The Delmar Divide - Segregation in St. Louis, Missouri

when i hear that term i think of a city that has not come to grips with itself that there are differences be there ethnic economic social that has prevented the city from coming together as a whole so that we can work for the larger good when i heard those words the first thing i think is white and black the word discrimination comes to my mind like discrimination racism you know the vestiges of all of that come to my mind when i think about the word del mar divide to me it's it's a term uh that sends the message that we're not on one accord and because we're not on one accord we're not able to take advantage of the opportunities that are presented to us as a city i mean to me what it evokes is you know the other side of the tracks people in st louis do tend to live you know it's so segregated they live in their bubbles because the number of times i've had someone say to me oh st louis never struck me as that segregated because of course if you know if you'd ever cross the line you don't see the segregation you just see your side of it for me segregation i mean that's really what it is like you have a white population down in the southern part because they're not part of it and you have a black population in the north part like i mean that's kind of what the gist of it really is like you have the different groups that i mean don't really intermingle in in some respects it's like you know st louis is caught in a time warp again you can tell that if it had been kept up and if the money had stayed there it would look almost exactly the same but that you know that investment and that care i guess just sort of like dried up at some point and at the same time what was north of delbar in the eyes of many was less than what was south because there's so much concentrated wealth there in the central west end and these huge mansions right that have been kept up since you know the 1800s and you know um and you get two blocks north and all of a sudden it's you know it's very much you know i mean tragic for one thing i mean that's um it doesn't have to be that way a lot of cities have something like that but it's not as pronounced it's not as stark it's not as ingrained um i think as it is here and there's a lot of reasons for that but um and it's tragic in that sense it's tragic and you know you see the crime you see the poverty you see all the stuff that's happening you know north of del mar and you know you know you know those are your neighbors you don't want that happening right i mean that that's you know it affects all of us um it's not just the folks who live up there although they're the most directly affected by it i think del mar really represents our city st louis is on the hot seat he's had so many problems it's had so much unrest and del mar's right in the middle of that when louie came home to the flats he hung up his coat and his hats he gazed all around but no wifey he found so he said where can flossie be at a note on the table he spied he read it just once then he cried it ran louie dear it's too slow for me here so i think i will go for a ride meet me in saint louis louis meet me at the fair don't tell me the lights are shining any place but there we [Music] if you will meet me insane louie louie meet me at the fair [Music] [Applause] [Music] del mar is one of the few streets that runs all the way from downtown all the way down by the river out into st louis county through the suburbs you look at the del mar divide um i believe i think south of the uh del mar population is like 73 white uh north of uh the population is 90 percent black and so obviously that street is is um you know uniquely kind of separates our area uh based on um race del mar is known as the um sort of geographic divide between the areas of town that are majority white and the areas of town that are majority black um and so you know street cars ran out that way the del mar loop is a big sort of entertainment district where they used to have a street car sort of turn around area you know and a lot like a lot of places you know white people in the city of san luis started fleeing for the suburbs you started seeing this split start to occur in the city but in the county also so i said del mar kind of spans the whole thing and so um over time you know people sort of split both sort of self sorting and also by virtue of institutional things that um again sort of south of del mar broadly especially in the city broadly white or sort of mixed race but north of del mar almost monolithically majority african-american i think of economic social ramifications as well the home values are higher south of del mar you know the medium income is higher south of del mar there are more social opportunities and places to go you know uh south of del mar you know so so yeah that's that's the kind of things i think about when we say denmark so whenever you hear the word divide it means that there's one side and the other side but it could also mean one side versus the other side and um in this case because your city of somewhat limited resources one side of the of the divide is getting greater access or more resources than the other side of the divide i think you know you know all you have to do is look at it i mean it's not something you can just talk about you drive by and you just drive through north st louis and you drive through south you know and you see the differences and that's really based on development you know and and investment you know uh you see their their you know stores moving out north uh lack of uh available medical facilities so you know it's it's very very visual to see the difference today i think it still represents kind of a and i look at more terms like central corridor so if you think of the central corridor as being that part of the city that has the best of everything to offer it has our cultural institutions like the science center the art museum the museum of missouri history museum the zoo you know all those things are kind of in washington university saint louis university all the way downtown to the arch you know that's kind of the central corridor and i think del mar is sort of the north side of that if you will and it may go as far south as highway 44 or 64 depending on your view of the world so even though there have been more people of color to migrate south there's still this gap in wealth educational achievements even access to educational opportunities and that probably goes more in line with uh economic situations and that those families are better able to choose school experiences that are better resource than other families so well i think whenever you begin to hire have a higher concentration of poverty you're going to have a less than situation and where there's a greater there's greater access to resources and wealth you're going to have greater investment and more opportunity so to me it represents a place where over time you've had people who've been better off economically sort of concentrate where they live and as a result of that they've done a lot to invest in that part of their community whereas in the other part north you probably have more transitions families as they do better tend to move out of those neighborhoods and either those uh that population is not replaced and so the housing stock goes down the investment's not there you don't have sort of community-based businesses to generate revenue and all those things that you look to have in order for a community to to thrive or for a neighborhood to thrive so there's fewer students attending those schools that are