St. Louisans were outraged. The well-known lawyer Terry Crouppen aired a 30-second ad that ran in St. Louis during Super Bowl 50 saying of Kroenke’s decision, “We cheered [the Rams] year after losing year. In return, they trashed, then left, us.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Benjamin Hochman struck a more optimistic chord when he declared, “They can strip away our NFL team … but they can’t snatch our confidence because, right here, right now, we will harness it, we will cradle it, and we will carry it into the next year and years, because we are St. Louis.”

The Gateway City does have much to boast about. It’s home to world-class centers of learning (Washington University in St. Louis, to name one); nine Fortune 500 companies; a robust medical system (BJC Healthcare); cultural institutions that rival those of cities twice its size (the St. Louis Zoo); and one of the most storied baseball franchises in history, the Cardinals, a team that has won the World Series twice in the last 10 years alone.

Yet while Kroenke’s argument that St. Louis can’t support an NFL team is self-serving, he’s not altogether mistaken about the city’s economic plight. Relative to big metro areas on the coasts, St. Louis has lost ground in recent years. Job growth since the recession has slowed. The city’s population growth has stagnated. Downtown St. Louis sits eerily quiet on most days, despite millions of taxpayer dollars spent on upgrades—including on the Edward Jones Dome, the Rams’ now-vacant home. The city has a nascent tech start-up scene, but struggles to keep its most successful companies from leaving town—the payment firm Square was conceived in St. Louis by two native sons who relocated to San Francisco in 2009. The per-capita income of the St. Louis metro area today has fallen to 77 percent of that of metro New York, down from 89 percent in 1979. And while St. Louis’s nine Fortune 500 corporate headquarters are a lot for a metro area of 2.8 million people, that’s down from 12 in 2000 and (correcting for the way Fortune changed its methodology in 1994) 23 in 1980.

Experts often point to manufacturing decline, offshoring, and racial strife to explain the relative economic weakness of St. Louis and other Rust Belt cities. But these ills hardly have afflicted St. Louis more than they have Chicago, New York, Boston, and Los Angeles—which all have mounted much stronger comebacks in recent decades. Yes, those other cities made the transition from manufacturing to services and technology. But a quarter-century ago, St. Louis was already (and, to some extent, it still is) a hub of many of the post-industrial industries that have gone on to experience the fastest growth, from pharmaceuticals to finance to food processing.

Moreover, St. Louis had an abundance of what regional economic growth theorists such as Richard Florida, Edward Glaeser, and Enrico Moretti argue is the most important ingredient of success for post-industrial America: a large population of educated, professional, creative types who dream up the innovations that drive growth and profits (think software in Seattle and Silicon Valley, biotech in Boston, finance in New York and Charlotte). In 1980, 23 percent of adults living in the St. Louis area had completed four years of college or higher—double the national average and greater than that of economically “hot” cities like Dallas, Charlotte, and San Diego. Even more important, one out of every five residents worked in fields like finance, insurance, real estate, business, health, law, or medicine.