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A Local Code for America Brigade Works to Reprogram St. Louis
Overhauled digital infrastructure will help people access the services they need — but deep-rooted problems persist
Right now, in a four-block section of the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood in north St. Louis, cranes and backhoes are demolishing and clearing 130 badly blighted properties with the help of Jack Dorsey, a native of the city and co-founder of Twitter and Square. Dorsey’s hometown has struggled with blocks and blocks of blight for decades, which serve as magnets for drug activity and gun violence. But those backhoes might not have been there were it not for the efforts of local civic techies.
Which brings us to rooms 126–128 in the St. Louis City Hall building, where you’ll find the recorder of deeds office. Late last year, Michael Butler, a tech-savvy millennial and former Missouri state representative, ousted an incumbent who had held that office longer than Butler had been alive. Butler’s platform? “In 2019, you should not have to go to City Hall to access your city government,” he says. “The general public, they can’t believe that the government that they pay taxes to every day is not up to date with the private sector they pay fees to every day. … All we’re asking is that government keep up.”
At a hackathon back in 2015, while nearby Ferguson still smoldered in the wake of the Michael Brown murder, Butler first met members of OpenSTL, the local volunteer brigade of Code for America, the innovative nonprofit that began 10 years ago as a sort of Peace Corps for well-meaning nerds. Code for America’s brigades operate in 81 cities and in almost every state. They’ve produced a range of solutions for real, local problems, from a renter’s rights app in San Jose, California, to a reentry resources website in Greensboro, North Carolina, for people recently released from prison.
That 2015 St. Louis hackathon focused on reform of the municipal courts system and produced YourSTLCourts, a tool to track upcoming court dates and receive text message reminders on a mobile phone. There, Butler met Nehemiah Dacres, then the captain of OpenSTL, who had found his way to the civic tech world after becoming interested in local policy and infrastructure when the bus routes he…
