Created in the spirit of incentivizing reinvestment in communities, tax abatements allow a party to freeze property taxes for a period of years while they redevelop the land. In theory, tax abatements can be a positive for urban development. Unregulated, however, they can lead to express gentrification and hardened segregation. In St. Louis, the latter is unfolding.
On Tuesday, September 27, the Board of Aldermen met to discuss 19 properties proposed for redevelopment. These proposals come about when the party interested in redevelopment approaches their alderman asking for support. Working with the St. Louis Development Corporation, aldermen then take the proposals they agree to sponsor to the board to have them either passed or rejected.
In St. Louis, these proposals tend to pass for the most part without challenge from the other aldermen. Otherwise known as “aldermanic courtesy,” the idea is that each alderman will act without board interference in exchange for allowing other aldermen to do the same.
The meeting held last week was no different. Bills came through the board with little conversation or opposition. In only one instance did an alderman abstain from voting, perhaps as a light-handed way of disagreeing without rejecting. Occasionally, some questions were asked of developers: Does the design match the neighborhood? How many stories will the structure be? This soft probing is usually followed by a chorus of, “No further questions.”
This summer, concerns were raised about unchecked tax abatements by a team of policy researchers at Washington University’s Brown School. They discovered a lack of investment in communities north of Delmar, while citing that “the displacement of the black population … is widespread throughout the Central Corridor.”
One of the study’s authors, Assistant Professor Molly Metzger, reports that the black population in the Central Corridor dropped by more than 2,300 residents from 2000 to 2010. During that same timeframe, the non-black population of the Central Corridor grew by more than 7,000. The Central Corridor they’re referring to is the region of St. Louis that receives the most tax abatements.
The report urged St. Louis to use tax abatements in accordance with poverty statistics in the city, meaning that areas with higher rates of poverty were to be given extended tax abatements to incentivize development. More affluent areas like those in the Central Corridor would only be allowed limited tax abatements. This provision alone would help regulate a more equal investment in the future.
The study also noted the need for affordable housing throughout the region, and particularly in areas that are gentrifying. Inclusionary zoning laws could be one way of advancing that goal.
Of the 19 proposals presented last week, 17 of them were in the Central Corridor between Arsenal and Delmar. Some were already under construction by the time the “incentive” was being considered. None of the 19 was north of Delmar. As the report points out, in time, this pattern creates an uneven burden of taxation on black communities north of Delmar.
The violent irony of this laissez-fair approach to tax abatements is within the city’s history. Entire swaths of land in St. Louis are vacant or “blighted” due to a century’s worth of racist policies like redlining, racial zoning, and subsidized suburbanization for white families. These historically destructive policies have created the present need to incentivize redevelopment.
While well-connected developers find ways to avoid paying property taxes, ordinary homeowners are left to cover the budget gaps. Just as white flight in the middle of the twentieth century was subsidized by the taxation of black communities, so too it seems will the gentrification of St. Louis occur on the backs of this city’s black communities.
A recent graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, Clark Randall is an editorial intern for The St. Louis American.
