New community report strategizes to ‘dismantle the divide’

When she was 18, LaTonya and her African-American family were living in one of the few affordable housing complexes in predominantly white South St. Louis County. But because it is one of the most isolated areas from public transportation in the region, LaTonya had to walk along a treacherously narrow shoulder of Highway 141 to get to her $7.50-an-hour job at Burger King.

“The risk of getting to the job was worth it to support the young children in her family,” stated a new community report written by seven local organizations.

The 115-page report, “Segregation in St. Louis: Dismantling the Divide,” told the stories of many families like LaTonya’s who lacked access to health care, fresh food and good employment opportunities because the housing they could afford were in areas with the least resources.

St. Louis is among the 10 most-segregated cities in the country, according to a calculation of the percentage of metropolitan-area black residents who live in predominantly black census tracts performed by 24/7 Wall St. The St. Louis region’s policymakers have long catered to meeting the needs of white middle- and upper-class families, in the process making living in St. Louis harder for low-income and African-American families.

Both local and national experts attempted to explain why at the “Dismantling the Divide: Fair Housing Conference” on Wednesday, April 25, hosted jointly by the Metropolitan St. Louis Equal Housing Opportunity Commission (EHOC) and For the Sake of All.

“For over a century, African Americans in the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County had endured housing policies and development strategies that have trapped generations of some families in segregated and disinvested neighborhoods,” stated the report, which was released at the conference.

The conference’s keynote speaker Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, said segregation across the country could be attributed to two policies that the Federal Housing Administration established during the late 1940s – systematic segregation of public housing and the federal funding of whites-only subdivisions in every metropolitan area.

Although the conference was also meant to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, Rothstein noted that enforcement provisions weren’t passed until 1988.

“So I might recommend you postpone your celebration until another 20 years,” Rothstein said. “And the Fair Housing Act only prohibited future discrimination effectively. It did nothing to undo this enormous segregation they created.”

After World War II, many working-class families – both white and black – were living in public housing projects. At some point, white families started to move out, and the projects became almost entirely black, Rothstein said. That’s because the Federal Housing Administration began to finance whites-only suburban housing divisions – which moved white working-class families out of the urban core and into the suburbs. The administration’s written manual required developers to sign agreements, or racial deed covenants, that they would not sell these homes to African Americans, he said.

Because black families were not able to buy these homes, they rented apartments in public housing – missing out on generations of equity building. Today, African-American incomes on average are about 60 percent of white incomes, he said, and African-American wealth is about 10 percent of white wealth.

“That enormous disparity is entirely contributable to the unconstitutional federal housing policy that was practiced in the mid-20th century, explicitly violating the 14th Amendment of the Constitution – and that we have never remedied and never even attempted to remedy,” Rothstein said.

He stated the policies were not just a “historical curiosity.”

“They are so powerful that they created the boundaries we have today,” he said.

Zoning and race in St. Louis

St. Louis is among the most-segregated cities because the region got an aggressive start – earlier than the rest of the country – on using segregation tools, such as racial deed covenants and exclusionary zoning, according to the report that was written collaboratively by ArchCity Defenders, Ascend STL, Invest STL, Empower Missouri, Metropolitan St. Louis Equal Housing and Opportunity Council (EHOC), For the Sake of All, and Team TIF.

Some of those damaging zoning practices are still in place today, particularly regarding where multi-family units can be built. As part of the report, researchers surveyed nearly all of the region’s existing zoning requirements.

Today, few parts of St. Louis County are zoned for more affordable multi-family homes. And large swaths of far western St. Louis County are almost exclusively zoned for detached single-family homes. The cities of Ladue and Grantwood Village banned multi-family housing outright. Another 48 cities lacked specific zoning classifications for multi-unit housing, the report found.

If developers want to build multi-family housing in some cities, they must go through a process that includes formal hearings and resident input.

Of the city and county’s approximately 614,000 housing units, researchers found 25.9 percent of them exist in some form of multi-family housing and they are concentrated in a few areas. Because of the zoning practices and other policies, the report found that the region’s 41 most-exclusionary cities – meaning that they remain inaccessible to most low-income and/or African-American families – are located in West and South St. Louis County.

Modern development tools, such as tax incentives, can also be veiled segregation tools, that displace African Americans, the study found. For instance, the report found that tax incentives, such as TIFs, mostly support majority-white or commercial neighborhoods.

“The current use of development tax incentives has directed investment into wealthier communities and neighborhoods and bypassed areas with the greatest need for jobs, businesses, retail, and better housing,” the report found.

Remedies for dismantling the divide

“Conscious choices created our ‘geography of inequity’ in St. Louis,” the report stated. “Conscious choices can also help to reshape it.”

The report made several recommendations. The first was that St. Louis County create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund and that St. Louis city fully fund its trust fund.

In order to combat the legacy of redlining, the report recommends creating a “Greenlining Fund” that would foster homeownership for lower-income residents.

It recommends enacting legislation that prevents housing discrimination based on source of income.

Tax incentives are continuing the region’s legacy of segregation. The report demands reform of TIFs and other public tax incentive programs, and it urges that publicly-funded development projects include Community Benefits Agreements – or agreements that protect the residents’ interests in tax-incentive deals.

In order to invest in neighborhoods dealing with economic hardship, it encourages those in the private sector to support a regional Community Reinvestment Fund that would provide loans, grants and tax abatements in these areas.

Like the rest of the country, St. Louis has an eviction crisis which is destroying families, particularly those in poor, African-American communities. The report recommends eliminating unfair local nuisance ordinances which disproportionately put domestic violence survivors and people of color in low-income families at risk of evictions. The report also highlights the city’s former program called Hope Is Moving In, which partnered with local agencies to send housing caseworkers into public schools to prevent evictions and homelessness. The program was not sustained through federal funding, but was considered a model for the prevention of evictions and homelessness.

And finally it pushes residents to establish “Consciously Inclusive Communities” and to start having more conversations about how they can heal and unify the region within their own neighborhoods.

The report concluded with the hopeful message, “Change is possible.”

Read the report “Segregation in St. Louis: Dismantling the Divide” athttps://forthesakeofall.org.