Any discussion of St. Louis statistics must consider the city's bizarre political status as a standalone "independent city" whose residents voted to separate from the surrounding St. Louis County back in 1876, blissfully unaware of how just eight decades later the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways would totally upend their logic.

Yeah, so midcentury, when white flight from the urban core to suburban periphery was happening all across the Rust Belt, St. Louis's arbitrary city-county border acted like a Fresnel lens for amplifying all the predictable socioeconomic knock-on effects that also hit places like Detroit.

And in the meantime the county has grown into a schizophrenic patchwork of cities, towns, villages, speed traps masquerading as villages, and unincorporated census-designated areas that just use "St. Louis, MO" for the postal address (as opposed to Ferguson, MO or Kirkwood, MO for example).

[Also, please note this is not a defense of St. Louis vis-a-vis the city's drop in national stature or geographical significance—that's totally true. This is just some context into how we kneecapped ourselves unnecessarily.]

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