Unlike San Francisco, St. Louis is a blue island in a red state, and conservative state policies have at least partly driven the city’s decline. More apt parallels to St. Louis are places like Kansas City, Mo., Memphis, Nashville and Little Rock, Ark. : liberal enclaves that in a macrocosm of the worst kind of family dysfunction are at the mercy of conservative state governments. In 2015, for example, St. Louis passed an ordinance to gradually raise the state’s $7.65 minimum wage for workers in the city to $11 by 2018 — prompting passage of a state law that retroactively prohibited cities from passing their own minimum wage hikes and dropping St. Louis workers’ minimum by more than $2 overnight. (Missouri voters later responded with a statewide referendum that stepped around the legislature and gradually raised the state’s minimum wage to $12 by this year.)

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Persons: Louis’s, Louis Organizations: Little Locations: Francisco, Francisco’s, St, Kansas City, Mo, Memphis, Nashville, Missouri