Investment in the city is "up"

Yesterday's post in the blog attributed to Mayor Slay said that investment in the city is up 54%, if you measure investment by building permits.

It's noteworthy that the author of the blog posted this the day after the Post-Dispatch ran a front page story with the headline "As city again attracts residents, jobs slip away."

It's great that there are rehabs, and I guess some of the new construction going on in the city could be worse (in terms of demolition, urbanity, and building materials, though on the whole it's pretty bad), but building permits alone only reflect a little piece of the story. I want to know: Slay, where are the jobs?* And more specifically, as someone who makes $7.50 an hour, I want to know: Where are the decent jobs that pay a living wage?

And while we're measuring important investment in the city, why not talk about investment in the schools? You can cry "past administrations" all you want, but the fact is that the cuts at the recent budget meeting of the School Board were very hurtful to an already critically injured system, and you know it.

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*According to the St. Louis Regional Chamber & Growth Association, the unemployment rate for St. Louis City in 2004 was 9.1%.