DISMANTLING THE DIVIDE: Bel-Nor Should be an Inclusive Leader in its Quest to Stabilize Homes

By Nancy Cambria, Communications Manager at Health Equity Works

This column was originally published in The St. Louis American.

In July the Bel-Nor Board of Aldermen crammed into their tiny meeting room with about 25 residents, both black and white.

The discussion centered on the tiny North County town’s decision to combat deteriorating properties with an aggressive inspection program that would result in citations and possible fines if the required repairs were not completed by early fall.

The Bel-Nor Board of Aldermen welcomed various opinions. They are trying hard to protect the beauty and future of the community. The feeling was, this strategy is the best way to protect a town that’s withstood decades of decline experienced by nearby North County towns.

Most at the meeting were in favor of the fines, saying people had to be responsible, just like everyone else. Others remained quiet.

There is no extension option built into the process. So, if you need more time to raise the cash to make the required repairs, there’s no way to appeal the city for an extension. Instead, they were reassured by a Bel-Nor police officer that if you had to go to court, the judge would show leniency if you were making progress.

Bel-Nor told me my house needed some paint. No argument there—it does. And I’m sure my neighbors think so, too. I’m not yet sure how much that is going to cost. The problem is that I have little saved for that project and no equity in my house to borrow money at a low-interest rate, so I’m not sure where the money is going to come from if I want to stay out of municipal court.

And I’m sure there are several people in the community who are in the same situation.

Surely, there has to be a better way for diverse communities struggling with housing values in North County than punishing its residents for financial factors out of their control.

In April, my mentor and colleague Dr. Jason Purnell of Washington University wrote about creating consciously inclusive communities—one of 11 recommendations in the report “Segregation in St. Louis: Dismantling the Divide.” He urged people to consider diversity and inclusion as assets that could stabilize and strengthen communities. Indeed, neighborhoods that were welcoming to all and created supportive systems for everyone could chip away at a century of policy promoting racial segregation.

Bel-Nor is an outlier when it comes to our region’s pervasive problem of black and white segregation. The town is about 48 percent African-American and 46 percent white. It’s not like some “diverse” towns or neighborhoods where whites and blacks don’t live on the same streets. African Americans and whites truly live side-by-side in Bel-Nor.

But, Bel-Nor is struggling to stay solvent, and some of its residents are struggling too. When the Great Recession hit, Bel-Nor took a hit in housing values. After Mike Brown was killed, Bel-Nor took another hit. A few walked away from their houses because they were tens of thousands of dollars underwater. A man down the street lost his home to the bank and stripped out all of the crystal doorknobs and the Central AC compressor on his way out the door. Opportunistic landlords swooped in on depressed home values and converted houses into student rentals. And, some housing declined.

Indeed, all of these factors point to the possibility that Bel-Nor, though diverse and blessed with beautiful housing stock, could transition to another poor North County disinvested community.

I love my town, and I don’t want this to happen. I want it to remain diverse. I want it to remain pretty and maintained. And I want it to thrive. Preserving the housing is critical. But I don’t want people ostracized in the process. I want people to feel included and part of a real community.

At this meeting, I asked the group to consider doing away with punitive fines and consider more inclusive, supportive and creative solutions that don’t ostracize its vulnerable residents in the courts—or put others in jeopardy of leaving or walking away.

I urge them to keep thinking about this.

This could include working more closely with homeowners on tiered improvement plans so the repairs get done over time. Better partnerships with families could help them find needed credit and resources. Even creating a swap system of yard and exterior upkeep work between families with different skills could help.

On a bigger policy scale, lobbying could yield incentives that encourage stability in transitional neighborhoods so people don’t leave—maybe by offering residents in these neighborhoods college tuition breaks in state schools, or arrangements with UMSL and/or WashU to entice investment in neighborhoods that house faculty. (WashU is already offering staff and faculty incentives to buy home in certain parts of the city.)

Or, the Board of Aldermen could actively lobby on the recommendations in “Segregation in St. Louis: Dismantling the Divide.” They include St. Louis County establishing an Affordable Housing Trust Fund. Or the creation of a Greenlining Fund so people can borrow money to improve under-appraised homes. They could consider applying for support for home stabilization through community reinvestment groups. And they could start talking about how our differences make us stronger if we stick together.

Neighborhoods certainly benefit from well-maintained housing, and Bel-Nor leaders are tackling hard issues. But better policy and inclusive and caring relationships can also build strong, stable communities. There is a better way if we start demanding it.

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Nancy Cambria is the communications manager for Health Equity Works, formerly named For the Sake of All. She was a lead author of the recent community report Segregation in St. Louis: Dismantling the Divide. Prior to joining Health Equity Works, Cambria was the children and families reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for more than a decade. Her reporting focused heavily on children in poverty, child trauma and early childhood quality and safety.

