2020 Vision An Equitable Economic Development Framework for St. Louis

Mass Economics led a team of consultants to create the City of St. Louis’ comprehensive economic development strategy, “2020 Vision: an Equitable Economic Development Framework for St. Louis,” for the St. Louis Development Corporation, St. Louis’ economic development agency. Informed by intensive quantitative and qualitative data analytics, the advisory committee, and extensive public engagement over the 18- month project, the project team identified twelve guiding principles and ten specific and actionable goals for the equitable economic development in the city, laying out dozens of strategies to support a more prosperous and equitable future for the City.

Following a comprehensive demographic, housing, workforce, economic, land and cadastral, and fiscal profile of the City, its neighborhoods, and recent trends, strategies in the framework cover three strategic areas: opportunity to thrive, clusters, and place. With project team support, Mass Economics led the development of 17 opportunity to thrive strategies, which aim to build and sustain long-term wealth for city residents and entrepreneurs, especially Black/African Americans, and 32 cluster strategies across seven identified target clusters that offer inclusive growth opportunities. Mass Economics supported the development of 43 place strategies that target both citywide (re)development – like land management and assembly – and district-and corridor-specific challenges and opportunities. Each of the strategies are accompanied by a series of action items to guide implementation, identifying the leader and potential partners, start time and duration, difficulty, potential funding sources, and explicit goals and measures to track progress. In addition to metrics that track progress on action items, the framework identifies metrics to track the overall progress toward its equitable economic development goals.

In 2021, SLDC won an EDA Sprint Challenge grant to implement one of the framework’s strategies around creating TechSTL, a software tech cluster organization.

The framework is available for download at: https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/sldc/documents/2020-vision-framework-for-stlouis.cfm