North St. Louis needs Reparations now 

“Overcoming the legacy of housing discrimination, disparities, and disadvantage is a steep task. All of its elements—institutional ‘redlining,’ federal housing and urban renewal policies, prevailing patterns of segregation, the racial wealth gap, local zoning and planning policies—were underwritten by massive public investments.”

The St. Louis Reparations Commission wrote this about the city’s role in shaping a segregated and unequal housing landscape. This report came seven months before a tornado swept through the city, killing five people, injuring dozens, and damaging thousands of properties. This storm ripped across St. Louis without regard for the invisible dividing lines that shape our lives.

But in its aftermath, those lines re-emerged. While the tornado’s effects are widespread and severe, they are not even. Like a critical patient with pre-existing conditions, it is again Black North City that is left needing a lifeline. Decades of disinvestment, depleted housing stock and crumbling infrastructure, uninsured and underinsured properties, and pervasive poverty: these conditions upgrade a natural disaster to an existential crisis.

Reparations provide an alternative to enduring destitution or mass displacement.

Unlike a once-in-a-century storm, the basic dimensions of this crisis were foreseeable. The Commission offered this retelling of one piece of relevant history:

“The City’s notorious ‘Team Four’ plan in 1975 proposed a policy of ‘triage’ which reserved resources for neighborhoods that were doing well or showing early signs of stress, while recommending intentional ‘depletion’ of those most in need. Large scale clearance was replaced by systematic neglect.”

The devastation now on display in the city’s northern half is fueled by 50 years of abandonment by public and private institutions alike. There is a clear answer to this man-made inequity: reparations for North St. Louis.

This is a moment for St. Louis to center repair—of the structures left hobbled by the storm and of the socioeconomic wounds left over lifetimes of racist policy and practice. Both require a sense of urgency.

Thousands of homes are now unlivable. Across the hardest-hit zip codes, most have no insurance to replace their precious possessions or help them rebuild. The fortunate minority with insurance are receiving cruel reminders about the racialized nature of a housing market that assigns little value to the places where poor and working-class Black people reside; “the market” may discount their homes, but there will be no such discount to rebuild. Entire blocks face the threat of generational homes lost forever, a potential mass exodus that would deepen racial disparities and erase irreplaceable bonds of community and collective memory.

Perhaps this is precisely the “depletion” that the Team Four plan and its quiet proponents have sought all along. History suggests that there are rooms where the prospect of “redeveloping” the northside is being discussed not with regret but with yearning.

Reparations provide an alternative to enduring destitution or mass displacement. Reparative strategies should take various forms. Beyond the polarizing option of unrestricted cash (which is needed and justified despite significant political hostility), the Reparations Commission has offered up many approaches as a starting point, including: adopting an official city history acknowledging harms to Black St. Louisans; fostering cultural preservation and memory; providing grants and financial assistance for homeownership, home repair, and property tax relief; allocating land to affordable housing development in Black communities; investing in the revitalization of neighborhoods neglected due to segregation and racism; and increasing access to parks, recreation, and green spaces in these areas.

“Housing policies,” the Commission explained, “should connect residents of historically-disadvantaged neighborhoods to local and regional opportunities, while simultaneously making and sustaining meaningful investments in those neighborhoods—for the benefit of those who live there.” We should pursue all of these proposals and more, including a permanent City Reparations Committee focused on implementation.

It is encouraging that the state and federal governments have begun lending support to the recovery efforts in St. Louis. And it is appropriate that the city has allocated an initial $30 million for relief. But it’s not enough.

Fortunately, we have no shortage of public and private resources in St. Louis. We still have $270 million in Rams settlement funds that were debated for months with no resolution. The corporate community previously floated the prospect of matching funds for high-impact development. There is no better or more pressing use for those resources than reparations for North St. Louis—today!

It took less than 30 minutes for an extreme storm to ravage St. Louis. It took many decades to hobble half of our city and leave its residents especially vulnerable. How long will it take to make it right?

Blake Strode is executive director of ArchCity Defenders, a holistic legal advocacy organization.