Laura Kinsell-Baer is a Senior Planner with St. Louis County government. Her background is in urban planning with a focus on forecasting as it relates to public policy, research, and urban data management and communication.
As Brooks Goedeker pointed out in last month’s op-ed, neighborhoods in our region are contending with shrinking coffers and dwindling resources. I would extend this to say that certain neighborhoods, especially those that do not have the means to tax themselves, are contending with dwindling resources, while others are doing okay. And those neighborhoods require a “piling on” of our region’s best creative solutions and resources in order to stop or reverse current downward trends.
Studies of inequality often focus on people-based variables, such as educational attainment and income, discounting the effects of neighborhoods on families living in poverty. And yet, as sociologist Patrick Sharkey writes in his book Stuck in Place, the effects of neighborhood disadvantage are deeply entrenched and persist for generations. The effects on children of exposure to violence, hunger, and unemployment do not disappear as they become adults, but continue to affect mental and physical health, educational attainment, and economic opportunities. The cycle of poverty that results from these challenges as well as the stigmatization of high-poverty neighborhoods is exacerbated by structural forces.
In St. Louis County, as elsewhere around the country, a combination of forces has caused a palpable shift in previously-stable low-middle-income suburban neighborhoods. In the 1990s, federal investment in our most economically distressed families, especially single mothers and their children, dramatically decreased with President Clinton’s welfare reform. More recently, the Great Recession hit hardest in neighborhoods that were the target of subprime lending, and many people lost their jobs, their homes or both, leaving behind large concentrations of vacancies and families in or near crisis. As a result, many suburban communities are now struggling to cope with issues associated with the mortgage crisis, unemployment, and poverty – issues that were previously understood as mainly affecting inner cities or rural areas.
Over the last two years, many of St. Louis County’s leaders in government, the nonprofit sector, and school districts have sought to re-evaluate the structure of local investment both in our youth and in our most distressed neighborhoods, make the changes needed to break the multi-generational cycle of poverty, and halt struggling communities from slipping into the poverty trap. One vehicle for achieving this is the county-wide strategic plan, Imagining Tomorrow for St. Louis County, which is mandated by the county charter every five years and was passed by the St. Louis County Council in October 2013. Once more of a land use plan, the plan has evolved into a broad strategy for addressing changing demographics and economics in a largely built-out county.
Imagining Tomorrow marks the start of a new era whereby St. Louis County seeks to work with partners to try new approaches to community development in a more physically-dispersed, suburban context. More specifically, the policy directives and tactics in the plan are meant to build bridges with our 90 municipalities and 23 school districts to test approaches that we know have worked for other urban counties, develop and test some of our own, and pile on the resources that are available to us.
In that vein, we have joined with partners at Beyond Housing, University of Missouri St. Louis, and the OneSTL team at East-West Gateway Council of Governments to host a policy forum on this topic for anyone who is inspired to contribute their energy and ideas. The event will be held at The MET Center in Wellston, itself a success story in adaptive reuse of a manufacturing facility to a job training center. Next door, an early childhood center is currently under construction as part of a “two-generation” initiative for the young children of students who are in training at the MET Center.
We hope you can join us for this important discussion, where we’ll hear from two nationally-known experts on changing trends in poverty and innovative approaches to community development. Elizabeth Kneebone, fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institution and coauthor of Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, will speak on her research on urban and suburban poverty, metropolitan demographics, and policies that support low-income workers and communities. David Erickson, director of the Center for Community Investments at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and senior editor of Investing in What Works for America’s Communities, will speak on innovation in community development around the country by local governments and nonprofits.
A panel of local officials and Q&A session will follow. May 29th, 1-4 p.m., The MET Center, 6347 Plymouth Avenue, Wellston, Missouri 63133.
Articles in “From the Field” represent the opinions of the author only and do not represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis or the University of Missouri- St. Louis
