Mapping Decline: A Book Report
I recently discovered a folder of all of my writing from a St. Louis History class I took at Wash U in 2010. It was fascinating to read through it all and remind myself that I not only had a solid analysis of our city’s racist past 7 years ago but also that we continue to rinse and repeat that history, as we’ve been doing for literally 200 years. This is the first in a series of posts, in which I will be including some of my analysis of STL History from that class.
Yesterday, Better Together released a new report on the inefficiencies of our fragmented government and announced a task force to consider the path towards a unified city and county government. We St. Louisans seem to love reports, so I wanted to share a report I wrote with some of the historical context for why we find ourselves in our current situation and just how uphill our battle is going to be to change any of it. Indeed, we are engaged in a campaign for the hearts and minds of our region’s disparate population. If this task force is a way forward—and it currently seems to be the only way forward—then it should have our hope and support. There remains a long road ahead, no matter the path.
So without further ado.
Mapping Decline: a book report
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Urban decline has been a hallmark of every major city in America during the last century. As suburban sprawl increased, cities across the nation lost much of their population and tax-base. In trying to explain this phenomenon, many theories have arisen, but taking a look at history, almost every instance has at its roots, racism. In Mapping Decline, Colin Gordon takes a specific look at this issue and its impact on St. Louis. Our city had, in many ways, a unique fall from its high point in the fifties though the decline started much sooner. By looking at this example, the author hopes to provide some insight for us all in order to reverse these trends in the future.
In his conclusion, Gordon states that the current pattern of population sprawl is unsustainable and that dense urban life is more efficient for the whole society. Indeed, this was the way cities originally grew. People lived close to one another and relatively close to their employment. There was also a centralized power-structure to regulate land-use and development. The current-fragmented structure of local governance in the St. Louis region not only prohibits regionally-beneficial planning and coordination, but actually influences and encourages sprawl while gutting local tax-revenues across the area. In 1876, with the revisions to the Missouri Constitution allowing for “home rule”, the city formally separated from the county creating, essentially, two competing municipalities. This opened the door for municipalities across the county to create their own governments resulting in the municipal mess that exists today. The implications of this decentralized system of local governance are severe. First, by ceding authority to so many local governments, any resemblance of efficiency is lost. Also, this gives each governing body the opportunity to compete with their neighbors for local population and business, which is the author’s main interest.
In competing for people, we see horrible racist practice en masse. Each municipality drafted and enforced their own versions of segregation policy beginning in the city with two restricted black neighborhoods. Restrictions placed on where an entire population segment can live obviously cause problems. As population levels grew in these areas, conditions worsened until they were deemed ghettos, and as these conditions spilled out from their restrictive borders, the white population began its retreat to other areas. Many areas of the county were set-up in response to this, with zoning restrictions immediately set-forth to discourage black settlement. Additionally, in regards to zoning, municipalities across the region all have power over their own zoning, which equates to inequities in property-value for residents who live near industrial zones, i.e. blacks. Besides the lure of the affluent population base outward from the city, these suburban communities also competed for business as well in a downward-spiral of tax incentives that led to widespread loss of tax-revenue for the area.
Development patterns in St. Louis mirrored the residential shifts and also had racist undertones. Through federal redevelopment programs and the definition/use of blight, communities could be cleared for redevelopment without much thought given to current residents. Originally, in order to blight an area or property, it had to pose a threat to the health or safety of the population. That was later expanded to include an economic threat, and eventually nearly anything could pass as blight. This meant, in some cases, the wholesale destruction of black neighborhoods whose demise had been caused by the same restrictive real-estate that put them there in the first place. Now, local governments could blight the bad blocks, clear the land with federal money and build a shopping mall over the top, all of this done with little consideration for the residents who would have to relocate. Aside from the social costs of community destruction, there were also severe financial costs to the region as most redevelopment was done in association with TIF financing or tax abatements, where cleared land would be tax-free for years after development. Included with the regional competition, the cost of these TIFs grew and grew as communities attempted to out-bid one another for businesses. The unfortunate irony to this was that when surveyed, most developers ranked tax incentive a very low priority for location.
Given all of this, it is not surprising that St. Louis’ decline was so dramatic in the second-half of the 20th Century. The lack of central authority in the region has been one of the defining factors of that decline. Without regional oversight, there is no way to keep different locales from competing against one another to the detriment of the entire region. These short-sighted government practices coupled with the racism of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries left St. Louis with only 41 percent of its peak population by 2000 and one of the most geographically segregated regions in the country. Colin Gordon hails from the University of Iowa, giving him a unique outsider’s view of St. Louis’ situation. He took on this project after visiting St. Louis for a conference. After learning that his hotel was actually in Clayton, he realized that St. Louis offers a unique perspective into regionalism, or the lack thereof, and as he researched the issues commonplace to the St. Louis experience, he concluded that our struggle can be a lesson for urban communities everywhere in the 21st Century.