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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.

We invite readers to contribute to the civic conversation about community development in St. Louis by writing an op-ed for the Community Builders Exchange. Op-eds should be short (400-700 words) and provocative. If you have an idea for an op-ed, contact Todd Swanstrom at swanstromt@umsl.edu.

Policing and Social Trust

By Luther O. Tyus, Graduate Research Assistant at the Brown School at Washington University

This column was originally published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Humans are a social species. The need for trust is rooted in our DNA. In times of peril and uncertainty, trusting relationships provide a sense of security. Trust helps us to survive.

In 2014, during the Ferguson unrest, I was a police officer in St. Louis, assigned to a special unit focusing on low-income housing projects. Dirty stares and middle fingers were testaments to the trust we’d lost. The city was on the verge of erupting.

One evening, I handcuffed a man on his front porch for unlawful use of a handgun. I didn’t notice the angry mob forming behind us. “Leave him alone,” someone yelled. Angrier words followed. You could feel the tension in the air.

But then a young woman stood up in front of us. “Stop,” she yelled to the crowd. “That man,” meaning me, “reads to my child at school.”

And it was true. I did read to students. My unit also sponsored movie nights and back-to-school giveaways. At Halloween, we hosted “Trunk or Treat.” We invested in community relationships.

The community didn’t forget. Her plea worked. The crowd lost its steam.

But in too many places, police have failed to create trusting relationships. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice released its report on the Ferguson Police Department. The report concluded that “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs.” The DOJ also found that these practices “reflected and reinforced racial bias,” with “nearly 90 percent of documented force used by FPD officers was used against African Americans.”

These problems began long before the shooting death of Michael Brown. The DOJ report highlights a 2013 encounter between a Ferguson patrol sergeant and an African-American man. The sergeant, though he could not articulate a reasonable suspicion, detained the man after seeing him talk to an individual in a truck. When the man refused to allow the sergeant to frisk him, insisting that had committed no crime, the sergeant became infuriated and drew his Taser.

Video captured by the Taser’s built-in camera shows that the man made no aggressive movements. Still, the sergeant fired, knocking the man to the ground. The sergeant then fired again, later claiming that the man had attempted to stand. But the man never tried to stand, as the video makes clear. He just squirmed in agony.

Each year, similar reports flood the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. Victims hope for protection and understanding. Police misconduct is a betrayal of trust.

Distrust is not simply the absence of trust: Both are rooted in neurobiology. Feelings of trust flow from the prefrontal cortex, which compares the present to past experiences. Feelings of trust release oxytocin and dopamine, which increase energy and a sense of belonging. Feelings of distrust trigger the amygdala, which controls our “fight, flight or freeze” response.

Together, these brain structures dictate our perceptions of reality, which is why regaining lost trust can be so difficult. Once the amygdala is engaged, new experiences invariably mix with old narratives of hurt and disappointment.

But it is possible to regain trust, as Ferguson Police Chief Delrish Moss, who was appointed in 2016, is now demonstrating.

From the ashes of unrest, Moss has implemented a community-first philosophy. Every member of the department must meet with members of the community. Officers are rewarded for positive interactions, from organizing kickball tournaments to treating high school students to a special “Black Panther” premiere. The promotions process has been revised.

Chief Moss also emphasizes that social media, properly used, can help to humanize officers. Specialized units are creating content for the department’s Facebook and YouTube pages. Videos provide friendly tips for public safety and exclusive behind-the-scenes looks at department operations.

Effective policing requires social trust. The Ferguson Police Department is rebuilding the trust it had lost by tapping into a simple but powerful human need: the need to belong.

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Luther O. Tyus is a Graduate Research Assistant at the Brown School at Washington University, as well as an eight-year veteran of the St. Louis Police Department and a certified POST police instructor. Luther has published and commentated for CNN, Headline News, and St. Louis Post Dispatch.

Luther has delivered a one-hour Crime Prevention presentation to numerous corporations, including ten to AT&T and several to Ameren UE. He has conducted his Social Unrest seminar for the NAACP, Urban Strategies, FOCUS St. Louis, and The Urban League.

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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.

We invite readers to contribute to the civic conversation about community development in St. Louis by writing an op-ed for the Community Builders Exchange. Op-eds should be short (400-700 words) and provocative. If you have an idea for an op-ed, contact Todd Swanstrom at swanstromt@umsl.edu.

Failure to Participate in County Executive Forum Represents a Breach of Public Trust

By Wally Siewert, Ph.D., Public Ethicist

Next Tuesday, August 7, St. Louis County residents will go to the polls to decide between two leading candidates in the Democratic primary for St. Louis County Executive: incumbent candidate Steve Stenger and his chief challenger, businessman Mark Mantovani. Voters were recently denied an opportunity to listen to these candidates exchange an open dialogue on a range of important issues facing our region.

