Something good? about St. Louis? Don’t see that every day!
Ray “CityNerd” Delanty rated the neighborhood just across the street from me as the number one example of how much better your quality of life can be, for even less money, if you give up your car(s) and both live, and work, in a walk-friendly, transit-friendly part of town. (Similar comparisons are included for 25 other US cities all over the country.)
I live in the Tower Grove South neighborhood, just a couple miles from his example of Benton Park West, pretty comparable. For a rustbelt town in a flyover red-state, TGS, Benton Park, and neighboring Dutchtown have amazing transit coverage, it's why I moved there from the suburbs not long after I gave up my car.
There is crime, but if you aren't a gunslinger yourself and you don't hang out with gunslingers, it's extremely safe, and when gunslingers shoot each other, who cares? The schools aren't great, though, unless you can get your kid into one of the magnet schools; some of those like the performing arts high school and the language immersion middle school are better than you'd find in a wealthy exurb. And Benton Park West's probably going to get a bus rapid transit line in at most a couple of years.
Oh, and did I mention it has an actual Progressive majority city government, including staunch progressives as mayor and as president of the board of alders? That might matter to some of CityNerd’s listeners. It's why the rents finally stabilized, they greenlit a ton of dense infill, much of it sliding-scale rents financed by, of all people, the Missouri Lutherans. That's right, this is a town where even some of the right-wing fundamentalists support mixed-use, mixed-income, car-optional housing construction.
