University of Iowa historian Colin Gordon has written an outstanding overview of the decline of America's cities in Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Gordon's focus on a single city allows him to map out, literally, demographic and economic change through the extensive use of geographic information system software, bringing the trends to vivid life.

Of the many themes in the book, I want to highlight three: race, urban redevelopment, and subsidies. St. Louis has a long history of housing discrimination against African-Americans, through practices such as agreements among realtors, restrictive covenants, steering, and exclusionary zoning. Many of the nation's most important court decisions on housing discrimination stem from lawsuits in St. Louis and surrounding suburbs. Blacks were restricted to living in a very few areas of the city, and even fewer parts of neighboring St. Louis County, for many decades. Gordon documents this history through extensive archival research.

The rhetoric of urban redevelopment in St. Louis, as in many other cities, was in removing blight, but the reality was that of reducing the housing stock and using federal funding to establish commercial and tourist developments, rather than constructing new housing. As Gordon tells us, "Although blight was originally understood as a residential problem, urban renewal efforts in St. Louis skirted the worst residential areas and focused increasingly on large-scale industrial and commercial development." In the process, the meaning of "blight" was stretched beyond all recognition, allowing the upscale suburb of Des Peres to blight a mall so it could receive tax increment financing subsidies to attract Nordstrom's. (Since the book was completed, Missouri's Supreme Court ruled that property must be both an economic and a social liability to be declared blighted, blocking the use of eminent domain in the similarly prosperous suburb of Clayton.)

Finally, Gordon shows how the use of subsidies, most recently tax increment financing (TIF), has contributed to sprawl in the St. Louis region. His map of TIF districts illustrates graphically how this subsidy has been used heavily on the periphery of the region, "poaching," as he says, retail activity from the city and inner suburbs. (Missouri is one of the few states that allow sales tax to be TIFd, leading to the subsidized oversupply of retail facilities.) This is facilitated by the lack of targeting in the enabling legislation (that is, its use is not restricted to areas that meet objective criteria of economic deprivation, as are regional subsidies in the European Union).

I can't do justice to this excellent book in a short blog post. I highly recommend it, for its lessons apply to a large number of cities.