north of del mar if you will uh so those buildings get shut down and and what had traditionally been an anchor is now an eyesore to that community uh even if you think of churches if you think of the migration of african americans to north county they generally left north city and so those churches that they attended are those whatever those religious institutions and educational centers that they were part of they're no longer there so you've had a much larger uh uh decline in population that has not replenished itself and so the um the overall quality of those communities is lesser today than perhaps it was years ago and at the same time what was north of delmar in the eyes of many was less than what was south if you're driving up say king's highway or union and you cross del mar you immediately see the neighborhood change i mean it's just like that as soon as you cross the street you see you know million dollar homes on one side and then on the other side you know houses that can barely appraise out to be sold on the open market i see neighborhoods that look identical to neighborhoods in in south st louis like [Music] their neighborhoods in the 27th ward that look identical to neighborhoods in the 13th ward same housing stock same you can tell it's the same builder because the houses look identical right but those houses in north st louis in the 27th they're second wards uh appraised for at least thirty to fifty thousand dollars less than the same exact house in south st louis and the only thing that's different is that you know because they're on the opposite sides of del mar um and one neighborhood is black and one neighborhood is white and nowhere is that more visible than you know my house and my dad's house like so we live about four or five blocks north of del mar he's on kate's and i'm one street over on cabinet and he built um a what should be appraised as a half a million dollar home um all the bells and whistles insulated concrete foam um you know a propane generator solar panels on the roof three-car garage five bedrooms you know full basement all of the you know and you know uh thousands of square feet his home won't appraise for more than maybe three fifty four hundred thousand dollars but if you move that same home five blocks south it easily goes for i would say 750 800 000 just for sheer location i just want to make sure that there's equity in in our processes um and you know equity in the appraisal process and then as we look at equity we also have to look at you know just um appraising those properties for the same amount isn't going to help things overnight because there may be families in those homes who cannot afford an increase to their taxes overnight like that but what other things can you do to make it more palatable so they're not pushed out of their homes there was one thing i was talking to well i was talking to a group of activists yesterday about economic justice and one of their plans was to freeze property taxes for seniors over 62 who had lived in their home for ten or more years who would also um deed at their home to someone in their family um and so we talked about you know some of the ins and outs about that proposal and i said well well i think is a good proposal and i think philadelphia has done some stuff related to that as well i think that um you know one of the unintended consequences is if you're doing it for every 62 year old regardless of where they live you could have a bunch of you know expensive homes and condos come off of the tax rolls um so you know if if you're really trying to make sure that marginalized families uh hold on to their assets and are able to pass them down as generational wealth then you might have to you know put an income cap in there or a valuation cap so it really targets the people that you're trying to help [Music] we have to do a better job um of when we do give out tax incentives and and don't get me wrong i'm not just saying that we should just stop giving out tax incentives for for a big development all of it has a place but i think we have abused it um in the last you know 20 years or so and so we need to take a look at our 150 plus tip districts and see which ones can be rolled back or or or take the or or retired early um in my office there was a tip that could that was retired two years before it was uh before it expired and we were able to put back eight million dollars into the school district in one year it's a lot of money um and but it begs the question what other tips are like that um we saw with the with whole foods for example the whole foods that's on in the west end that was a tiff the guy built it built you know apartments above it those apartments are all rented out um he got his money back he sold it to somebody else got his money back and then some but why is that tiff still there he got his money back so in my opinion we need to take a really long hard look at how we're awarding incentives um how those incentives are currently doing and exercise any clawback provisions if we can because if that's going to bring back money to the city we're all then that's a perfect way to do it and then invest that money in the right places but most of the things i've seen is sort of a migration of businesses and other key community amenities sort of move about um grocery stores you know um you know access to uh you know health care those types of things home of g phillips hospital which used to be north is no longer there when when regional hospitals shut down you really don't have a health care facility uh north uh in the city north of del mar so you have to go to one of the bjc hospitals or uh saint mary's or other places and and kind of along with that you see this um deterioration of housing uh and a rise in crime that goes along with that so when you have sort of this abandonment of a community and so no one to really vouch for its value then people take advantage of that by you know vandalism you know crime um those types of things which doesn't bode well for the future of those communities because it's going to take more of an investment to turn those things around and then you can't do those things one street or one block at a time you have to do them you know in big chunks where people have to be willing to come in and make an investment and so i think it's you know important to be able to find those who are willing to do that so you know visually you know what i've seen is sort of this loss of population which is left more vacant buildings which you know over time get demolished so you have more vacant lots less people living there uh fewer resources because you don't have income being generated they're less of a tax base because you know the city takes possession of those properties and they don't generate tax and so the city's responsibilities continue to grow but the resources and the revenue that they need to to make those happen are not there in large part so you have a uneven sort of distribution of resources and in those places where you do have resources they're using those to improve and in the other areas they're using those resources just to get by you know so if i'm an alderman i'm using that money to demolish an abandoned building where if i'm south i'm an alderman i'm using that money to maybe build a new building or to enhance the exterior of an existing building so uh resources ended up getting distributed or getting utilized in very different ways and so from a physical standpoint it's sort of actually seeing you know this sort of uh drop in what should be available to any citizen which is safe neighborhoods you know adequate