have to get exposed to it and we have to find a way to get people here because we don’t have mountains, we don’t have oceans. We don’t have incredible weather during the winter. So people are not going to naturally come here. And so we have to create ways for people to come here. When you look at one of the most successful developments in St. Louis history is the Gateway Arch.
And that I think the cost of the arch at the time that it was built was like less than 15 million. Right? The arch on an annual basis brings in over 2 million people a year. Sometimes it hits the 3 million number, but over 2 million people a year come to see a structure that was built for less than 15 million. I mean, that’s an incredible ROI. And so that’s the point is that use the fact that our city is very cost effective.
All right? That’s a great thing. But then start to come up with amenities that bring people here. Even if you have to make up museums that are located here, do it. Whatever it is, whatever, you know, get some amusement parks to be located in downtown St. Louis. I mean, whatever you have to do to have the bright, shiny lights and get people to come here, do it. Because you look at, you know, the town of Branson, Branson has done a phenomenal job becoming like the Las Vegas of the Midwest. And they did it by saying, look, we’re going to make ourselves an entertainment Mecca for the Midwest. You know, we’re going to have great golf. We’re going to have musical shows, best pro shop, and all this stuff, you know, to get people to go in there. And billions of people go to Branson every single year. And so it’s not like you can’t create something else like that in the Midwest. You just have to be really creative about how you do it and stick with it.
Josh
Right, there’s nothing in the landscape of Branson that makes it attractive to anyone. Table Rock Lake is cool, but isn’t that even man-made? I think it is, it’s man-made as well. Maybe not. But there are lakes all over the country, but Branson is just an amazing place.
Jarrad
I think it’s a nice part of Missouri. mean, to touch on another point that, you you’re talking about manmade. Look at the Lake of the Ozarks. Lake of the Ozarks is manmade. It has more coastline than the state of California. There’s million dollar homes that dot its, you know, shorelines. But I mean, that has billions of dollars of real estate that has been developed there. And prior to, I think the 1930s, it didn’t even exist. we can be very, very creative in this state in terms of creating amenities that draw people here and we just need to double down that again and find creative ways to draw people to Missouri again, including the fact that we have a low cost of living here.
Josh
Right. What is it? What will it take Jared to get our leadership, our political leadership, our community leaders to move that direction? What is it going to take?
Jarrad
I think people have to be very creative and I don’t think they have to reinvent the wheel. I think everyone thinks that you’ve got to come up with something that’s just crazy. We’ve already come up with the arch and I think that’s an amazing thing. But sometimes it’s kind of like driving around downtown and some of the neighborhoods around it, like Midtown. And one of the things I noticed the other day, I took the family to Circus Flora.
I think it’s called, it’s like a circus right near a SLU, it really cool experience. One of the things that I noticed driving around downtown and midtown was the lack of trees. And you go to Europe or you drive around Lafayette Square and they have trees everywhere. And it’s such a small amenity. It’s such like what many would think is an insignificant amenity, but it does so much for creating a sense of nature and community and the environmental benefits of it.
And so St. Louis doesn’t have to do a lot to really move the needle. They just have to have the motivation to do it. I mean, like I would have one of the things I saw when I went to Argentina in January in these neighborhoods on let’s just say every other corner, they would take out one of the corner lots and they would create a small little corner lot park. And then people would go in there and they would congregate during the day and night.
And they would close it up and every one of these little parks was different. They had fountains in them, had tile and they had like different, you know, flowers and trees and stuff in them. But it was such a unique way to like make your community really unique. Yeah. And then, you know, like in this community called Palermo, almost every building was a different color and they had these beautiful facades that they created on the outside of them and they weren’t that expensive to do. And so that’s the other thing, too. Like you drive around St. Louis and you see a lot of the same color brick, you know, with the exception of like going to like Midtown or like Lafayette Square where you see, you know, people, you know, painting their houses or other buildings. That’s another thing that I would do is that I would plaster murals and color everywhere, you know, just to bring, you know, along with the trees and the outdoor, you know, parks and all that to create and foster a walking environment as much as possible.
