Barriers & Blessings Episode 4: South County Struggles and the Opportunity of Aligned Interest
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 3 • Episode 5 •
In episodes 1, 2, and 3 of Barriers & Blessings, we explored how commercial development patterns in St. Louis County have disproportionately favored wealthy, majority White school districts such as Clayton and how these same patterns have disproportionately neglected impoverished, majority Black school districts such as Jennings. However, readers may have also noticed an odd clustering of a handful of majority White school districts in South St. Louis County whose finances more closely resemble those of majority Black school districts than those of their majority White peers. How do we explain this?
What’s Going On in South County?
South St. Louis County has 1) fewer commercial properties, 2) less valuable types of commercial developments, and 3) less valuable residential property. Case in point, trusty Famous-Barr opened a South County location in 1963, well after its expansion to West County in the late 1940s and North County in the 1950s. The South County Center in Tesson Ferry was an ambitious endeavor in its own right. Its novel air conditioned structure built around an iconic rotunda enticing shoppers with a “perpetual springtime” atmosphere. But it didn’t take off the same way the West County location did. That remains true: Macy’s (Famous-Barr’s current-day name) is worth 22% more in Richmond Heights than in Tesson Ferry.
Taken together, these three patterns translate into fewer resources for South St. Louis County schools. The as-of-yet unanswered question is why this situation is the way it is today. A major component of the answer is municipal incorporation and the population migration trends that the region witnessed starting decades ago.
Headed South
Throughout the 1950s and beyond, White residents left the city for the St. Louis suburbs in greater and greater droves. While the vast majority of research has focused on West County and the “second-wave” of White flight from North County starting in the 1970s, South County also experienced, an albeit less intense, White population boom in the 50s-70s. Its less expensive land was attractive to White residents who were “anxious to leave the city, but priced out [of Western destinations]… [and who] leapfrogged to new subdivisions in unincorporated areas”. And no place had more inexpensive, unincorporated land than South County.
Municipal incorporation presents several potential advantages, most stemming from the fact that an incorporated municipality becomes its own government independent of St. Louis County. This gives residents complete local control over most taxation, zoning, city planning, and land use regulations. For new and emerging communities, incorporation posed an attractive option: reclaim those taxes as well as more control over their future.
And, as municipal governance goes, incorporation was actually pretty straightforward. Chapter 72 of the Revised Missouri Statutes governed (and still governs) the process of incorporation for cities, towns, and villages. Incorporation required a petition to the county government by 15% of voters in the last election for governor from that area. From there, a simple majority vote of residents in the proposed area was all that was required to incorporate. A flurry of incorporation occurred between 1931 and 1950, mostly in the years following WWII, reaching a high of 98 municipalities by 1958.
However, South County was largely left out of this frenzy to incorporate. Because it appealed to lower income White residents fleeing the City, South County seems to have had less and delayed access to the incorporation development and governance strategy compared to wealthier and more powerful West County transplants. Today, the vast majority of South St. Louis County remains unincorporated. When school district boundaries are taken into account, districts like Mehlville, Hancock Place, Bayless and Affton are almost entirely unincorporated. By contrast, the vast majority of municipalities in West and Central St. Louis County are incorporated, which allows them access to certain tools that subsequently enrich their school districts.
The Powerful Tools That Come with Incorporation
For example, zoning allowed incorporated municipalities to keep out multi-family housing (which evoked connotations of Blackness and poverty) and maintain low-density single-family developments to preserve high property values. School districts aided and abetted this practice as well — testimony presented to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1970 indicated that it was Parkway School District policy to oppose rezoning for higher density development. By contrast, around the same time, St. Louis County (including the unincorporated parts of it) banked 70% of its vacant land for future high-density development in the unincorporated areas using the highly-restrictive “non-urban” (NU) zoning classification. Part of the issue, according to an employee, was that in its infancy, the St. Louis County Department of Planning was so understaffed and overwhelmed by rapid suburban expansion that it did not have the capacity for long-term planning for its unincorporated areas. This meant the unincorporated areas had much less land and few long-term plans, whereas the incorporated municipalities were free to act quickly and independently to secure their economic futures, even at the expense of the rest of the county.
Another tool incorporated municipalities used to secure their economic futures was annexation. Annexation refers to the ability of incorporated municipalities to expand their borders by petitioning the county to add more land. Until 1953, state law allowed municipalities to annex adjacent territory at their own discretion, although later also required circuit court approval. This process was unilateral — voters in areas proposed to be annexed had no say in the matter. St. Louis County was also powerless to stop these municipalities from picking-and-choosing the most profitable pieces of land to gobble up, especially when it came to commercial and industrial properties.
By 1963, St. Louis County could finally step-in and block annexations thanks to the Missouri Supreme Court’s decision in City of Olivette v. Graeler, which stated that the courts must consider the interests of the county when deciding whether an annexation was reasonable or not. At the same time, state law had changed to allow residents of an area proposed for annexation to vote on whether they would like to join the annexing municipality or not. The greater hurdles to annexation substantially reduced the appeal of incorporation.
But the damage inflicted by three decades of unfettered land-grabbing could not be undone at this point, especially once the Missouri Supreme Court invalidated Olivette v. Graeler in the 1983 City of Town and Country v. St. Louis County case. The end result was the concentration of property wealth (both commercial and residential) in those school districts in West and Central St. Louis County, which continues to this day.
Systemic Oppression: A Shared Enemy Creating Opportunities for Collaboration
The White Flight that gutted St. Louis City looked different for North County compared to South County, but the end result bears some striking resemblances. Ultimately neither became the focal points for the bulk of the region’s White population, wealth, and power. The resulting economic disinvestment has marred both parts of the region and it has undeniably seeped into schools. In that realization is an opportunity. While the axes of oppression may be wealth in South County and race plus wealth in North County, the knowledge of shared interests between the two creates some unique opportunity for working across divides to remove systemic barriers to the equitable distribution of resources and educational opportunity. In the final episode of this series, we present our closing thoughts and considerations for the kind of reimaginings of our systems that are necessary to secure a brighter, more just future for our children and for St. Louis.
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.
- Post-Dispatch coverage of one of the rare incorporation attempts in South St. Louis County: South Pointe (1995). Though ultimately unsuccessful, the proposal would have created the largest municipality in St. Louis County by incorporating most of the Mehlville and Hancock Place school districts and portions of Bayless and Lindbergh.
- Find the data for this episode here.
- Meet our friends working in the education equity space: the Saint Louis University PRiME Center, a research center committed to providing evidence for decision-makers in Missouri to build the best and most equitable educational systems possible.
- Sign up for our newsletter: bit.ly/signupFTF.