housing access to uh health care and the ability to get to the grocery store i guess no transportation those types of things i think it's more so now the economics of it i mean if you look at you know there there are no major uh you know hospitals north you know you have barnes you got you know saint mary's you know you got singles university you know all these all all the even the you know medical facilities all south of del mar um and you look at uh the biggest treasures the city has which is forest park you know it's one of the biggest treasures they have that's south of del mar um you know and even talking about areas where you know um people like to go out and have a you know nice meal you come off the hill you know and and different things like that you know um even something as simple as a big uh hardware store which is home depot you know that's you know the only one in the city is south it's on south kings highway you know and so i think it's more now more of an economic uh social issue at this point yeah infrastructure um access to retail um no malls no nothing there's no i don't no no malls north of del mar not even in north county um uh access to you know certain types of restaurants for example um there's only one major rest or grocery chain uh north of del mar that's a schnooks that's on union and natural bridge and you know the near the next nearest grocery store i think there's a shop and save a little bit further down natural bridge and shop and safe is good don't get me wrong i shopped i mean it was no save a lot i shop there too they got great stuff um and fresh fruits and vegetables but you know you have deserts you have bank deserts food deserts grocery store deserts healthy restaurant deserts um the only options for fast food um are you know are bad fast food options and don't get me wrong i love a burger from mcdonald's but you have you know mcdonald's white castle but no options for a healthy fast food like a bread company or uh or you know the pasta joint was a noodles and company or any of the places that you see healthy food healthy fast food options um and nowhere was that more evident it was on election day every election day i try to travel around to every um a polling place in every ward and around noon i took a break to meet my staff for lunch and we were in north st louis there was nowhere for us to go to have a sit-down meal you know about eight of us and the only place that we could go was mcdonald's um we need to do better at creating an environment for small business like you know small business restaurants and you know that offer healthy options to thrive and grow and and we don't we just don't pay attention to to people who live north of del mar just yesterday um the superintendent announced that he's closing 11 schools seven are in north st louis uh so you know and we have to do better and again that's not the school district's fault the school district is suffering from years of disinvestment in in in the city and only investment in certain places south of del mar and for years of tax policy that has awarded tax incentives millions of dollars in tax incentives at the and the school district has suffered because where what's the biggest part of the education foundation formula is property taxes 60 of our property taxes is supposed to go to the school district well if you are giving out hundreds of millions of dollars in tax abatements um and there's no equity in the uh in real estate appraisals and your rent still redlining um there aren't a lot of property sales in north st louis because i see the reports every year so you're setting up your school district to fail i think it's more of a middle thing i think that uh you know i think you have people that are coming you know young folks that are coming now who don't think they belong stop the deal more i think it's i think it's more uh generational is it's going from generation to generation like my dad he he was in mill creek they move north and then i get older i get a family i stay north you know so i think it's more as we're coming up as a generation you're coming in it's almost known kind of uh it's unconsciously i think that there's there's been an unconscious thought that you know south of del mar is not for us in a sense um you know um they're not things cater for you know maybe um you know different classes to do um south of del mar um so i think it's more of a i think it was more of a mental at this point it's more mental i think now it's been it's been in place so long people have talked about the divide for so long i think it's affecting people and mentally that hey you know of course we all know we can all live south of denmark i mean i can live anywhere you know take me to st louis region that i want to you know uh economic wise but i think it's like an unconscious mental situation that we put ourselves in that tells us hey you know that's not where the area i would like to live you know even though i think more of more african-americans are living south but there's a large percentage statement and looking for someone to somewhere to live or looking somewhere to start a family they're not thinking in that in an area it's automatically you know north or north county and definitely not south county because i think south county is is you know you know it's kind of has reputation whether it's right or wrong that you know they're you know a lot of african-americans you know would not rather live in the south county uh area and i i think it's an important uh issue and i think um when you look at the migration and some of the laws that were put in place whether it was redlining or other things that did not allow you know certain groups to move into certain communities that had a lot to do with how things exist today you know those things can be difficult to over to overcome and i think if we're not careful we'll see that divide happen in other places [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] one historian of the us west a man named john mack ferriger uses um one particular theoretical construct to describe what happens in the west over the colonial into the early republican period in the u.s when it incorporates missouri st louis especially becomes kind of the center the metropolis right um and you'll see people coming from across the globe to st louis and then they spread out into the west so there's a lot more kind of heterogeneity than there would be in a small town for instance montana at the same time um it is more cosmopolitan in that regard it's also a crossroads of north and south of slavery and freedom of of multiple kinds of immigration from ireland etc so all these all these stories play themselves out in st louis once you know the louisiana purchase is is a done deal and you've got explorers coming west they begin to formalize what's an informal set of knowledges that is brought back by traitors and what was called a frontier of inclusion or could have been described as such becomes a frontier of exclusion segregation as we know it doesn't become a political reality until after the civil war right um there's no need to segregate african americans from whites when their status is quite clear they're slaves right they're unfree they're very very subordinate when slavery ends though segregation becomes a political imperative to remind people of social hierarchies then people become very very interested in drawing color lines and making sure that there is no mixture of white and black in urban areas on the job and elsewhere so so it's after the civil war that people become much more keenly aware of of neighborhoods