As a public ethicist, a civic engagement advocate, and a U.S. citizen, I find this deeply problematic, and symptomatic of a wider trend of non-engagement, especially among incumbent candidates.

For the past year, I have been a part of the Social Policy & Electoral Accountability Collaborative (SPEAC), a group facilitated by the Community Builders Network and comprised of leading St. Louis area organizations striving to hold elected officials accountable to the communities they represent, or are seeking to represent, both prior to an election and afterward. In February 2017, SPEAC hosted one of the largest mayoral forums in the City of St. Louis, held at the Sheldon in partnership with St. Louis Public Radio, the Nine Network, and The St. Louis American. Over 700 people gathered to hear mayoral candidates discuss their priorities on live television before the March primary, a race that—as will likely be the case with next week’s primary in the County—effectively determined the outcome of the subsequent general election.

SPEAC has spent the past ten months planning a similar forum for the County Executive race in St. Louis County, originally set to be held on July 25 at the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the University of Missouri-St. Louis campus. As we did last year, our group was working with journalists at St. Louis Public Radio to craft questions that would have explored where candidates stand on priorities at the heart of the Ferguson Commission Report under the Youth at the Center, Opportunity to Thrive, and Justice for All issue clusters.

Mark Mantovani agreed to take part in SPEAC’s forum. However, despite repeated, multi-pronged outreach attempts over time, County Executive Steve Stenger’s campaign failed to confirm his participation. As a result SPEAC was forced to cancel the event.

As someone who worked hard in partnership with a coalition of incredible St. Louisans who are passionate about building a stronger, more equitable, and more just region for all, I was very disappointed in this result.

As Forward Through Ferguson’s David Dwight noted in SPEAC’s press release about the forum cancellation, “there are few things more core to the health of our local democracy than the right of residents to interact with those who seek to represent our community in public office.” Indeed, this is the very glue that holds a democracy together: a genuine belief that our elected representatives and public institutions will take our viewpoints and our needs into account in a real, substantive way when they craft policy and make decisions. Without that foundation of accountability, transparency, and trust, democracy can’t exist.

To read SPEAC’s full announcement about the forum cancellation, click here.

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Dr. Wally Siewert has over a decade of experience with civic and political engagement, from the grassroots and applied level to academic analysis and theory. From 2011-2017, Dr. Siewert was the Director of the Center for Ethics in Public Life (CEPL) at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. During that time CEPL established itself as a statewide hub for public ethics information, conferences, workshops, research, best practices, legislative tracking, community collaboration and more.

Prior to arriving in St. Louis in 2011, Wally earned his Ph.D. in political philosophy and ethics from the University of California Santa Barbara. He also holds an M.A. in philosophy and a B.A. in philosophy and German from Western Michigan University. Prior to his post-graduate work, Dr. Siewert worked as a political organizer and lobbyist for a network of state-level grassroots consumer justice organizations, including two years as the Campaign Director for the Coalition for Consumer Justice of Rhode Island. He also spent four years as a small business owner and manager.

Dr. Siewert’s most deeply held political beliefs are not about policy, but about political process—about what it takes to create cooperation among co-citizens while simultaneously respecting every individual’s right to pursue her own personal conception of the good. He is an avid wood-worker and animal lover who enjoys nothing more than a good game of chess with a purring cat on his lap and a dog on his feet.

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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.

We invite readers to contribute to the civic conversation about community development in St. Louis by writing an op-ed for the Community Builders Exchange. Op-eds should be short (400-700 words) and provocative. If you have an idea for an op-ed, contact Todd Swanstrom at swanstromt@umsl.edu.

DISMANTLING THE DIVIDE: St. Louis needs a Greenlining Fund to Undo Damage Done by Redlining

Jackie Hutchinson, Co-chair of the St. Louis Equal Housing & Reinvestment Alliance (SLEHCRA)

Clayton Evans, Community Banking and CRA officer at Reliance Bank and board member of the MSLCRA Association

This column was originally published in The St. Louis American.

Jackie Hutchinson

Clayton Evans

The historical impact of the early 20th century federal redlining policy continues to hold back many communities of color. For decades, the federal government used a system of color-coded maps to grade neighborhoods for mortgage risk. Red areas were marked the highest risk for loans, which were primarily African-American neighborhoods, meaning residents could not secure financing for homes and wereunable to build equity and accumulate wealth from which many white families and neighborhoods benefited.

The impact of redlining continues today. Neighborhoods in North St. Louis continue to show little or no mortgage lending activity. While many neighborhoods in St. Louis have recovered from the financial crisis in 2008 and now have an active mortgage market, neighborhoods north of Delmar have almost zero loans.

