St. Louis City also has a problem with its beloved "earnings tax".

At one point as our office space lease renewal was approaching I plotted all of our 100+ employees at the time on a map, almost all software engineers, about 2/3 of them lived west of the city and 1/3 lived east, and only a single one lived in the city, and he was in a temporary apartment immediately post divorce, didn't get the house. To me that says 99+% of professionals don't want to live in the city. Our first office plan had been to put one in the city, but the earnings tax on our side and the employee's side was a deal breaker for a business with payroll as its predominant expense. So instead we got an office on each side of the river and teleported across the city as needed with the interstate highway system.