Living in Metro East (Greater St. Louis)

Metro East is the real, well-established term for the Illinois side of the Greater St. Louis, Missouri metro area -- Madison and St. Clair Counties, genuinely oriented toward St. Louis's economy and job market rather than Chicago's, the same cross-state-metro structural pattern this project's Ohio coverage documents for Cincinnati's own Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana footprint. Edwardsville is a real college town, home to Southern Illinois University Edwardsville's 2,660-acre campus 25 miles northeast of downtown St. Louis. Alton, directly across the Mississippi River from St. Louis via the Clark Bridge, carries a wholly distinctive historic identity -- the 7th and final Lincoln-Douglas debate (1858), the hometown of Robert Wadlow (the tallest person in recorded history) and jazz musician Miles Davis, and the real, if sobering, 1837 killing of abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy -- alongside honestly disclosed, historically catastrophic Mississippi River flood risk (a 42.7-foot crest in the Great Flood of 1993, more than double flood stage). Belleville and Collinsville round out the region as St. Clair and Madison County towns whose job markets and daily commuting patterns run toward St. Louis, not Chicago -- a genuinely different economic orbit from every other Illinois region in this project.

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Last reviewed: 2026-09-05. Independent research; see individual place pages for metric-level source attribution. This is not financial, tax, or legal advice -- confirm current figures with a local professional before making a decision.