And I would take these wide boulevards and avenues and I would bring them down. You know, I’d take away some lanes. I would put a center lane down there with, you know, a bunch of trees on it. And I would make, would cut off some of the streets and make them solely for pedestrians. There are little things that you can do that can help change how people view your city. And so it doesn’t have to be something drastic. It’s just changing how people feel about it.
Josh
You know, those items that you mentioned, trees, color, pedestrians, those are all signs of life, right? These are those people that are living, enjoying, and existing in this community, and that’s evidence of that. The drab grays, the lack of trees, the lack of foliage, the concrete, she was just a very dead landscape.
But when you add those three things to them, it suddenly becomes a very exciting and engaging place to be in. You see people walking down the street, you see them enjoying areas that’s living, that’s real life, right? It’s not just existing.
Jarrad
It’s crazy when you drive down, you should try this sometime, when you drive down South Grand, okay, and you’re heading towards Carondelet Park, but you’re going through Dutch town right there, you’re driving through Dutch town and it’s concrete, concrete, concrete, concrete. And then within a couple of blocks before you hit Carondelet Park, it changes completely. You start to see just trees just litter the sidewalk going all the way down to the entrance of the park.
And as soon as you start to see all those trees, and not only are they on the main street, know, Grand Boulevard there, but then they’re on all the side streets too. And then you see that and you go, oh, I’m in a different neighborhood now. This is nicer. I don’t even need to look at the buildings. You just get that feeling from seeing all this, you know, to your point, all of this life around it. And when you’re driving around, you know, places like Midtown or certain parts of downtown, you see all this concrete and asphalt.
And especially on, you know, like we were driving around, you know, late Sunday afternoon and it was just dead. There was nobody out. And so it looks like this barren Soviet Union-esque landscape. And there’s so much more that you can add to that back to what you were saying to bring life to it. And then you do that and then it influences people then to want to walk around that, to then want to congregate around it and sit down at a cafe or go to a park and…
Then you have, then with that density, now you have safety in numbers. And so then it’s a lot harder to commit crimes versus like these barren areas where there’s nobody around. All right, no one’s around, I’ll commit a crime. And so I think there are small little things that the city can do to help change how people feel about the city. I think they’re changing that landscape. I think that that is very inspirational and it makes people want to be around it. I mean, case in point.
You look at Forest Park, well, it’s in the name, Forest, and you drive through there and it’s an urban oasis. I mean, you feel at peace there and you see people laying down in the grass and having picnics and walking around their families and you see ducks and other kinds of birds and, you know, squirrels and stuff like that. You look at that environment and you go, wow, this is like a utopia. Like, this is peace. And you see the density and you see the culture. You see the art museum. You see the zoo and The Muny, all that wants to congregate there because that is life.
Life is not the concrete, it’s not the asphalt. And the Europeans and the South Americans have figured this out. You know, they’ve figured this, you know, how do we make this urban ecosystem come to life? And you look at some of the surrounding neighborhoods to downtown and they’ve done a phenomenal job doing that. Soulard, Lafayette Square, Ben Park, Shaw, the Hill.
You drive around those areas and it’s tree city and it’s parks and it’s, you know, outdoor cafes and people walking around. That to me is what the urban lifestyle is like. And you’re trying to take elements of the country and you’re trying to bring them into the city. And people want that kind of yin and yang. You know, they don’t want it to be concrete and loud noises and all those things all the time. They want to have someone’s at peace, you know, and that’s…
And one of the reasons why we love Lafayette Square so much is that if you, kept yourself walking around Lafayette Square at six or seven at night and you think you’re in a small town, you don’t, you, don’t even think that I’m next to a really big, you know, downtown. I never think about that because it doesn’t feel that way. But then when I want to go to the ball game or I want to go to the art museum, it’s just a hop, skip, jump away.
Josh
When was the last time St. Louis as a city was like this? Was like you’re saying it should be? How long has that been?