and where people live and segregation of course becomes the rule of of law in most cities north and south de facto whether through through jim crow laws or from covenants and communities in the north where there's no de facto legal segregation but really when slavery disappears people think of other mechanisms right to differentiate between white and black and maintain those social hierarchies and that's when strict segregation um becomes the norm it also happens to be when lots of public culture and and and public consumer culture rises and we can begin to see that manifestation much more clearly as well as we move into the modern era i think the thing for me that's most remarkable about segregation in st louis is the way in which the segregation remains pretty much the same but the mechanism that's used to create it or enforce it keeps changing so you know in 1916 the city tries to pass a racial zoning ordinance which says you know if you're black you can't live on this block and then those kinds of laws are thrown out by the supreme court so they use another mechanism you know the race restrictive deed covenant to do it by property and then they lean more on zoning or on the real estate industry or there's just there's so many different ways it can be accomplished or sustained and you know the you know the civil rights law of housing closes off some of those forms of discrimination but then they just invent new ones in some communities you will simply have especially in the south where jim crow is more obvious um you don't need covenant communities right there's there's white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods and no one would dare violate right that that line um for a lot a host of reasons and they're not really shy about it in the north a covenant is attached to a deed and it and it forbids the owner from selling their property to any one of a number of people in the north oftentimes you will find deeds that say you cannot sell to an asian an african-american or a jew these are these are categories of people that are routinely discriminated against buying in certain neighborhoods so you'll have entire blocks of neighborhoods covered by these individual deed covenants that that prohibit certain types of people to move in this is really true in some of the early inter-ring suburbs right that are there that are consciously made by developers in the 1920s right when the united states begins to suburbanize um and so so what begins to happen is you'll see these neighborhoods begin to develop right they have affinities and people will move into play into places based on covenants um in the 1930s during the new deal era the federal government moved into a big way into the private home market by by guaranteeing mortgages and so that's when something called redlining comes into widespread use and that's because the federal homeowners loan associations will not lend money to people who are in red zones of cities and that's where there's old housing stock high crime rates um any number of things that might threaten an investment of a new home right so so lots of federal government loans are given to people who are moving into new developments in the suburbs they're they're given to wealthy areas where the housing stock the value is very stable or growing and those areas that tend to be dominated by the working poor african-americans new immigrants or poor whites become effectively redlined so so that there's no new investment in those areas so you've created cities in which you're by force or inducement having some people move into some areas and others move into other areas and it becomes this mutual reinforcing system in which property crimes and a host of other things get associated with certain neighborhoods and not others there's now kind of systemic policing of certain neighborhoods and not others and so on and so on and so forth and this begins right in the early 20th century in the south or in places like missouri where racism is much much more on the surface because there are african-americans and whites living together um or in places in the north where where uh covenanted communities prior to redlining 10 to tend to determine neighborhoods st louis i think stands out as you know what we would characterize it as a border city between the north and the south so it's similar in that respect to say baltimore or washington dc and what these cities have in common is they have pretty substantial african-american populations before the first great migration so that makes them unlike detroit chicago milwaukee minneapolis any other you know city further north so because there's already a well-established african-american population these cities basically get a head start on figuring out how to segregate so you know it's no coincidence that st louis and baltimore are the two most notable cities to pass racial zoning ordinances and they're the ones that are really quick off the mark in um using race restrictive deed covenants once we get in the early years of 20th century once the great migration uh does does take hold i think where it starts in a city like in st louis particularly is that the african-american population is there in the neighborhood called the ville and when the great migration begins there's this determination or this panic to prevent the ville from expanding and so that's where most of the lines are drawn sort of in a ragged sort of donut around the existing african-american community and then mill creek valley which is overwhelmingly sort of rental tenement housing mostly african-american so they knocked that down and at the same time they build the big public housing complexes the result is you know they further isolate that population from the rest of the city further concentrate them in one area of the city um and so the segregation you know actually gets worse over time rather than getting better i mean in a lot of areas you have you know basically the same housing stock on both sides of del mar and on one side it's worth 300 000 on the other side it's worth 60 000 because ultimately the view of the developers and the county leadership and the municipalities is that african-americans don't belong in st louis county and and so the assumption is that they should move back into the city where even you know even those these are multi-generational neighborhoods so you know it's not just a matter of you know having an african-american central city that whites flee over time but when they flee and there's african-americans out here they kick them out right so in you know in such a way that that really exaggerates those underlying patterns of segregation right after shelley versus kramer cases decided that outlaws the enforcement of restrictive deed covenants there's an explosion of incorporation and zoning particularly in the county and you know the correspondence of those civic leaders at the time make it quite clear that they saw zoning as a way of accomplishing what restrictive covenants had done you know that if we restrict the land use to large law single-family zoning we can accomplish the same thing for a long time the city county line was as hard a line of segregation as del mar was um but you know for a variety of reasons it does that doesn't really exist anymore i mean there's no and so it's more this you know like uh the city county line sort of collapsed as a line of segregation and the african-american population sort of steadily migrating west through the county um but mostly north but mostly north of that del mar line you know one thing but one interesting thing about those sorts of