August Policy Newsletter
Changes coming to the CWE, Recycling, and Lindell/Union bridge replacement
The Central Best End keeps getting better
Neighborhoods grow and change, and the Central West End is no different. It has seen its share of restaurant and retail turnover, especially since the pandemic. But is the neighborhood declining, or is it just uncomfortable to see change where beloved institutions used to be?
I miss Coffee Cartel like many other people, as well as the activity on the corner of Maryland and Euclid. The pandemic had a significant impact on the Euclid corridor, dropping its annual total visitors to a low of 3.1 million in 2020. But five years later, the picture is different, and the true story of the Central West End is one of change, progress, and success.
In 2018, Coffee Cartel closed its doors. At the same intersection the following year, the St. Louis Chess Club began its expansion, shuttering Culpepper’s, Froyo, and Brennan’s in one fell swoop. Then, construction stalled. But last year, construction resumed, and recent news tells us that the corner of Euclid and Maryland will see a new restaurant, tournament hall, and expanded classrooms soon. Farther up Euclid, near McPherson, Stacked is preparing to open in the former Pi Pizzeria space, and the restaurants that closed due to a 2022 fire are open once again. Visitorship in 2024 was up to 4.6 million, not quite where it was before the pandemic, but well on its way.
The Central West End has shined in another category, too. Census data tells us that between 2010 and 2020, the Central West End gained more population than any other neighborhood in St. Louis. In a city that is still losing population, that’s a big deal, but diving into the data, we see some very encouraging trends. The City’s population loss slowed in the last decade, shrinking at a rate of -5.55%, the slowest rate of decline since the 1980’s. The Central West End led the charge in the opposite direction, gaining over 2,000 people since 2010, a 15.2% change. The Central West End also added more housing than any other neighborhood, so it is probably unsurprising to see that the number of households has gone up too, by about 1,500. I wrote about how looking at households is a much more informative measurement than population in my March newsletter. Now more than ever, the City needs to produce more housing.
Population gain anywhere in the city is good for the whole city. What we need right now is to reverse the overall trend. Census data tells us that when people move to the central corridor, they often do so from out of state, meaning that population gain in the central corridor is not cannibalizing population from the rest of the city or region. Instead, the population gain we see in neighborhoods like the Central West End and Downtown, which also gained population during the last decade, means that we are adding new people that help expand our tax base.
Why is this important? That tax base pays for our city services, which have been struggling as our population shrinks, putting the tax burden on fewer and fewer people. In order to hire enough workers and pay them competitively and fairly, we need a tax base large enough to sustain that. The same goes for repair and maintenance of our infrastructure like streets, sidewalks, and water. The more people that we have in our city, the more money there is to pay for essentials like our schools and our city services. Conversely, with fewer people, there is less money to go around, and services get strained, declining in quality and coverage. Today, with a population dipping below 300,000, city services fall unevenly across neighborhoods, meaning that vacant lots get mowed once a year, sidewalks become cracked and disappear, and streets become dangerous and riddled with potholes, making it harder to attract investment and success.
But decline is not the story of the Central West End, despite our untimely death in the eyes of some online influencers. While some stores and restaurants have closed, it is part of the natural life cycle of a neighborhood. Neighborhoods are always changing.
In 2014, when the Majestic closed at the intersection of Euclid and Laclede, it ended a 53 year run in the Central West End. It was scheduled to close on Sunday, April 6th at 2 pm, but the crowds coming to say their goodbyes were so large, the beloved restaurant ran out of food by noon. The next year, BBQ Saloon would open in its place, and is still there today, known as the Wild Flower Saloon.
Restaurants can turn over quite often, but I could not find verifiable evidence that the oft-quoted 5-8 year lifespan is true. The truth likely lies in the gray areas: restaurants open and close for all sorts of reasons, and the overall economy is just one of those factors. When a once busy street in a neighborhood seems quiet, it is not necessarily indicative of the overall health of a neighborhood. Rather, it could just be growing pains.
The Central West End neighborhood is not any less than years past, even if your old favorite restaurant is now something else. We can miss the old and embrace the new, finding joy, comfort, and pride in our neighborhoods along the way. Great new places have opened like Mainlander, Yellowbelly, and Havana’s, and not all that was lost is gone forever. Brennan’s moved around the corner into a beautiful new space, and Dressel’s reopened after a hiatus. Mainstays like Left Bank Books (since 1977) and Bar Italia (since 1983) are still here, and old spaces are getting new energy, like the Bel-Air Social, which is opening in the old Holiday Inn Express on Lindell. Down at the corner of Lindell and Kingshighway, the Albion West End has broken ground. When completed, it will bring 305 new residential units in addition to retail.
All over the neighborhood, signs of progress abound. But you don’t need to take my word for it, or anyone else’s. View it for yourself by using Google Street View’s time machine. In the upper left corner of the screen, you will see a date when the image was taken, and a link that says “See More Dates.” Clicking it will give you the ability to look back in time to previous passes of the Google Street View car. Try it out in the Central West End, and watch the neighborhood rise.
