Barriers & Blessings Ep. 1: The Parable of Commercial Property Taxes
Barriers & Blessings — How Commercial Prosperity Shapes School Success, is a continuation of FTF’s Still Separate, Still Unequal advocacy & accountability tool for Education Equity.
By: Cristian Vargas, MPH, and Karishma Furtado, PhD, MPH
The stories that we tell ourselves, and that we pass on about education inequity often ignore the historical trends and present-day structural factors that can make or break student success. Instead, a burden of blame is typically forced onto the shoulders of individual Black and Brown students.
Follow along with us for this latest series, where we’ll detail the central relationship between commercial property development and education outcomes, and the disproportionate impact that relationship has on students across the St. Louis region.
By uncovering the unspoken barriers and blessings that shape our region’s education landscape, we can begin to correct the flawed narratives around education equity that have been spreading for generations.
Check out the rest of the Barriers & Blessings series:
• Episode 2 • Episode 3 • Episode 4 • Episode 5 •
Last year, in Forward Through Ferguson’s accountability tool, Still Separate, Still Unequal, we pointed a spotlight at the effects that ongoing residential segregation has on property taxes and, as a result, on school funding, culminating in vast differences in the day-to-day school experiences of the St. Louis region’s children. We also took a quick look under the hood at the regional disparities in commercial property values, which are an under-explored and under-recognized cause and effect of the generations-long inequity in the region’s education system.
We were previously only able to explore that story in a piecemeal, anecdotal manner through the tales of Brentwood and Riverview Gardens. But now, we have compiled data on commercial properties for every school district in the region to paint a more complete picture.
The stories we tell ourselves and pass on matter. They reflect and reinforce our beliefs, the decisions we make, and the actions we take. The narratives that residents of wealthy, majority White school districts tell themselves rarely acknowledge the windfall they enjoy courtesy of the commercial property in their neighborhoods. The absence of this good fortune is similarly rarely acknowledged as an obstacle for low-income, majority Black districts. Reckoning with these flaws in our narratives and the forces at play in our education landscape will be essential to achieving education equity.
How We Did This: A Brief Note on Methods
• The “St. Louis region” as used throughout this article follows the same definition presented in Still Separate, Still Unequal: namely, all public school districts within St. Louis City, St. Louis County, and St. Charles County.
• Assessed value as used throughout this series refers to the taxable value of a given property. Assessed value figures, unless otherwise specified, come courtesy of the 2019 Annual Report of the County Clerk for St. Louis City, St. Louis County, and St. Charles County. The County Assessor’s Office determines this value in odd-numbered years. Commercial properties (businesses) are assessed at 32% of their “real”, or market, value, whereas residential properties (homes) are assessed at 19% of their “real” value.
• Each school district then sets their own tax rates (usually expressed per every $100 of assessed value), which can be changed year to year. This tax rate then determines the actual amount paid by residents that school districts then receive.
• For example: Parkway School District had a tax rate of $3.8972 per $100 of assessed value in 2019. A theoretical business in the district that is “actually” worth $500,000 would have an assessed value of $160,000, and would therefore owe $6,235.52 in property taxes to the Parkway School District.
What We Found: A Highly Uneven Distribution of Commercial Property Wealth
The median majority White district boasted nearly twice the assessed commercial property value per student as the median majority Black district. Majority White districts had $55,058.50 of assessed commercial property value per student. That figure for majority Black districts was over $26,000 lower, or $28,997.02 of assessed commercial property value per student. The majority Black district with the highest assessed commercial valuation was St. Louis Public Schools (SLPS) at $64,646 per student. The majority White district with the highest assessed commercial valuation, Clayton, has nearly three times more property wealth: $192,314 per student. On the other end of the spectrum, the majority Black district with the lowest assessed commercial valuation, Riverview Gardens, weighed in at $4,865 per student.
The school funding pie grows and shrinks with these commercial property values, especially because commercial property is assessed at a higher rate and therefore contributes a larger share of taxes to school districts than residential properties. They’re a big part of why, in 2019, Clayton School District was able to spend $30,329 per student while Riverview Gardens spent $12,068 per student.
In the Weeks To Come: Telling the Story of Why…And Why It Matters
Why is this the case? How did this come to be? That will be the focus of this series. Over the course of the next four episodes, we’ll rove across the region, from West County (episode 2), to North County (episode 3), to South County (episode 4), following the flow of White Flight and the commercial property development that both caused and was affected by it. We’ll go back to St. Louis’ golden age of shopping and watch as this story is told through an iconic department store, synonymous with St. Louis itself, that to this day sparks nostalgia for its legendary French onion soup: Famous-Barr.
Along the way, we will weave in stories from area residents whose lived experiences and narratives of self have been shaped by the institutional forces we identify. We’ll close the series by sharing our final thoughts and calls to action for the region. It will be a whirlwind of data, stories, and shopping.
We hope you’ll come along for the ride to see how historical commercial property development — and the decisions we’re still very much making about it — plug directly into our education system and its inequities. We hope the series prompts a broader conversation as well about the stories we tell ourselves and the need to take a more unvarnished look at the benefits and barriers, headwinds and tailwinds, that shape our region.
Want to Know More? Check Out These Additional Resources:
- Still Separate, Still Unequal: A Call to Level the Uneven Educational Playing Field in St. Louis by Forward Through Ferguson. An in-depth tool examining the root causes of education outcome disparities in our region.
- How Lower-Income Americans Get Cheated on Property Taxes from the New York Times. An interactive exposé on how low-income majority Black neighborhoods pay more than their fair share in property taxes in St. Louis and across the country.
- Find the data for this episode here.
- Meet our friends working in the education equity space: WEPOWER, an organization working to activate community power to redesign education, health, and justice systems to be equitable and just for all.
- Sign up for our newsletter: bit.ly/signupFTF.