patterns of segregation is you know they they do a lot of damage when they're successful but they also do a lot of damage when they fail because then you get this sort of rapid racial transition falling property values you know and in and you know pretty tense racial politics in settings for example like ferguson you know because you get the situation in 2014 where you know the city of ferguson is 60 to 70 african-american and its police force of 60 is 90 white and um you know and african-americans uh you know who are overwhelmingly in city like ferguson renters and more transitional they're not represented on the school board the way white parents are they're not um so you get this this disjuncture between who lives in a city and who runs the city [Music] i think you know i think in some respects you know for people from who weren't from st louis the hard thing to wrap their head around was oh you know mike brown was killed in the suburbs how does that happen well you know if if you're from st louis you know ferguson's not really a suburb in the conventional sense of the term and what i think it underscored particularly in the county was that the del mar divide just keeps going right doesn't stop at skinker you know it splits university city in two racially and you know everything north of it in in st louis county until you get pretty far west is overwhelmingly african-american you know there's more african-americans that live in north county than in the city now so that line that north-south line of segregation you know is moving west through the county and what's interesting is almost anywhere where you see significant segregation that segregation either creates or takes advantage of a sort of natural physical boundary um and then that boundary becomes you know a marker so it's like 110th street in in manhattan or you know the river in cincinnati or um you know the other side of the tracks in oklahoma city because you can use like a river or a busy arterial street or a rail railway as a way of of um enforcing segregation because you know there's there's not too many places to cross a river or a railroad track that runs through a city so you tend to isolate the neighborhoods from them you know if i'm in a neighborhood that is near a railroad track you know you face away from the track and so does the neighborhood on the other side you're sort of orient that way and so you reduce the opportunities for uh citizens from you know different backgrounds or different racial groups to to integrate in any sort of natural way because you create these sort of hard boundaries you know then you can reinforce that by zoning so you have a street like like del mar um and by zoning the frontage on del mar as commercial you create a busier street and you create a street in which there's not houses facing each other across the street right the neighborhoods go this way instead i mean i think one thing that really stands out is is not just the sort of is is seeing del mar not just as a sort of black white divide but as an economic divide like comparing incomes poverty rates unemployment rates educational attainment any metric um you know not only is delma is are these neighborhoods of north delmar much worse on every metric than everyone south but they're getting but they're getting worse over time and so you know the poverty rate north of del mar has doubled since 1970 whereas you know in real terms incomes have fallen by half and um you know so the you know the pattern of segregation is roughly similar you know over ninety percent of the population north of darma is african-american but their economic position now is much worse than it was a generation ago right now the mechanism is wealth inequality right um since the 2008 recession housing prices have rebounded in most many urban areas um and begin to reach you know the pandemic has slowed things down but it's it's you know in a lot of cities real estate is very very expensive and because of the kind of systemic inequalities in wealth and inherited wealth you don't need the covenants anymore because the price tag alone is going to statistically work to exclude large numbers of people from certain neighborhoods and so and and as well the way the way schools are funded i mean a host of things tend to embed and entrench racist practices in real estate um and so and so while we no longer have enforceable covenants while redlining is not necessarily um a problem in terms of making communities you know indelibly one color or not market mechanisms have taken the place [Music] you know so the important thing to remember you know again going back to your mill creek example i mean 90 of the cost of clearing that land was born by the federal government and so you know the federal government it for urban renewal and public housing and and you know transportation you know building highways and that sort of thing poured money into cities in the first two thirds of the 20th century but you know we don't have an urban policy now the federal government is not providing significant aid to cities like st louis cities like st louis don't have the ability to raise uh much local funds locally uh the state of missouri doesn't give a about the city of saint louis so um you know there's not there's there's just not the resources that used to be available to uh you know rehab entire neighborhoods that sort of thing so you know if you walk through north side st louis you see a lot of very small scale redevelopment you know one block at a time kind of thing can we make this stick um but you know it's it's really it's really tough going because there's not you know the resources are just not available [Music] you know in terms of the big picture is is recognizing how much money and effort went into creating the segregated system and how little money and little effort is going into undoing it um and that's especially challenging in a metropolitan setting like st louis which is governed by you know 212 general-purpose governments um because there's nothing preventing the you know the claytons and the ladies of the world from continuing to survive opportunities um so i think you have to you know you have to approach it as a regional problem as something that involves you know um shaping policy simultaneously not just in the city of st louis but in the surrounding suburbs [Music] you know i don't know what the future is i know that certainly it's weakening to the traditional walls of segregation what people build in its place you know that's not for historians to decide um but we have some models and in some places it works better than others but right now systemic income and wealth inequality is really tough to overcome um you're going to replicate segregated systems because wealth is [Music] segregated mmm [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] well it depends i'm a glass half full guy so when i hear del mar divide i think opportunity you know uh and that opportunity is to unite whatever the factions are whatever that division is this is a chance to bring those things together in order to create a a better living environment a more a higher level of vitality to our living environment in the singles community which will in turn attract people to the city or back to the city so you know opportunity comes to mind now if i was a glass half empty person uh i would um you know i would probably look at it more as a reason not to invest in st louis and in fact if i'm a young person and i see that kind of division my thinking is well perhaps maybe i should move to another community where you know at least people know