One of the contributing factors is depressed housing values creating an almost all-cash market, and making it nearly impossible for potential home buyers to finance a home. Depressed home values of surrounding homes guarantees that more buildings will face demolition and ensures homeownership remains out of reach for many families. This is felt when a family tries to purchase and rehab a home but cannot get a loan because the home’s after rehab value is still too low.

In the Greater Ville community for example, you may purchase a home for $35,000 and provide an additional $50,000 for rehabilitation. After completing the rehabilitation, the home only appraises for $70,000, far less than the $85,000 needed to purchase and renovate the home. Because of this common appraisal gap, the loan is denied. Consequently, homes in the impacted communities stay vacant and fall further into disrepair, while families lose out on becoming homeowners in their neighborhoods.

To overcome the long-lasting effects of redlining and to break this vicious cycle, a coordinated approach to reinvesting in neighborhoods of color is needed. We need to do the opposite of redlining—we need to “greenline” neighborhoods, opening up access to credit for residents to buy homes.  Lenders, community organizations, foundations and local governments must work together to create a loan program that fills this need.

We’re calling this approach a Greenlining Fund. This fund, modeled after the Detroit Home Mortgage Initiative, would provide loans for qualified community residents to purchase and rehab homes above their appraised value. In Detroit, the program works with partner banks, foundations, local governments, and a community development financial institution (CDFI) to offer loans up to $75,000 over the appraised value to purchase and rehab a home or repair their current home. Participating banks offer the same loan product, which provides homebuyers with consistent terms and rates on quality, affordable mortgages. Since the program’s beginning in 2015, Detroit has seen the number of mortgages increase by more than 25 percent each year. This program has opened up homeownership opportunities to families who have long been denied the ability to invest in their neighborhoods. We believe this program will work in our market.

The Greenlining Fund would foster homeownership opportunities for residents and help stabilize neighborhoods. Becoming homeowners would help build household wealth for African-American families historically cut out of home-buying opportunities. Homes that have fallen into disrepair will become habitable, reducing the number of vacant homes and bringing life and vitality to neighborhoods. An influx in home rehab projects will create jobs and bring more investment to North City neighborhoods. New mortgages made through this fund will contribute to restarting the real estate market and increasing housing values, helping to improve our local tax base and contributing to the economic viability of the city.

We are already working as a group with the Metropolitan St. Louis CRA (MSLCRA) Association and nonprofit advocates like the St. Louis Equal Housing and Community Reinvestment Alliance (SLEHCRA) to put the pieces for this fund together in St. Louis. In particular, the report “Segregation in St. Louis: Dismantling the Divide,” recently released by the For the Sake of All project team and partners, included the Greenlining Fund as one of its policy recommendations. We call on our partner lenders, nonprofits, and CDFIs to join us. More support is needed from foundations, our government leaders, and from neighbors and community members that want to undo the effects of redlining in their neighborhoods and instead, invest in opportunities for neighborhoods to thrive.

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Jacqueline Hutchinson is VP of Operations for People’s Community Action Corporation in St. Louis. She is actively involved in policy and advocacy issues that affect low-income consumers in the St. Louis region. Jackie is Co-Chair of the St. Louis Equal Housing and Community Reinvestment Alliance (SLEHCRA), where she works to increase investment in LMI communities; serves as board chair for Missouri Consumers Council; and is a member of the Unbanked Task Force. She has a Master’s Degree in Policy Analysis from Southern Illinois University and a Bachelor’s Degree in Business from Washington University in St. Louis.

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Clayton Evans is Senior Vice President of Community Banking and CRA Officer at Reliance Bank. He is also a Board Member of the Metropolitan St. Louis CRA (MSLCRA) Association. MSLCRA was formed to provide a venue allowing banks of all sizes within the St Louis Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) to come together in a non-competitive environment to share best practices.

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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.

We invite readers to contribute to the civic conversation about community development in St. Louis by writing an op-ed for the Community Builders Exchange. Op-eds should be short (400-700 words) and provocative. If you have an idea for an op-ed, contact Todd Swanstrom at swanstromt@umsl.edu.

We Must Invest in Remedying the City’s ‘Depletion Areas’

By The St. Louis American Editorial Board

This editorial was originally published in The St. Louis American.

Better Family Life, Inc.’s renewed strategies for community outreach call to mind an urban legend that continues to haunt North St. Louis. The so-called “Team Four Plan,” many people continue to believe, was a secret development strategy intended to lay waste to majority-black North St. Louis byconcentrating public and private investment in developing the diverse Central Corridor and majority-white South Side. The truth is messier than the legend—this so-called “plan” actually was a mash-up of a development memo (crafted by Team Four Architects), an unrelated map of the city, and two unrelated board bills. None of it was secret, and none of it was enacted into law or policy. However, public and private investment have been focused on developing the diverse Central Corridor and majority-white South Side, and much of majority-black North St. Louis is so disinvested that it does look like it was intentionally laid to waste.