Jarrad
Well, we used to be connected differently. So St. Louis used to have more streetcar lines than any other city in the United States, San Francisco. We were connected differently. When you look at, when you drive around, you know, some of the neighborhood, city neighborhoods, you’ll notice that almost every block has kind of a retail storefront window where maybe somebody’s converted it to a single family residence, or maybe it’s still commercial. But the rationale behind that was you only had horses and carriages and people walking, you know, back in the, you know, the 19th century and early 20th century. And so if people wanted to connect with one another, it was just a short distance. And you didn’t feel a disconnection. felt connected to their neighborhood. And through the invention of the car, we became more more spread out with one another. And so we stopped having that connection with our neighborhood. We stopped having that connection with the city. You know, they got rid of the street cars. So it’s not like you had that same connection.
And anyone will tell you that has been to San Francisco or New Orleans and has ridden on the streetcars, you feel the community around you a lot more going slower and looking outside your window. You feel it. You notice it. Whereas you’re in your car and you’re just like, what’s this? know, what, you know, let’s just get to the next destination as fast as we can. You know, there’s no connection that you have to whatsoever. You know, and so…
I think that we need to find ways to get back to that. And you see Kansas City doing a really good job right with that right now with their light rail system is what they’re doing is they’re trying to slowly connect each of these neighborhoods together to bring them all together so then you don’t feel as disjointed anymore. And I would love to see St. Louis do a better job of that, of connecting each of our neighborhoods together, because it always depresses me when, you know, I go outside of St. Louis and I run into people that have been here and I’m like, man, that’s great. You know, where did you go? And they’re like, well, you know, we just kind of went around downtown. I tell them like, downtown’s all right, but the best part of St. Louis are the neighborhoods. And I said, you didn’t see the best part of St. Louis. And we need to do a better job of connecting all of those communities together with downtown St. Louis. And I think if we do that, think that we’ll showcase our city in a much better manner.
Josh
On May 16th, a devastating tornado ripped through large areas of St. Louis. Here, Jared is talking about rebuilding and revitalizing those neighborhoods. Having thriving communities in North St. Louis is key to having a strong city. Come back for episode 8 for more about the tornado and the relief efforts.
You’ve got some fantastic, like really common sense ideas. These should be things that our leaders are talking about. How do we make those things happen?
Jarrad
I think the first thing you have to do is you have to develop a master plan for North St. Louis. And then you have to see what parts have to go together to make that happen. You what kind of capital do you need? What kind of industry players have to come in? And then you make sure that you have to figure out what kind of resources, monetary resources that you need. And then you execute on it. And you execute on it really fast. I’m a big fan of plan slowly, execute quickly.
And because I think if we execute slowly, you know, then that’s ripe for, you know, corruption and money being taken away from us. And so or another, you know, act of God happening. And so I think that we need to act really, really quickly. But I think that the plan for North St. Louis has to be completely different from the plan that has existed in North St. Louis for the last 100 years, because that plan doesn’t work. And so we need to come back with a different plan where we get more people to come up into that community.
You know, and I think another idea that would help a lot is to go around the country. And, you know, I’ve talked about immigration a ton on LinkedIn, um, and get immigrants to come to St. Louis. We’ve already done a really, really good job. I mean, uh, there was some that came out in the census, um, a couple of months ago that said that St. Louis had the second highest percentage of immigrants moved to the city of St. Louis versus any other city in the country.
It was like a 22 % increase. St. Louis would have had an even greater population loss, but not for the immigrants coming to St. Louis. And so St. Louis was a city that was built on immigrants. And I think we need to go back to that to help our revitalization of not only North St. Louis, but the region in general. And we need to have more immigrants come to St. Louis because I think getting them involved in all of our different communities only makes us better.
Josh
Any ideas on how to spur on immigrant relocations to St. Louis?