how to get along and how to cooperate i mean this you know it's the 64 000 question and the big challenge is to reclaim and rehabilitate neighborhoods for the benefit of the people who live there like not in such a way that moves them out it's very hard to you know to come up with policies that are genuinely you know as i say for the benefit of people who already live in neighborhoods there are people doing it there's a group in st louis called the vacancy collaborative uh which is doing a lot of work trying to get people to stay in their homes and and to do that sort of block by block rehabilitation they're very inventive and using you know packaging together different kinds of tax credits to to save pockets of housing allow people to stay in their houses and the thing is it's not just uh white um or prospective homeowners or prospective renters who might have a dim view of north of del mar it's everybody and it's not just you know white homeowners and white renters that view you know the ladues and the claytons as the as the um they become sort of universally accepted views and in some respects sort of self-fulfilling views right if you say you know that's a poor and crime-ridden neighborhood we shouldn't go there then you don't go there and it has no chance of rebounding and its schools close and it becomes more crime-ridden and so it's um you know the idea it's and it goes back to the idea you know from the early years of the tw or decades of the 20th century that african-american occupancy destroys property values that that becomes this sort of self-fulfilling thought process and what it does is it sort of psychologically shifts the emphasis from sort of outright racism i don't want to live next to black people to this sort of subtler you know psychological mindset where it's like well i really want to go somewhere where the schools are good and that really is code for you know a bunch of big single family houses lots of resources for the schools you know schools that don't have metal detectors at the doors that sort of thing i mean i mean another way to look at that is is to recognize that you know african-american families who have left north st louis because there's a huge black flight out of north st louis into north county they left for exactly the same reasons that white parents left a generation earlier right because the city was failing them whether it was the schools or the crime or whatever um and so you know it's it's you know it's not just white parents that have aspirations that their kids be safe and go to good schools and live in safe neighborhoods but a big part of that is um you have to have the infrastructure in the neighborhood not just the houses but you know if you want families to move in you've got to have schools and you've got to have decent schools and so at the same time as groups like the vacancy collaborative are trying to save neighborhoods you know the school district is busy closing schools north of del mar um so you really have to be you know all on the same page in terms of of uh making those investments we can't change all that every state but we can start to make it more fun in st louis more human in st louis and i think erasing the del mar divide you know by little by little building by building you know effort by effort all the way downtown to ballpark village or however park goes we'll start to make people feel differently and then one by one we'll start fixing up north of del mar just you know all the things that are north as well it'll be safer and safer and safer and we have to find housing for people who need affordable housing the del mar divine is a real estate multi-use retail project repurposing a historic hospital into a 21st century place of caring which will feature offices for non-profits that are affordable apartments for young professional diverse professionals teachers nurses social workers those young people that make those salaries of 35 to 55 out of college and want to live in a cool place and don't necessarily want to live with 100 roommates and then phase three is was that it was the former nursing school so it's outfitted like a school so it could actually be converted into a school and one of my dreams is to create the quintessential early childhood center in st louis but um we'll see what what the demand the public demand is and in our project also is a small part of retail so on this on the under on the front floor of the del mar apartments uh the residences at del mar divine is um space with three retail tenants one is going to be a bank one is going to be a pharmacy and the other is tbd but on the side off the parking lot we have a space for a cafe and we're working with a very exciting restaurant developer to bring something to st louis that isn't really here in any significant way which i think is one of the most and another restaurant that might also include a cooking school with it in a in a low-rise building that we have but i think what that will do is bring people really across that invisible wall because they'll want to come to the restaurant they'll want to come and food is always a part of economic development like if you remember it from tower grove how many restaurants there are on tower grove avenue and um in maplewood on manchester road that weren't there five years ago let alone 10 years ago and those restaurants bring people strangers to come and have dinner together oh wow maybe i'll put it off one of my businesses here or maybe i'll my my son wants to be in the restaurant business maybe he'll come here or whatever you know there's a whole bunch of possibilities that come from that that one step of having a restaurant that people want to come to this location is hollywood and vine of st louis we actually don't have to put in any infrastructure whatsoever we're between two subway stops we're between on the del mar bus line the trolley and we're half a mile from the fort from forest park you couldn't ask for a better location so this area has tremendous potential and instead of being a wall um you'll be able to see through it and walk across it either direction um already the um on del mar and um and belt they opened up that you know they always have those those um big dividers you know those those round balls are they closing they opened up the gates it's the first time in decades they've opened up the gate so people are starting to feel like we can't close off people anymore we've got to open up the doors and this all has come from the kind of investment that's coming to the neighborhood i think everybody's feeling safer it's it's just really ready to happen and um all of those things in one building you know it one campus it's not one building it's multiple buildings really allows us to put a lot of creativity right from the beginning that people will be able to see instantly what's possible and then there's other developments coming up east of us on del mar and then also south on devolver which all just comes together in a really nice way you know the other part about it the part that's really important to me is that it no longer be a dividing line but it makes people there's things on both sides of the street that people want to go to people that are afraid from the north from the south the north side of the street that don't want to move don't normally go outside their neighborhood because they don't want to be arrested or you know look like they don't belong and the other way where people will come from the other neighborhoods including who knows west county to come to a restaurant and to come to the bank and other because the pharmacy is