The 4500 block of Laclede
The intersection of Euclid and Lindell
The intersection of West Pine and Kingshighway
The intersection of Euclid and West Pine
Recycling
On Thursday, August 14th, the city officially announced that it was moving to drop-off points for recycling, ending the collection of alley recycling. The announcement came during a meeting of the Board of Aldermen’s Public Infrastructure and Utilities Committee, the committee that I chair. This meeting was organized to give the mayor’s office an opportunity to present their plans for the future of recycling in St. Louis. But first, I had our legislative assistants present how other cities handle their recycling programs. It was a highly informative meeting, and if you care about this issue, I recommend watching it here.
Since 2011, the City’s Refuse Division has collected recycling from blue dumpsters placed in the alleys and blue roll-carts for those who don’t have alley access. About 20% of residents use roll-carts, and the rest are served by alley dumpsters. It was a single-stream system, meaning that all recyclable items are placed in the same container, whether they are glass, paper, metal, plastic, or some other recyclable material. The recycling was picked up by city trucks and brought to a transfer station managed by Republic Services, a private company.
In recent years, the Refuse Division has been facing a number of harsh realities. Since the pandemic, it has experienced workforce shortages as well as a lack of funding due to a moratorium on water shutoffs that also affected the Refuse Division, since both services are paid for on the same bill. The moratorium was lifted recently, but a quarter of customers were not paying their bills, which starved the Refuse Division of revenue. The cost of picking up trash, recycling, yard waste, and bulk items costs the Refuse Division $28 Million annually, while revenues from billing only accounted for $16.5 million. The gap is being filled with tax dollars from general revenue, all while our Refuse Division drivers struggle to complete their daily routes.
In the midst of this, recycling had its problems too. The hard truth about the single-stream dumpster recycling program is that it did not work. The Mayor’s Office reviewed data from between January and May 2025 and found that 52% of recycling collected was rejected at the Republic Services recycling center due to contamination. Roll-carts fared better, with only 20-25% being rejected, which is partly why recycling will continue to be collected for those residents who have roll-carts.
Blue and Brown dumpsters will be used for trash, green dumpsters will continue to be for yard waste, and blue roll carts will still be for recycling.
But these stats are devastating for those of us who try to be good stewards of our environment. Even if you are very careful about what you put in the recycling dumpster, there was still a coin-flip of a chance that it would end up in a landfill.
Some people make an honest mistake and place items that aren’t recyclable in the dumpsters. Plastic is the big culprit, with many types that simply aren’t recyclable. I won’t get into it here, but practices like greenwashing are meant to confuse consumers into thinking products are more environmentally friendly than they really are. When it comes to what can actually be recycled, it’s complicated. Other people don’t even try, throwing food waste, trash, organics, plastic bags, and more into the large alley bins. We have all lifted the lid to our alley recycling container only to see that someone threw trash into it, contaminating the load.
There is a practical and economical argument to be made for the move to recycling drop-off locations. At a time when the city is struggling to recover from the tornado, with debris collection falling to city employees and trash sometimes going uncollected, the City had to make a frank assessment of the situation and pursue a solution. The trash must be picked up; it is a matter of health for the city’s residents. It costs about $42 per ton to pick up and process trash, compared to $192 per ton for recycling. With half of recycling rejected for contamination, the city was paying almost five times more just to have it end up in a landfill.
There is also an environmental argument for continuing to search for a better solution. Other cities have higher diversion rates, which measures what portion of a city’s total collected waste is diverted from landfills. St. Louis City’s diversion rate is a devastatingly low 10.7%, whereas cities like Austin, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle boast diversion rates of 60-80%. Other cities like Nashville, Baltimore and Kansas City still have diversion rates almost twice ours. Those cities also charge more for their refuse services, and pay their drivers more.
For now, the blue dumpsters in the alleys will remain, but they’ll be used for trash with stickers identifying them as such. Residents who would like to recycle can do so at one of the drop-off locations, and the City is aiming to expand those sites by 50% over the next 90 days, with a goal of having a drop-off site within one mile of every resident’s home. The website will be updated as they are opened.
But what about that $14/month charge on your bill, will that go away? Unfortunately, no, because the fee actually covers comprehensive waste services, including trash, yard waste, recycling, bulk pick-up, and 12 annual drop-offs at a City transfer station. Fortunately though, $14 is far below what most other cities pay for refuse services, including our friends in the County.
This is not the last word on recycling in the City. Next steps include an audit of refuse collection and current accounts, including commercial properties that do not pay collection fees. The administration has also said they will implement tablets in refuse trucks (we’re currently using paper maps), perform additional stakeholder engagement, and more. Alders, myself included, will keep working with the administration towards reducing waste as well as improving recycling. We have work to do, but our City and our environment are worth it.
Lindell/Union bridge replacement
e 9th Ward Town Hall, I received a question about the Lindell/Union bridge replacement, and I promised to provide an update in this newsletter. Without further ado, here it is:
I am eagerly anticipating this replacement. To learn more about this exciting upgrade, the city website has more renderings and info.
