“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…