catering to the black consumer like they've never been catered to before i think people will come from all over or order their prescriptions for delivery or see it as something that really stands up for the customer care that they want and deserve that they've never had from walgreens or cvs or any other local pharmacy if there was such a thing since we started our project in 2015 started the idea of it and started raising the money to do it there are many more projects now so there's all the deboliver which wasn't even thought of then because they when the when the um train station the metro station got so uh dangerous they decided they had to redo it and then they decided to do redo the whole street because it would make it more you know livable so now they're doing that um kevin bryant is doing a project um east of us john jim mckelvey did the project just east of us so you'll have a whole swath of del mar that is not just belmar but some behind the streets also our project goes all the way to enright and if we have our way we're going to fix the park up and do some other things in the neighborhood eventually but the idea is really to make it more livable so more people come in more people buy property and want to build a house there's lots of you know houses that have been torn down there's lots of houses that can still be remodeled there's lots of houses that are just perfectly fine that people have been hoping to sell or repair and they can't even get a home improvement loan because the valuation of the property is so low so i'm a big thinker i'm not a small thinker this is nearly a half a million square feet that's a lot of square footage and it's taking a lot of money but you're going to start somewhere so i think we have to go big um and big is relative but you have to start somewhere and then you bring other people with you so i would say that from the deboliver at forest park to our project all the way down the street to del mar downtown and king's hot king's the kingsway project that kevin bryant goes farther north into um it's not really north north but into fountain park which is a beautiful old neighborhood there's probably 250 300 million dollars of investment right there in those blocks of del mar and that's huge that means jobs that means people you know buildings are resources amenities that will be built that people can walk to they can go to they can use they're gonna have an ups store they're gonna all these things we've never had in these neighborhoods before and i think that that makes people say yeah i think i'll open a business now over there because look at all the new office buildings they're not new they're just renovated but they're they're totally renovated so they they feel new but you know everything has been blocked up boarded up three decades you know the stuff that we have in st louis is decades old and awful and it deteriorates and when one of the things about uh you might do some research on this in school low income tax credits for building low income housing they expire after a certain while and then you just let the place rock or you sell it to somebody who's never even care and that's the other challenge even in cantel green where michael brown was killed those used to be nice apartments when they were first started they were nice they had a swimming pool they had basketball courts they took all that down they closed up the swimming pool they closed up the clubhouse they they took all those amenities away because they didn't want to invest any money in making them better even though over the course of a lifetime they would deteriorate and that's wrong i mean why would you treat these people any differently how do they ever come out of and most people just lived there while they were young and got married and didn't have a great job yet and then they moved just like a lot of people do oh it what just seeing these places are just nobody should live in a place like that not even a prisoner and that is um you know that's just what we're trying to change is make it make it available you know more and more things available to more people and invest if we've done it all all along and invested in all these neighborhoods they wouldn't be so deteriorating but it's happening it just just didn't get started until a long time and now we're started now how do we keep it going one by one one plus one plus one equals a million in this case you know they're they're going to happen all about the same time even though they weren't necessarily started at the same time because my project is so big it took a lot more money but others are smaller and they still take money but kevin bryant's a black man he's been able to do this project jimmy kelby he didn't have to ask anybody for money i did i had i had a lot of money to put in but i also had to ask for a lot of money so it's just really um it's it's coming together i think the way it should slowly but surely it should have been faster it should have been earlier but we can't go backwards we have to just move forward i think you know i think there are a couple of ways private industry obviously with maxine clark and other businesses making an investment in that community uh even local governments so if you have an aldermen uh or all the women who are working for their constituents you know part of my responsibility is to take care of that geographical those things within that boundary but there's nothing that says that i can't connect to the others that surround me on each side to talk about how do we create um better experiences for everybody and whatever resources we're getting individually we can get those collectively and have greater good if you will you know so uh a part of bringing some healing or bringing some unity to that divide is to kind of reach across that divide and join in with others and say hey what does it take for us uh to make some uh improvements i think that's a big part of educationally you know i know it's tough to uh build school buildings particularly when you have a dwindling enrollment you know when i was a student at st was public schools we had about 100 000 students they're less than 25 000 now so you know where those kids gonna come from um maybe you continue to transfer kids but maybe you build better buildings and put them in those and and figure out a way to um you know address the the vacant buildings which i think is a big issue so i think it takes uh collective thinking i think it takes a more of a universal approach and i think just like you have people that operate in a uh within a political boundary i think you have to make the entire st louis city uh in both city and county i guess if you think about the effort to bring the city and county together you have to look at it from a more take a more universal approach to it knowing that if a neighborhood fails that that contributes to overall downfall of the city so you know our effort there needs to be more of a comprehensive approach to addressing those issues kind of you know reaching across the aisle if you will in order to do something that's uh that's going to benefit the greater uh part of the population and i think when you have that kind of investment when you have those kinds of improvements um then you begin you can begin to attack other things like crime i mean you don't wait to attack crime but i think you have um you're sort of addressing it from both ends you have law enforcement but also you're creating safer environments and you're getting getting rid of situations where crime is likely to to take place by you know building up those areas so uh i guess what i