Barriers & Blessings Episode 3: Famous-Barr Falters As it Heads North, Signaling Woes for School Funding
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 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.
Barriers & Blessings — How Commercial Prosperity Shapes School Success, is a continuation of FTF’s Still Separate, Still Unequal advocacy & accountability tool for Education Equity. 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.
Check out the rest of the Barriers & Blessings series:
• Episode 1 • Episode 2 • Episode 4 • Episode 5 •
In the early 1950’s, Jennings was a popular destination for White residents leaving the city thanks to the growing accessibility of cars. The emerging city, named after James Jennings, a merchant and farmer who owned most of the land in the area as well as about 30 slaves in 1839, was just outside the hustle and bustle of the city, while still within easy driving distance. The 1950’s saw a frenzy of “modern” and “jet age” development — both homes and businesses — attempting to capitalize on the population boom. It led to the construction of the Northland Shopping Center at the intersection of Lucas & Hunt and West Florissant, St. Louis County’s first “ultra-modern retail village”. With its sharp angles and sleek finishes, the complex, painstakingly designed to appeal to the pedestrian, driver, and shopper, was a “grand piece.” It was an exciting move for Famous-Barr — the first time it had anchored a major shopping center. Signing on to Northland and this new shopping mall approach to retail in such a major way was a major gamble.
They needn’t have worried. Northland was an immediate hit. The center quickly expanded over the next few years, adding an office building (Northland Office Buildings), a grocery store (Bettendorf Rapp, later acquired by Schnucks), and a cinema (Northland Cinema). Before long, in the 1960s and 70s, these growing opportunities and amenities attracted Black families as well and many moved to the area from North St. Louis City.
This, of course, did not sit well with many. It might have been the Civil Rights Era, but those politics didn’t belong in quiet (White) neighborhoods. So, White families packed up and left, heading even further West. This second wave of White flight became a widespread dynamic in and after the 1970s and it hollowed out St. Louis’ inner-ring suburbs, including Jennings. Departing St. Louisans took their shopping habits and pocketbooks with them, patronizing the equally-established and growing West County stores. Retail sales at Famous-Barr’s Northland location started to falter. By the 1980’s and 1990’s, the Northland Shopping Center as a whole was in a precipitous decline. Famous-Barr decided to close its anchor store at Northland in 1994 and focus on its more successful stores that it had opened in West St. Louis County during the post-WWII population boom.
Now without an anchor to entice foot traffic to the various other mall tenants, the Northland Shopping Center was in freefall. In 2000, the St. Louis-based Sansone Group began eyeing the property for demolition and redevelopment. The plans to demolish the mall stalled indefinitely as the Sansone Group searched in vain for a new anchor store. Eventually, in 2005, the entire center was demolished, and the City of Jennings granted a $17.5 million tax incentive to Sansone to help finance the construction of the new Buzz Westfall Plaza.
Target served as the major anchor of the Westfall Plaza. Schnucks joined it, occupying the storefront it had once abandoned. But the revival was short-lived. Target later abandoned the location in 2016 after years of declining profitability and a short stint as a police command center during the Ferguson protests. A Goodwill stands in its place today.
The Plaza at present represents $6,036,450 of assessed property value for the Jennings School District, according to St. Louis County property records. The Galleria is worth over 4 times this amount to the Clayton School District¹.
¹ The St. Louis Galleria falls mostly within the Clayton School District, but part of it (about 29% of its property value) falls within the Ladue School District boundaries. The numbers presented below refer only to properties of the Galleria that pay property taxes to the Clayton School District, according to St. Louis County property records.
One Store, Two Different Paths
Schools rise and fall with their communities. The decisions made by Famous-Barr and other retailers, land developers, and the populations they are trying to entice have profound implications for the school districts they are in. Today, Jennings School District has the second lowest assessed commercial property value per student in the region, at $9,186 per student. Jennings also spends $12,727 per student, well below the $15,516 per student spent by the median majority White district.
In the Clayton School District, Famous-Barr lives on as Macy’s. Its home, the Saint Louis Galleria Mall, boasts over 165 retail brands and restaurants and is anchored by Dillard’s, Macy’s, and Nordstrom. The mall benefits from its close proximity to the Richmond Heights MetroLink stop and the high median income of the area — according to customer intercept surveys gathered by the shopping center, 41% of households in their property trade area earn $75,000 or more per year. It generates $25,119,350 in assessed value for the Clayton School District and is the #1 property taxpayer for the City of Richmond Heights. Those property taxes are a big part of how the Clayton School District can spend more per student than any other district in the tri-county region: $30,329 per student. That’s more than twice the $13,441 spent per student by the median majority Black school district.
But not all majority White school districts are so privileged. In episode 4, we will turn South, where the tools of municipal development were slow to arrive and disastrous consequences followed.
Want to Know More? Check out these 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.
- Second-Wave White Flight by Molly Patterson. A first-hand account from a former Bel-Nor student recounting her family’s participation in the White flight from North St. Louis County school districts.
- Find the data for this episode here.
- Meet our friends working in the education equity space: A Red Circle, a North St. Louis County-based nonprofit dedicated to reverse the effects of racism through education justice, mutual aid, healthy food access, civic engagement and policy, and the arts.
- Sign up for our newsletter: bit.ly/signupFTF.
