Rewriting the Business Plan (again)

Verbage from the old one:

Geographically the core market for our product is St. Louis, mostly concentrated in St. Louis City. The city has two paradoxical identities. On the one hand its demographic identity is a study in diversity – half black, half white with vibrant and growing Hispanic and Bosnian populations. From the public housing projects to the private streets and mansions, St. Louis is economically diverse as well. This diversity of cultures creates a colorful political scene full of factions, tensions and intrigue. On the other hand, the traumatic consequence of the city’s divorce from St. Louis County in the 19th century, coupled with a population free fall – from 800,000 in 1950 to 350,000 in 2000 has created a unifying identity within this diverse population – the people who didn’t leave.

The intersection of these two identities has created highly accentuated political competition and discourse. Our political history has left the city with various political factions—representing various geographic, racial, or economic sectors of the city—and as the city has contracted, these factions have come into closer contact with each other. At the same time, the traditional political mechanisms that kept the city more or less unified no longer work. Thus, the phenomenon of the engaged citizen is one that is found across the city—in a variety of racial, economic, and political sectors—even though they may not seem the same or speak the same political language. However, what they all share is a need for basic political information, because increasingly the dictates of politics and economics call for them to work in a broader political context.