STLife

STLife // Taking Care of Business
AT THE DONALD
DANFORTH
PLANT SCI-
ENCE CENTER,
RESEARCHER
MALIA GEHAN
AND HER TEAM
STUDY HOW
PLANTS CAN
BE MORE
RESILIENT.
B
usiness is booming in St. Louis.
Even national publications are
taking notice. Seek Business Capital
recently ranked St. Louis as a top city
for women entrepreneurs. Business
Insider credits the startup scene as one
of the fastest-growing in the country.
The Penny Hoarder and Redfin named
St. Louis as the top city for millennials
and the most affo dable, and the
Council for Community and Economic
Research credits St. Louis as having one
of the lowest costs of living among the
nation’s 20 largest metro areas.
Today, St. Louis is home to nine
Fortune 500 companies. Last year,
Edward Jones, Enterprise Holdings,
and Emerson—all of which give back to
the community, like so many other St.
Louis companies—landed on Forbes’
list of Best Employers for Women. And
Bunge and Bayer are expanding their
footprints here.
The city also has been long recognized
as a leader in plant sciences, with more
than 1,000 plant science Ph.D.s, the largest
concentration in the world. And with
construction underway on the 97-acre
Next NGA West campus in North St.
Louis, the city is expected to become a
leader in geospatial technology.
At the same time, the Cortex Innovation
District, T-REX, and 39 North are
creating programs and initiatives to fuel
technology and innovation.
But all of this growth didn’t happen
overnight.
START ME UP
In the early 2000s, the 200 acres where
the Cortex Innovation District is now
located, between Washington University’s
medical campus and Saint Louis
University was largely desolate. “It was
a tired, industrial area with vacant lots,”
says Cortex president and CEO Dennis
Lower. “It was really the hole in a donut
of fairly decent infrastructure.”
So a group of civic leaders gathered to
create a road map. Their goal: to develop
an innovation district that would bring
high-paying tech jobs to the city, generate
new tax revenue, and become the
most inclusive innovation district in the
country. “This has been a very intentional
effort,” Lower says. “We have
been growing this now for almost two
decades, and now we are getting to the
place where we are getting traction.”
By 2018, a study showed that Cortex
companies and employees generated a
direct impact of $1 billion. When looking
at the indirect impact, that number
jumped to more than $2 billion. Today,
there are approximately 6,000 employees
in the district, and that number’s
expected to more than double next year.
At inception, there were 2 million square
feet of office space; in 2020, 1.2 million
42 Photography courtesy of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center