What Team Four’s Memorandum 6B actually proposed was three types of areas that would receive different strategies for investment: Conservation Areas, which would be maintained in their current state of relative health; Redevelopment Areas that would be targeted for redevelopment; and Depletion Areas, whose poorly chosen name had something to do with the sprouting of an urban legend. So did the fact that these “Depletion Areas”—that is, areas “experiencing severe problems requiring redevelopment but where reinvestment had not yet begun,” as William Albinson of Team Four Architects wrote in The American in 2008—were heavily concentrated in majority-black North St. Louis. However, Team Four did not recommend merely letting these areas go to ruin and depletion. Rather, as Albinson wrote in this paper, it advised that “spreading scarce redevelopment funds thinly across all depletion areas would not work” and therefore “the city should make commitments to specific locations before turning them into redevelopment areas.”

It’s a redevelopment strategy sometimes described with the medical term of “triage,” where the incoming wounded are sorted into categories depending on how urgently they need treatment and how likely immediate treatment would save a life. The “Depletion Areas,” in this metaphor, are the parts of the city in need of so much investment to be saved that a perennially cash-strapped city would be better off investing in other areas of the city that are closer to coming back to life. Though Team Four’s memo was not secret—it was submitted as part of the 1975 St. Louis Draft Comprehensive Plan, a public document—and it was never enacted as policy, St. Louis has been developed—and underdeveloped—very much along these lines. And though Team Four did not take racial equity into account when making its proposal (it would take St. Louis almost a half-century and a suburban uprising before it would start taking racial equity into account), the areas that have been depleted are mostly places where mostly black people live, and many black lives have been ruined right along with their neighborhoods.

In 1975, when the Team Four memo was written, St. Louis’ population had declined to just over 500,000, a decline of 40 percent since mid-century, and the city’s finances were in shambles. The city’s decline in population and tax base have continued until today, along with a host of other worsening macroeconomic conditions, including departure of company headquarters, loss of high-wage manufacturing jobs, flight of downtown retailers with their sales taxes and accessible jobs, and erosion of outdated housing stock, leaving the city’s “Depletion Areas” more depleted than ever. The city budget submitted last year had to plug a $17 million deficit, due largely to lower-than-expected sales tax and payroll tax collections.

James Clark, vice president of community outreach for Better Family Life (BFL), knows this history, he is busy standing it on its head, and he needs help—including from the financial powers that invest in development. Rather than allow “Depletion Areas,” considered in human terms, to go to further ruin while concentrating efforts on people and places that would be easier to save, Clark and his team are going right at the heart of urban decay. The name of the effort—the “Resourcing Ground Zero Initiative”—is well chosen; it could just as well be called the “Resourcing Depletion Areas Initiative.” BFL is canvassing eight of St. Louis’ most challenged neighborhoods, with staff drawn from those neighborhoods, bringing social services directly where they are most needed. They also are fighting the opioid crisis by taking resources right to where drug sales take place in open-air drug markets and have organized conflict de-escalation centers where they intervene between individuals at immediate risk of resorting to gun violence.

We commend Clark and the rest of BFL leadership. St. Louis leaders may not have consciously followed a master plan to neglect the neediest areas of our city and let them go to ruin, but that has happened—to disastrous effect. Clark and BFL are now trying exactly the opposite approach. They are diving into the wreck and trying to save those who would appear to be the farthest from salvation. It is incredibly difficult work, and its positive effects may not be immediately evident, but we believe it is a promising approach because it is so different from the approach that has failed and is failing. Clark is calling for the Black Church to join BFL in this work, and clergy and the faithful are desperately needed. Equally needed are the financial powers that neglected these parts of the city and these citizens while focusing development elsewhere. BFL’s outreach efforts have received critical funding from the Missouri Foundation for Health, Civic Progress and the Regional Business Council, but more is needed. Robust macroeconomic growth is what is needed in the St. Louis region, more than anything, including the city, but community outreach into our most desperate and dangerous areas like BFL is attempting can only make St. Louis a safer and more attractive place to live and invest.

As Jason Q. Purnell’s landmark study on racial disparities makes it clear, we don’t address the neediest cases merely for their own sake; we do it “For the Sake of All.” We will never have a healthy, safe or equitable St. Louis if we do not remedy the neighborhoods and human beings we left depleted. These remedies will require investment, and it is urgent that these investments be made.

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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.

