Team Four, Inc.

Team Four Inc was founded in 1968 by four Washington University graduates. They were hired to draft a comprehensive development plan for the City of St. Louis in response to these findings of the 1973 Rand report - St. Louis: A City and Its Suburbs: A summary statement of the research findings and policy implications of a series of studies conducted under the St. Louis project of the RAND Urban Policy Analysis Program. Three possible futures for the city are posed: continued decline; stabilization in a new role as an increasingly black suburb; and return to a former role as the center of economic activity in the metropolitan area. The analysis argues that without major policy changes beyond the local level, the city will most likely continue to decline, and suggests that, among the alternatives open to the city, promoting a new role for St. Louis as one of many large suburban centers of economic and residential life holds more promise than reviving the traditional central city functions. However, new resources, available to the city from sources outside the city, are essential to any improvement. Several mechanisms are offered for consideration: (1) a more substantial federal revenue-sharing program; (2) a state revenue-sharing program to support selected public goods; (3) a metropolitan revenue program, sharing revenue generated by industry in the metropolitan area; and (4) a metropolitan earnings tax. This report shocked city leaders. The planning commission hired a consulting firm to update the 1947 Plan and to reverse the decline cited in the Rand Report. The draft 1975 INTERIM COMPREHENSIVE PLAN was the city’s response. The Interim Comprehensive Plan was introduced to the public as a replacement of the 1947 Comprehensive Plan . The City Planning Commission claims that the planning needs of St. Louis had changed over a period of thirty years and therefore the comprehensive plan for the City should change as well. This draft document was written for citizen review. The overall focus of this comprehensive plan was to provide citizens with the highest quality of life, socially, economically, and physically. The plan contains policies and recommendations for land use, transportation, public facilities and housing, all of which are aimed at establishing a quality residential environment, job opportunities, economic development, and expanded opportunities for the disadvantaged. This never adopted draft plan is best known for the firm the wrote it, Team Four. The Team Four plan was urban triage — cutting off municipal services to those areas deemed too far gone. Save what can still be saved. It was viewed as a plot to drive black citizens out of the city. Many still feel that was the intent or would have been the result if the plan would have been officially adopted. In 2008, Rep. Maxine Waters conducted a Congressional Investigation into the ""Team Four Plan" where St Louis City officials denied any overt or covert implementation of the report.