mean to sum it up i'd say you know a universal or more uh comprehensive approach to addressing all the elements of the city and ensuring that you know so you know you might need a new road in your nape in this part of the city but this other part of the city might need you know new housing so i think you have to you know kind of look and see what's best overall and begin to make your investments that way sounds a little simple but in my mind it's the kind of thing that that would work yeah i think i think making sure everything is is is is equally you know distributed you know uh at least equally um i think for years that has not happened i mean if you look at a lot of the investments and focus has been mainly downtown and um central you know those are those were the biggest focuses of uh st louis uh development you look at forest park all the work that was done to forest park over the few years like i said you look at barnes district over there now they're building some some uh unbelievable uh buildings now you know for housing different things you look at ballpark village you know downtown and and you know and just washington avenue and in all those different areas you know that's that's been the big push i think now you know there needs to be a concerted effort to take that sort of investment uh like you have going on with the nga project which is what's definitely going to help um uh you know with a project that that's massive i think you have to do these massive projects i think the little nickel and dime a few blocks here a few blocks there that approach is is uh you know i think we're way beyond that i think the nga slash uh paul mckee uh project um that's going on is some of the type of massive development uh that needs to be done in order to try to even this out so i do you know i do have hope i do see there are a lot of things that are going on i just think for years that focus was again placed on downtown placed uh south i mean you look at the uh political leaders now i think uh you know if you just listen to their their you know their talking points and positions you know people are now making sure you know north county is uh you know particularly you know uh county government has really i think kind of focus more on north county particularly with the dependent pandemic has really kind of opened up a lot of um efficiencies uh and disparities between north county and south county and west county and so i think the prodigy has forced um leaders to really look at north county and uh and make sure that we you know get our resources you know with the new leadership potentially coming is a big election um for mayor's race in st louis in march and i think that's going to be the pivotal moment depending on who's elected i think that that new mayor um will will then put a more focus on the areas that need attention in st louis area [Music] [Music] um it has to happen at the top um you know leadership has to recognize that this is a problem and make the right decisions to steer investment that way um [Music] and we just haven't seen that um and then also we have to i was talking about this this morning on twitter about the school district i said this is this is a direct result of years of disinvestment if we don't change the city into a place where people want to move to we will cons we'll continue to close schools we'll continue to lose population so we have to do the hard work of making places that we're not invested in for years places that will be invested in and and bring the the right types of infrastructure there where people want to live there um of course you know nobody's gonna say well i want to live in a neighborhood that's full of crime and where i hear gun shots every night and um and where the local school is closed because the school district is losing population you know nobody's going to want to do that but but they will if you say this is a multi-year multi-million dollar um targeted investment in this community and we want you to come and help us build or rebuild this community then that makes a difference i think that i think she's a great candidate i think she um you know there's no perfect in our political figures for sure and even a good you know really good person with liberal and progressive views can't just snap their fingers and make things happen but i know she has a focus on it i know she cares about it and that she will she's the lived experienced person she knows what's necessary so she's going to put a focus on north st louis i believe north of belmont um but she has a lot of work to do it's not it's a complicated city with um this money that's coming from the government because we are one of the poorest cities in the country is significant and she has to allocate it properly she's got the jail that has all those problems the workhouse that has the problems the police force is under staff um if you didn't you know you don't have to take any money away from them they don't they're they're 150 or 200 people short maybe it's 250. that alone is money that you know is already cut is already not being spent so we do need police officers and that's another story you know how it works in st louis or whether you can live in the city or not live in the city how how complicated it is to be a policeman i'm not you know i think about it all the stories we see on the news news every day i think about what kind of person are they recruiting to be a police officer when they treat people like this you know and why would you such a nice human being want to be a policeman you know like so i do think they need better resources like social workers and counselors working alongside them being their partner uh in the car with them to help you know in a case when they they can mitigate um they can't offer they're often called to the scene of a crime too late but before the crime it's possible to have him do a better job i mean we can even talk about you know how policing is different you know i think policing is is definitely different you know based on the divide i mean you know i think if you come north i think if you know for for you know just more of a heavy-handed approach which i think you know at some point sometimes maybe that is you know unnecessary unfortunately um but i think you know just over the years that's been the approach and that's kind of hurt relationships uh between citizens and police as as we see what's been going on the last you know six seven years uh this stem from the michael brown incident um they also it also kind of has exposed the difference of you know the policing between the divide you know versus you know how you know people who are are living south of del mar are policed much different than the people who live in north del mar so i think policing has is a big issue too of of trying to help making sure that the divide is kind of erased and i do think there you know there's a big project actually in the del mar on delmar just uh north of it there's a big project taking place at the old regional hospital and with a lot of housing developments different things like that so there are some things going on that i feel uh hopeful about but just it's just taking some time to get to this point 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Channel: Jacob Sowers

Views: 17,715

Keywords: delmar, divide, segregation, educational, america, saintlouis, stlouis, missouri, race, discrimination, politics, journalism, documentary, minidocumentary, video, educational video, road, oppression, blm, civil rights, georgetown

Id: ihvicjrJ8N0

Length: 80min 47sec (4847 seconds)

Published: Wed May 19 2021