We invite readers to contribute to the civic conversation about community development in St. Louis by writing an op-ed for the Community Builders Exchange. Op-eds should be short (400-700 words) and provocative. If you have an idea for an op-ed, contact Todd Swanstrom at swanstromt@umsl.edu.

Parting with Trees to Save the Forest: Why Diversity Can’t Be an Afterthought

By Adam Bowen, Senior Application Developer at ej4, LLC

I live in the Shaw neighborhood in South St. Louis City. Our area’s diversity is one of the qualities that drew me in five years ago and one of the biggest reasons I’ve felt compelled to stay. Every conversation with a neighbor is a chance to learn something totally new from someone who’s lived a life that’s different from my own.

Those who work and volunteer in community building spaces are familiar with the fact that diversity of all types strengthens communities. The ecological world, like the human one, thrives on it. Unfortunately, until recently, St. Louis’ failure to cultivate diversity among our urban street trees has gone largely unnoticed by most.

A few months ago, the city began destroying dozens of ash trees all over Shaw. They’re preparing for an inevitable environmental disaster, but knowing the purpose didn’t make the process easier for many of my neighbors.

For over a century in St. Louis, we’ve been trading our natural diversity for continuous urban sprawl. A tree’s aesthetic beauty is easy to understand, but many of us don’t realize that the trees outside our homes have immense structural and economic value as well. The more we build out our communities, the more turf grass (with its shallow root systems), concrete, and asphalt we layer into the environment. Our sidewalks, buildings, and parking lots prevent the ground from absorbing water, putting stress on the sewer system.

The Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District (MSD) has a program called MSD Project Clear that’s tackling this issue from several angles. As they work to expand and renovate our aging sewers, MSD is educating homeowners and commercial landowners about the value of trees and native plants and incentivizing them to landscape conscientiously. Project Clear highlights one of a street tree’s most important roles in an urban landscape: its capacity to collect water and absorb it into the soil. Large shade trees like the green ash absorb up to 100 gallons of water after one to two inches of rainfall. A street’s shade trees can also provide energy savings to the structures around them as their leaves block sunlight and heat, reducing the need for air conditioning in the summer.

In 2015, St. Louis’ ash trees were confronted with a new threat: the Emerald Ash Borer (EAB), an invasive wood boring insect that targets the entire ash family of trees. It kills every ash tree it infests and currently threatens 15,000 out of the City of St. Louis’ 80,000 street trees. As the population of the EAB grows, it can wipe out all of the ash trees in a region within 3–10 years.

With the clock ticking on our 15,000 ash trees’ remaining years of life, and the value of the city’s ash population calculated at $817,000 (you can explore the value of your neighborhood’s trees using this calculator), the City has to decide which trees to save and which to destroy. The EAB population can only be controlled with pesticide treatment of healthy trees and destruction of trees that are less likely to survive. We cannot let infested ash trees die on their own—liability from trees falling on property and people would be enormous—and we have a responsibility to the wider region to reduce EAB numbers as best we can.

The City has taken these complex factors into account and has determined it will need to destroy 14,000 of the city’s 15,000 ash street trees in response to the EAB. The plan is a costly one—both literally and emotionally. I saw firsthand the distress and confusion my neighbors felt as contractors cut down the first round of ash trees in my neighborhood this spring. The tiny replacement trees they planted were not much comfort when the shade on some blocks had all but disappeared.

But it’s important to remember that these replacement trees, which include dozens of species and should last for half a century or more, are a critical investment in the future. They point to the silver lining of our EAB crisis: it’s giving us an excuse to address our tree diversity problem. The EAB only targets ash trees, so the damage the EAB is able to wreak on our community is directly proportional to the number of ash trees we have in it. Although the City of St. Louis Forestry Division recommends a single species comprise no more than 10% of the city’s trees, 12% are currently green ash.

It’s too late for our green ash trees, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that something like the EAB will threaten our community again. Increasing diversity in our street trees will make St. Louis more resilient to disasters like the EAB in the future, just like fostering diversity in our neighborhoods on human and structural levels will produce groups of people with greater capacity to handle the challenges of our daily life in creative and compassionate ways.

I want to live in a St. Louis that values and benefits everyone. The destructive impact of the EAB should be a wake-up call: diversity can’t be an afterthought if we want our communities to be strong, safe, and resilient.

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Adam Bowen is a software engineer and amateur gardener living in St. Louis City. He’s the organizer of the St. Louis chapter of Papers We Love, a meetup focused on notable papers in computer science, and a frequent participant in several tech meetups in the St. Louis area. He also serves as a member of Young Friends of the Ville and Young Friends of Urban Harvest STL.

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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.