Jarrad
Well, you know, there was a New York Times article that wrote about the immigrants that were coming to St. Louis and they were of Afghani and I believe Syrian descent. And it was very interesting when you heard why they came to St. Louis, you know, and they said, well, you know, we’ve heard about Chicago and New York and Miami and all these places in the movies. But at the end of the day, they looked at the cost and they were like, St. Louis is so much cheaper. And then they’re commenting in there about, you know, their way, the life that they’ve had so far in St. Louis and they’ve said, you know, we’ve been able to participate more in St. Louis as a community. You know, we’ve had more capital, you know, we’ve been able to save up more, have better jobs because of the low cost nature of our community. And so we need to continue to, you know, promote that all around the country and get the immigrants to come here. And this has been done before. I mean, when you look at one of the reasons why St. Louis and the Midwest in general has a lot of Germans and Scandinavians is back in the day, real estate developers would go to those parts of the world and they would promote coming to the Midwest because we had all this free free land and it looked like their home country and you know, they could have their own farms there and it would be cheaper. And so you have to understand the calculus that they made back then, you know, like I said, this is the 1800s.
They had somebody bringing postcards of what St. Louis or what other cities around the Midwest look like, just Midwestern states in general. And they convinced them to then make a several thousand mile journey, which probably took over a month, to then land on the East Coast. And then, guess what? Your journey’s not done. You then have to take a train to go to the center of the country, and then you’re finally going to be home. But they were, millions of them made that journey on that cost basis.
Like that’s what people don’t understand. And so don’t reinvent the wheel. Go back to how you were settled. Go back to how this entire area was built up. It was built up by immigrants. Go back to that well again and, you know, continue to promote our low cost nature and get people to come here to St. Louis. And I think you’re going to see our population turn around as a result of it.
Josh
Yeah, same messaging, just a different delivery system.
You reminded me of when I was growing up in California. So I grew up in central California in Fresno. Don’t know if you’re familiar with that area. Most people aren’t because it’s not the Bay Area. It’s not LA. It’s not San Diego. We’re not at the beach. We’re not up in the mountains. It’s just right in middle of the Central Valley. Fresno was always trying to be the Bay Area, always trying to be San Francisco, always trying to be Los Angeles. And when we moved to Missouri, I began to see that a lot in St. Louis. There was always like a chasing of Chicago, right?
Chicago was the big brother that had all the stuff, that had all the cool things. We wanted to go to Chicago. St. Louis doesn’t need to chase some other region, some other metro. You’ve said it many times, you just reiterated it again. Go back to what made us great, focus on those things, put that into the messaging, and then you’ll see things begin to change here. We don’t have to be some other region. We can proudly be ourselves and display what we are.
Jarrad
Yeah, I I was telling one of my interns today over a breakfast, if you and I were out in the middle of the ocean and we both jump off the boat, I’m not paying attention to how you’re swimming. I’m focusing on the fact that I need to swim because I can’t touch the bottom and neither can the person that just jumped off with me. And so let’s focus on staying afloat first before we start looking to others.
St. Louis needs to stabilize itself. We’ve gone from a population in the city of over three quarters of a million, 1950, to a population today of less than 280,000. And we’ve had the steepest drops in our population over the last couple of years. It’s one of the things that I commented on another podcast, like the greatest issue that’s affecting the city of St. Louis in the near future.
It literally is going to determine our fate is our population. It’s the number one thing. It’s not crime. It’s not what happened in our city with this tornado. It’s not the businesses. Okay. The number one thing is population and we have to get our population back. We have to do everything we can to get our population back. Because if you think about it, St. Louis is 62 square miles. Okay. It was a city that was built for over a million people. We now have, like I said, less than $280,000. We now have a tornado that we have to try to help pay for. Okay. We have all this infrastructure once again for a million people, but now it’s being used by less than $280,000. We have to maintain that. So old sewer systems, water systems, all this stuff, which is going to cost billions of dollars to redo. And that’s just under the roads. Then we have the roads themselves and the bridges and all this other stuff. We have an incredible amount of things that we have to maintain and that costs an incredible amount of money.
With a dwindling population, you have less people paying into the pot, tax pool pot, okay? And so eventually it’ll get to a point where if we don’t stabilize our population and start growing it again, we have two paths. We’re either going to merge into the county, have to merge into the county, as a municipality, and maybe that’s not such a bad idea.
Or we’re going to declare bankruptcy and then we’re going to have an appointed city manager by a federal judge. So then it’s going to gut things like crazy and the city manager actually will probably recommend that we merge into the county as well. But the trajectory that we’re on right now is not the right one for sustainability.
