GTA 6 City of the Week is a weekly article series here on GTA BOOM. Every week, we will evaluate a different city in the United States, gauging how well it would fit GTA 6 as a setting. First though, a recap of the week's GTA V news...
Those of you familiar with the reputation of St. Louis might have wondered why we didn't cover this city in the past. In all honesty, initially I was shooting for coastal cities, though I had St. Louis in mind. Then, after a while the articles drifted in-land while St. Louis drifted out-of-memory. In any case, a helpful commenter (who also happens to be from St. Louis) on last week's Charlotte post pointed out that the city just got rated as the most dangerous in America yet again, so what better opportunity to make up for its absence than now?
St. Louis
In spite of its current state as a relatively small city on a national scale with not exactly the best reputation in terms of public safety, St. Louis has a history to be proud of. At one point the city was the fourth largest in the country and became a major economic hub due to its busy inland port, facilitated by the Mississippi. St. Louis even hosted the 1904 Summer Olympics, which was notable for the fact that out of 651 participating athletes, only 62 were foreigners due to the difficulty of accessing the city, as well as the international tension caused by the Russo-Japanese war.
St. Louis today dropped down to being the 60th largest city in the USA with a population of barely over 300,000. That said, it is the second largest city in the state of Missouri, and the surrounding metropolitan area is home to around 3 million souls. Taking a look at the map, we'll see a large urban sprawl growing out of St. Louis itself, making it look like most much larger cities, however from an administrational point of view, the city proper actually forms a relatively small chunk of the sprawl in its middle.
The city is independent, meaning it isn't part of any state or county within the USA. I imagine this is one of the main reasons why it hasn't been unified with the large surrounding sprawl — in fact, here's a question for US based readers who know about such things: Several cities we've examined have large areas around them of contiguous settlement, but cut up into different cities or towns from an administrational point of view. In some cases, we've seen a town physically inside another, being bordered on all sides by the same settlement.
In such cases, why aren't the settlements unified? Is there some kind of legal issue preventing this? In Hungary it is relatively common practice to turn small settlements into districts of larger cities which have "consumed" them through growth, and this has happened on several occasions with the Capital, Budapest. Many of the outer districts were once independent towns, but were added to the jurisdiction of the capital for convenience and for the sake of administrational optimization.
Getting back on track, St. Louis has been leading the charge in terms of urban renewal, as many of the inner city areas have suffered from degradation. The downtown area as well a several residential complexes have been getting the most attention in an attempt to revitalize the city. St. Louis' small geographical size has been attributed to the choice of becoming independent, which significantly lowered city-income from taxes.
St. Louis was once a favored destination by immigrants, especially Bosnians, which has led to the city developing the largest population (around 70,000) of Bosnians outside of their home country. Bosnian-Americans are generally considered to have integrated very well into American society, and are seldom victims of discrimination due to this fact.
The St. Louis economy has changed much over the course of history. Once a major industrial city, St. Louis depended upon its port. The Mississippi river allowed for large shipments to arrive, resulting in a booming manufacturing industry which fed off the port. More recently, however, the city's industry has reorganised itself to be more service oriented, and is one of the fastest growing hubs of biomedical and pharmaceutical research.
From a geographical standpoint, St.Louis isn't exactly ideal. As an inland city, turning it into an island for the sake of GTA 6 would be a bit of a stretch, and there are no large bodies of water around either. Sure, the Mississippi flows through it, but there is quite a large difference between a river and an ocean.
