By Todd Swanstrom, Des Lee Professor of Community Collaboration and Public Policy, University of Missouri St. Louis and Author of recently released Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century (3rd edition); and Karl Guenther, Community Development Specialist, University of Missouri St. Louis
The shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed young black man, by a white police officer ignited the turmoil in Ferguson. But the fuel that is sustaining the peaceful protests and violent outbursts was produced by longstanding racial and economic inequalities that have plagued Ferguson and many other communities in North St. Louis County for decades. St. Louis County needs to do more to create neighborhoods of opportunity and connection for all. To build better neighborhoods, St. Louis County needs to build a stronger community economic development system.
Clearly, race played a crucial role in the events in Ferguson but place also played a role. Poverty is increasing rapidly across North St. Louis County and Ferguson is one of the communities where poverty is concentrating (see map). In 2012, more than one in four residents of Ferguson were below the poverty level, more than twice the County’s poverty rate. In some parts of Ferguson, such as the apartment complexes on the eastern side where the shooting occurred, the poverty rate is as high as 33 percent. Concentrated poverty worsens the effects of individual poverty, undermining school performance, health, safety, and economic mobility. Racial and economic disenfranchisement, once considered almost exclusively an urban issue, is growing in the suburbs.
The Spread of Concentrated Poverty Into St. Louis County
Compared to St. Louis City, however, St. Louis County does not have as many institutions and policies in place to revitalize distressed neighborhoods. We work with the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis, a coalition of community-based nonprofits. Only six out of our twenty-eight members work in the County and only three have place-based initiatives in the County.
St. Louis County does not necessarily need more CDCs but it does need institutions with the capacity to convene the community for genuine dialogue to devise and implement neighborhood plans with the following necessary ingredients:
The plan must grow out of an extensive process of civic engagement so that all major stakeholders in the community accept its goals and so the plan is rooted in local knowledge.
The plan must simultaneously address the deficits and problems in the community at the same time that it leverages the assets of the area in a market savvy fashion.
The plan must have the support of public, private, and nonprofit organizations, inside and outside the community, with sufficient resources to accomplish the major objectives and sustain itself over the long term.
The best example of a comprehensive community plan in St. Louis County is 24:1. Beyond Housing is doing innovative work fostering collective action on community goals under trying conditions in the Normandy School District. However, Beyond Housing has the advantage of an anonymous funder who has funded the staff to develop the plan as well as money to implement it. We need many more 24:1’s in St. Louis County but where is the funding going to come from?
To its credit, St. Louis County and the Economic Partnership recently supported the formation of a new community development corporation (CDC) in Spanish Lake, an unincorporated community in far north St. Louis County. This is a start but we need more resources and more supportive public policies if we are going to address the needs of all disadvantaged communities.
Here are a few supportive public policies St. Louis County should consider:
Community Development Challenge Grants: Presently, the County spends a significant portion of its CDBG funds on small housing rehabilitation grants spread out over 70 plus municipalities. The County should pool some of its CDBG funds into Community Development Challenge Grants to fund comprehensive revitalization initiatives.
Partnership with Banks: Instead of funding 100 percent of home repair projects with public funds, the County should partner with a consortium of area banks. Participating banks would fund the part of the rehab loan that homeowners would normally qualify for and public funds would pay for the rest. Potentially, this could expand public funds for housing rehab many times over and banks could get CRA credit for their lending.
Land Bank: The County should establish a land bank to accept abandoned properties, clear their titles, and potentially deed properties over to qualified community-based nonprofits. The land bank should have a dedicated source of revenue, such as the penalties and interest on delinquent taxes that are used to fund the land bank in Cleveland.
Align Current Spending with Revitalization Plans: We calculate that direct spending on community development in the County is only between $9 and $16 million annually, while County spending that could be coordinated with community development is over $255 million. Instead of simply repaving streets, for example, the County could coordinate with communities on complete streets projects. (Montgomery County in Maryland has developed such a program.
The St. Louis County Strategic Plan (Imagining Tomorrow for St. Louis County, 2013) recognizes the problem of declining suburban communities but, unfortunately, there are few active constituencies pressuring for more progressive community economic development policies. Recent events in Ferguson have focused the public’s attention on race, police practices, and disadvantaged suburban communities. We need to channel the passion rising out of the turmoil in Ferguson toward justice in the death of Michael Brown but also toward progressive public policies that help bring disadvantaged suburban communities back into the economic and political mainstream.
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.