We invite readers to contribute to the civic conversation about community development in St. Louis by writing an op-ed for the Community Builders Exchange. Op-eds should be short (400-700 words) and provocative. If you have an idea for an op-ed, contact Todd Swanstrom at swanstromt@umsl.edu.

Arrested Development: Healthy Housing is Under Siege in Missouri

By Samuel Yang, MPH, Research Assistant at Washington University in St. Louis

This is a revised version of an op-ed that appeared under the author’s name in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

It’s been a bad year for houses—the White House, statehouse, House of Representatives, and “House of Cards” have all rotated through the spotlight. But as the nation’s eyes have been fearfully glued to the drama unfolding inthose houses, affordable housing in St. Louis has silently taken even more hits than usual.

This month, in response to changes in state discrimination laws, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development followed through on a months-long threat to suspend the state’s participation in federal fair housing programs. This comes on the heels of a Missouri Housing Development Commission decision late last year to not match federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) funds, effectively halving the amount of money available to low-income housing developers.

These are programs designed to produce quality housing and safeguard equal access to them. The Fair Housing Assistance Program helps state and local agencies investigate, enforce, and promote housing access. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC) program helps developers build affordable housing in neighborhoods where it’s otherwise unavailable or unfeasible. Under them, federal, state, and local agencies worked together, a tenuous balance that is set to be brutally disrupted.

Such changes don’t just affect the market—they pose a serious threat to health and well-being for St. Louis residents. Most immediately, in-home exposures directly impact physical and mental health. Housing costs also affect the ability of individuals and families to manage illness and disease. Healthcare, sick days, and healthy habits are expensive. If housing is expensive, too, cash-strapped families often have to make hard choices.

Beyond those effects, though, public health advocates are becoming increasingly aware that health, like real estate, is all about location, location, location. That sticky mantra isn’t narrow obsession. It’s a reflection of how neighborhood conditions can be nearly all-encompassing in influencing health outcomes.

Cutting-edge academic programs here in St. Louis are connecting their programs in urban planning and design with public health and social work, but they’re just playing catch-up to every homeowner since the ancient urbanites who first started settling by rivers. Those early city-dwellers knew what the first practitioners of zoning (invented partially to separate houses from factories) knew, which is also what every parent today who buys their home based on school districts knows: Where you live is deeply tied to how you live.

That means questions and concerns about fair housing are inherently also about neighborhood access. Do all house-hunters have discrimination-free access to neighborhoods? Are they all shown houses in every neighborhood they can afford? Are they all treated equally when applying for mortgages?

The evidence says no. This is a problem, because in St. Louis, place (and race, to which it has been tied by abuse and neglect) is essentially a foundation for what parks, hospitals, schools, and jobs are within reach. All of those eventually affect health—and not just for this week or next week. Research suggests that children of mothers who grew up in underserved neighborhoods are at a disadvantage even if they themselves don’t. One crack in the foundation leads to further instability, which echoes across generations.

This is especially important in St. Louis, where in the past year alone, alarms have been sounded over illegal evictions, handicap accessibility, and policies that could jeopardize housing access for victims of domestic violence and the disabled. Just three years ago, reports emerged that housing voucher holders, often people of color, were discriminated against and “steered” toward certain neighborhoods, reinforcing segregation and health disparities. All of this in a city that already ranks in the top 10 for racial segregation and bottom 10 for economic mobility.

Despite the initial chaos, opportunities still exist for Missouri to fix its foundation. LIHTC’s opponents say they want to see long-term improvements to its efficiency, but fine-tuning a program doesn’t require the dramatic gesture of entirely pulling state funding and crippling the program. Let’s put together a plan for reform, and let’s do it through an honest, open process that won’t sacrifice important, necessary work already being done.

Furthermore, revisions to our state discrimination laws that restore harmony with federal laws need to be made by May 15 (the federal government’s deadline, three days before the end of the legislative session) so that fair housing funds can flow again.

With those plans and changes in place, state and local agencies can get back to work providing and protecting fair housing—and families across the state can start building their own healthy lives and happy homes on that foundation.

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Samuel Yang, MPH is a Research Assistant at Washington University in St. Louis and a resident of South City St. Louis.

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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.

We invite readers to contribute to the civic conversation about community development in St. Louis by writing an op-ed for the Community Builders Exchange. Op-eds should be short (400-700 words) and provocative. If you have an idea for an op-ed, contact Todd Swanstrom at swanstromt@umsl.edu.

DISMANTLING THE DIVIDE: St. Louis County Needs an Affordable Housing Trust Fund

By Chris Krehmeyer, President & CEO of Beyond Housing

This column was originally published in The St. Louis American.

What could be more important than investing in home?

The power of “home” can’t be overstated. The home in which we live, and the community where we grow up, drive the trajectory our lives. If we recognize this to be true for ourselves, how can we not recognize it to be true for all? How can this region, our collective home, succeed if we allow pockets of it to fail?