Josh
Consider what Jarrad says for just a moment. 280,000 residents can’t possibly support a city infrastructure designed for a million people. Let’s break it down. Think of it this way. A family of four earning an average salary lives in one unit of a four-unit apartment building. They pay their mortgage, utilities, maintenance, and upkeep on their own apartment. However, they also foot the bill for the three vacant apartments as well. It won’t be long before the months stretch much longer than each paycheck.
Jarrad
So the focus right now on St. Louis should be just staying afloat. It shouldn’t be, well, what’s Chicago doing or what’s Nashville doing or Kansas City doing? Just survive. Like that’s what we need to do right now. We need to survive. We need to keep swimming, keep our head above the water, and then find a way to start swimming again and get other people to start swimming with us.
Josh
Real quick, are a couple of the pros and cons of that county merger? Potential county merger.
Jarrad
Well, first of all, I’m all in favor of a city county merger.
Josh
Hmm, merging St. Louis City and County into one municipality is a hot topic. Jared lives up to his LinkedIn truth bomber moniker and wades into the controversy. But with somewhat of a different spin.
Jarrad
All in favor of it. I think that it would do wonders for our region. But I think the ways that we have talked about it in the past are pretty foolish and they’re too complicated. There’s an acronym that I learned in law school called KISS. And it means keep it simple, stupid. All right. And I think some of the most effective policies that we’ve ever had in this country have been really, really simple ones. I mean, if you look at the Constitution, there’s not a lot of words to it.
And then you go into the 27 amendments. They’re not a lot of words. They try to keep it as simple as possible to convey what they need to convey about our democracy to their citizens. When I look at the merger of the city and the county, to me, it’s very, very simple. All you need to do, and I’ve talked about this before, don’t reinvent the wheel. Look at what Louisville did. The city of Louisville and the surrounding county merged together…in name only. And then over time, they’ve started to work with one another to see what things can be integrated into the city or to the county or vice versa. But this idea that we can merge the city into the county and they’ll have to deal with our police department and they’ll have to deal with our school system here, which is a disaster, and our pensions, which are underfunded. Nobody in the county wants to deal with that.
So what I recommend doing and there’s some history there. You know, I think it’s very, very important in the city that we maintain our governance. I think that’s important. And likewise out in the county, they’ve spent a lot of their tax dollars trying to build up their school systems and police systems and all those things. Okay. That’s fine. If we keep that separate for now, great. Let’s just merge in name only, and then see what are the synergies that we can build up with one another. If we just start talking with one another again, and we haven’t done that since we divorced one another and I think it was like 1870s, okay? And the last time it’s been on the ballot was I think the 1970s, early 1970s. So the point is we’re not even talking about it really. I mean, every year, you know, you’ll have like an editorial on some kind of paper and they’re like, yeah, we need to merge or no, we don’t or whatever. That’s not gonna move the needle. You need to put it on the ballot and you need to keep it very, very simple. And then after that, we can start adding things to it to see what works and what doesn’t.
I’ll give you an example of this. We’ve merged how the county and the city work together with MSD. We’ve merged together how our museum district together in terms of how that’s supported. So like the zoo, you know, the art museum, Forest Park, that’s funded together through St. Louis County and St. Louis city taxpayers. Okay. So there are things where we have come together in the past and it’s actually worked out really well.
The problem is, is that we’re not continuing that dialogue. We’re continuing to remain segregated from one another. And as I’ve tried to talk, you know, say in this conversation, segregation in this country is a failed system. It does not work. You know, Americans need to be around one another. We don’t need to be behind white picket fences and highways and all this other stuff. And so until we unite together as one, St. Louis will never thrive as a region. I do think local governance of the city is very important.
And I think that local governance in the county is very important. But I do think you merge those two together. And instead of us being on the top 10 FBI’s crime list, we’re not even on the top 50. Right. right away, just from a branding standpoint, changes our brand. And like I was talking earlier about the population loss. Well, that population loss that was reported, I think it showed like a 22 % loss.
