Ferguson And The Aesthetics Of Poverty
What do you see when you imagine poverty?
Quick social experiment…
Close your eyes for 10 seconds and consider what comes to mind when you think about the following phrase: “a poor community.”
Those three words have been used to describe Ferguson, Missouri by national media countless times since the world turned its attention to the civil (and uncivil) unrest in that city following the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown. So, what did you imagine when your eyes were shut? Wait. Before you answer, we’ll tell you why we’re asking.
We didn’t close our eyes, but when we headed out on assignment to report from Ferguson, we did imagine encounters with men and women experiencing long-term unemployment, few opportunities for higher education and housing projects. All of these visions were propped up by the fact that Ferguson does have a poverty rate of 20 percent. That’s significantly high in a city with a population of only 21,000. Still, once we landed, our perspective quickly changed.
In Ferguson, we were hard pressed to find men and women without jobs. In most cases, we found scores of college and vocational school students as well as people working multiple gigs like Jameiko Rich, the young man featured in this story. And in neighborhoods classified as “low-income,” we didn’t find public housing but rather less modern units of affordable living that people of different income levels call home.
Such is the case with Canfield Green, the apartment complex where Brown had his fatal interaction with police officer Darren Wilson. Canfield has its share of subsidized housing and poor families for sure, as this historical analysis from the St. Louis Dispatch explains. But everyone in that community is not poor and aesthically, the complex has all the trappings of a neighborhood where most folks go to work and work to pay the rent in full and on time.
There’s also another part of the city entirely – staggeringly different in aesthetics. Historic Downtown Ferguson is the younger, shinier sister of the area surrounding Canfield Green. There’s a brewery a bike shops, restaurants, renovated apartments above storefronts and a wine bar that has, according to one local resident, avocado soup that will make you lick the bowl. It’s a neighborhood already haunted by whispers of words like “gentrification” and “improvement.”
But in actuality, it’s not that one side of Ferguson is poor and the other is wealthy. And it’s certainly not true that the two sides of town don’t mix – after all the city is only about 6 miles end-to-end. Historic Ferguson has been designated as the latest area to invest in. Rest of Ferguson? Not so much. Not that there has never been investment here, but the area around the now-infamous West Florissant Ave is old, more affordable and the combination of those two things make it distinctly different in appearance (and not a likely landing place for out-of-towners looking to spend their tourist dollars).
The aesthetics and language of wealth and poverty are important. We thought a lot about them on this trip. It was tough for us to jump on the adjective bandwagon and characterize Ferguson as poor without context. There is poverty, but the city is so small and so deeply integrated with other small communities that neighbor it like Florissant, Hazelwood and Jennings (within spitting distance of the West Florissant Quick Trip) that we thought it only fair to consider the demographics of those towns as we considered how to talk about Ferguson on a program for listeners who will likely never lay eyes on it beyond their TV screens. Older, less developed neighborhoods do not automatically equate to poverty.
We know, though, that poverty comes in many visual forms and the numbers and official methods of measurement only tell some of the story, depending on where you are. Here in Ferguson, where folks are working, educated and – at least as of late – socially engaged, poverty may not be what you’re picturing.
PHOTO CREDITS: Lindsay Foster Thomas
