PERSPECTIVE: No More “Window Dressing”

Date Posted: April 12, 2022

Posted In: Discussion, Ideas, Regionalism, Workforce,

by Tom Finan, Executive Director/Co-Founder, Construction Forum

It is time for us to step away from a “window dressing” approach to the St. Louis Region’s biggest issues.

A bit of generational explanation is in order. In a time of instant, electronic purchasing gratification we now have two generations to whom the term “window dressing” is a cypher. But in my childhood and youth “display windows” were a major marketing tool for retail institutions.

The Holiday season was not complete until we were bundled downtown to look at the miniature worlds that had been created behind the plate glass of the Famous Barr and Stix Baer & Fuller department stores. The windows often planted notions in our small craniums that were later communicated to Santa. We’ll get back to Santa in a bit.

A couple of weeks ago my brother, Chuck, was doing some family research about our maternal grandfather. Charles B. Wheeler was my business mentor. Armed with an eighth-grade education, he became the CEO of Boyd’s, a local clothing store chain. Founded in 1876 it was a St. Louis institution for most of the 20th Century.

As teens, most of the Finan kids worked at Boyd’s at one time or another. In his early ’20s my brother, Chuck, a designer, worked in the display department. I found some old photos of Boyd’s windows from the 1940s on the Missouri Historical Society website and sent them to him. He wrote me, “Those full-size windows were very creepy. I was always leery of dropping something and having it hit the window and breaking it.”

It’s Not About the Optics

Our civic agenda in St. Louis over the decades has played out in a manner similar to those long-ago storefront dioramas: We have continually pinned our hopes on ephemeral displays which have been long on promise and short on delivery. Our regional focus on the optics — creating the illusion of change — has been so paralyzing that our region is close to becoming a national irrelevancy.

To stretch the analogy  a bit further, my brother’s fear of breaking the display window is apt.  Breaking that glass wall of the display window that was and is our regional psyche could allow collective system change to penetrate to the street. And the street is where the people are.

Just as the store windows promised kids a perfect Christmas, our regional storefront has created a civic mindset that I’ll call the “Santa Claus Syndrome”. We might not be expecting a corpulent man in a red suit to come down the chimney with a sack of goodies, but we often prefer what passes here as system change to be spoon fed by somebody from a higher pay grade.

Focused, collaborative action is the piece that has been missing from this region for my entire 70 years here, and in my parents’ and grandparents’ time before that. During my childhood and continuing until two years ago with the formation of Greater St. Louis, Inc., our region operated under a pale, male, and stale civic structure, led by the somewhat ironically-named Civic Progress.

Those civic fathers built Busch Stadium, supported MetroLink and launched the St. Louis Community College system. But they also acquiesced or engineered the demolition of poor neighborhoods and propped up a system that demolished what little generational wealth there was in the Black community.

Now that we’ve lost a lot of our corporate headquarters, we’re hearing about “anchor institutions” — healthcare institutions, universities, and nonprofit interest groups that are popping up like whack-a-mole. I recently asked the leader of one such new organization how they defined their stated mission of supporting growth in the technology sector. “That’s something we’re trying to figure out,” they told me.

Becoming Engaged

Recently I heard Tony Messenger, the Pulitzer-winning Post-Dispatch columnist, speak in the Central West End about his book Profit and Punishment. Tony’s writing addresses unequal ways in which the justice system penalizes the poor with fines, penalties, and incarceration for minor infractions. During the Q&A he urged the audience to take personal ownership, to join the conversation, to become active in real system change here. He suggested that some of the COVID and NFL money could be applied to reparations, not for slavery but for the historic disinvestment of our region in its Black population.

One person in the audience argued that “the banks” need to take ownership of helping to right the ship of generational poverty. I know of at least one bank that is doing just that. Orv Kimbrough, Midwest BankCentre CEO spoke at our Dec. 2 program on system change.

“While race is a social construct that some have the privilege not to see, I see the impact of race every day. It is hard to deny that racism, defined as the systemic allocation of resources that doles out influence, justice and economic opportunity based on skin color, doesn’t exist. It is hard to deny that race doesn’t influence every aspect of one’s life from housing, healthcare, employment, education and yes in my industry, banking,” he said.

“Shared prosperity is about sharing power, providing justice, and nurturing the conditions for creating wealth. Wealth creation is about the ability to work and earn a living wage, to own a home, to start or scale a business, to educate our children, and to live a healthy self-determined life. It is about giving everybody a place at the starting line.”

System Change Series

Recently we convened the facilitators who have been conducting our continuing series of working sessions on system change to build an inclusive construction workforce. The purpose of the meeting was to work on next steps in the participatory process that has begun. The ownership and energy in that room encouraged me, just as the personal investment of those at our last two events has done.

At our March 16th event, I told those in attendance that they had decided “to look the elephant in the room squarely in the eye.” I told them, “That elephant is the history of the systemic exclusion of Black, Brown and women workers from meaningful participation in our industry. It is the resulting lack of family stability, generational wealth building, and participation in our region’s economic growth.

“It is the history of a system that successfully saw our region and our industry endure two world wars and a Depression and emerge surviving and thriving. But during those periods of crisis and triumph, that same system kept a substantial number of our region’s citizens on the outside looking in.”

If we join together to work on system change instead of focusing on optics or waiting for “Santa Claus,”  we can end the window dressing and build a more equitable and prosperous future for our industry and our region.