I think it was the most of any city in the United States that had more than 200,000 people. Okay? So the city of St. Louis is showing up on that. But that’s not really true for us as a region. As a region, our population is somewhat stabilized. Okay? I’m not saying it’s growing. I’ll say it’s a little stagnant, but we’re not declining. Okay? But the problem is, is the rest of the country doesn’t see it that way. Cause they’ll catch one little, you know, tidbit of information and they’ll go, St. Louis is declining. it’s going downhill. It’s the, it’s a crime ridden area that everybody’s leaving the population, you know, hates the place. Like, you know, that’s what they run with.
Josh
The national media loves the FBI statistics that are skewed against the St. Louis area. They’d love to publish those.
Jarrad
Once again, we’re horrible cheerleaders and we do it to ourselves. We have no one to blame but ourselves. We know exactly how to get out of this and we just don’t have the motivation to do it. But I’m telling you, get it started on the ballot and start going around to town halls and educating folks about, you know, keeping it, you literally could name it on the ballot to keep it simple, stupid merger, right? Like, title it that way.
You know, keep the language really simple and say, it’s in name only. That’s it. And look, it actually says it in the, you know, the bill language name only. Okay. And then let’s form a commission where we have folks from the county and we have folks from the city coming together. And then we’ll talk about what our communities need collectively to be more successful. But in the interim, we’re taking off all those lists, which continue to hurt our brand. And if our brand continues to get dragged in the mud, we’ll never succeed as a region.
Josh
Yeah. So I’m going to say once again, our community needs leaders like you to step up. Your thoughts and ideas on the region are spot on. We have a great place to live here. We have a fantastic community. It could be even better. It definitely can be, but it’s going to take some intentional efforts. Yeah. Some of the things that you’ve said just, man, I haven’t heard from anyone, Jarrad. I really haven’t. Yeah. We definitely need the city. We need it to be strong.
Jarrad
Josh, I appreciate you having me on and, you know, I think that we need to continue to promote St. Louis and you’d be amazed at how things can change. But, you know, is one of the things I love to tell people, you know, a standing ovation doesn’t start with everyone standing up at the same time. You know, it starts by a couple outliers standing up first and then inspiring the people around them to then stand up.
Josh
Listen carefully. Can you hear the individual clapping and cheering from the back of the room? It’s Jarrad. He’s rooting for St. Louis, looking for an encore for his beloved city, hoping for a reprise and even to vault it beyond its glory days. Sweet as they were, the future has the potential to outshine the years surrounding the World’s Fair of 1904 in St. Louis.
Jarrad
And then everybody then joins together. And then you see that in unison and you’re like, wow, you know, we’re loud, we’re pretty powerful. And I think that we need to continue speaking up for St. Louis and promoting it. And it’s literally the number one reason why I speak out the way that I do is to try to influence other people to then kind of take that torch and run with it and, you know, make St. Louis a better place for everyone.
Josh
Special thanks to our guest, Jared Holst. To learn more about Jared and his heart for St. Louis, can find him truth bombing all over LinkedIn. That’s Jared Holst, J-A-R-R-A-D-H-O-L-S-T.
Next time on part two of banking on St. Louis.
Yeah, so got the phone call from our executive director and he said, please call 911, please. We’re trapped inside of the church. So my heart’s pounding, man. I’m like, okay, so I’m calling 911. They’re like, well, sir, we’re getting hundreds of calls. We’re trying to dispatch somebody now. So it took us two and a half hours to get here because literally every street, Union, Kingshighway, all of those side cab, Raymond, all of these side streets, mean, telephone poles, electric poles were down. It literally looked like an earthquake.
Thank you so much for listening to the Banking On You podcast. Please follow us on all the socials at Banking On You pod. For show notes and additional info, visit our website, BankingOnYouPodcast.com. And let’s not forget about our incredible team. JD Sutter is our producer and Gandalf of sound design. Huge thanks to our marketing and branding team led by Kimberly Berzack, Ashley and Brian, you guys are awesome. The Banking On You podcast theme was composed by none other than Russ Whitelaw.
Our executive producers are Jason Peach and Koren Greubel. The Banking on You podcast is powered by West Community and Tigers Community Credit Union. And I’m your host, Josh Rodriguez. Until next time, remember, we’re banking on you.