Sub-standard low-income housing and what it represents continues to be a part of the St. Louis County landscape—and when housing struggles, so do families, communities, and our region. Even though St. Louis County is the jobs base for our region, no significant investment has been made in affordable housing in years.

As the recent, exhaustive study “Segregation in St. Louis: Dismantling the Divide” points out, this lack of investment has taken a significant toll on our region, particularly in North St. Louis County and parts of South County. The report was produced by ArchCity Defenders, Ascend STL, Empower Missouri, the Equal Housing and Opportunity Council of Metropolitan St. Louis (EHOC), For the Sake of All, Invest STL and Team TIF. They noted that over the course of decades, homes and apartment complexes have deteriorated. They require expensive upkeep that homeowners and landlords are hesitant or simply unable to make.

At Beyond Housing, we deal with these issues every day within the 24:1 footprint, which comprises the 24 municipalities in the Normandy school district. We’ve seen the many challenges homeowners, tenants and landlords face in keeping the quality of the housing stock as strong and viable as possible, and the lack of available tools and resources to help.

It’s why we strongly agree with the organizations that issued the report: An Affordable Housing Trust Fund is absolutely critical to the overall health and wellness of St. Louis County and our region.

The City of St. Louis has had its fund for a number of years. Considering more people live in poverty in St. Louis County, a similar fund is long overdue. It’s highly doable, too. An Affordable Housing Trust Fund can easily be paid for through the reallocation of existing resources, by a small sales tax, or by placing a modest fee on every real estate closing transaction, which is the method used by St. Louis City.

It’s essential to make funds available to repair existing housing stock, as well as supporting families in need. Making funds available through an Affordable Housing Trust Fund for issues such as utilities and housing expenses helps stave off the upheaval and trauma caused by eviction and provides stability for children, schools and communities.

We also know that we can’t continue to keep the poor confined to a few small, often highly segregated areas. As the study shows, most affordable housing is located in low-employment areas and isolated from public transportation, where the vast majority of residents don’t own cars to easily commute to areas of greater employment.

Racial and economic segregation have long been part of the problem here. It’s important to allow people lower on the economic ladder to move to communities that give them access to the things they need to prosper. This region will never be as strong as we’d like it to be if we refuse to allow people who look different or make less money to live next door to us. And study after study has debunked the myth that creating low-income housing in more affluent areas brings down property values.

At Beyond Housing, we believe that allowing people to move to communities of opportunity as well as investing in poverty areas is a successful two-pronged approach.

We’ve invested close to $80 million over the last eight years—repairing, renovating and building homes within the 24:1 communities, as well as continuing to offer affordable rental housing in places like Webster Groves, Kirkwood, Maplewood and Richmond Heights.

In recent conversations with St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger, we’ve been discussing the idea of an Affordable Housing Trust Fund. He shares my conviction that prioritizing funds for affordable housing is paramount in our community. Together, we are looking forward to working with interested parties to make it a reality.

If we’re going to thrive as a region, we need to recognize that this is the home we share, and that home matters—not just for some, but for all.

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Chris Krehmeyer is the President and CEO of Beyond Housing, a NeighborWorks America organization in St. Louis. He has served in that capacity since 1993. Chris has or currently sits on a variety of boards including Midwest Bank Centre and Midwest Bank Centre Holding Company, the United Way of Greater St. Louis Asset Building, both Washington University and the University of Missouri’s Not-For-Profit programs, and the National NeighborWorks Association Board. Chris has been an adjunct faculty member at Washington University teaching a class in social entrepreneurship. Chris is married with three children and has an undergraduate degree in Urban Studies from Washington University.

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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.

We invite readers to contribute to the civic conversation about community development in St. Louis by writing an op-ed for the Community Builders Exchange. Op-eds should be short (400-700 words) and provocative. If you have an idea for an op-ed, contact Todd Swanstrom at swanstromt@umsl.edu.

Chesterfield Mobile Home Park Poses Opportunity and Challenge for Community Builders

By Jim Moore

The recent publicity on the possible conversion of a mobile home park for mid-to-high income apartments raises several policy, political and practice issues re: affordable housing. The current drought in support for affordable housingsuggests a need to revisit the potential of “manufactured houses” and mobile home parks as a partial solution. A look at this case may provide some clues as to what legal, policy and practice changes are needed to make such housing acceptable to all stakeholders.

In the late 1940’s land once part of a Spanish Land Grant was developed as the Chesterfield Mobile Home Park (CMHP) in what was unincorporated St. Louis County. When the City of Chesterfield was incorporated in 1988, CMHP was grandfathered in the city’s zoning plan as a “legal, non-conforming use.” It operates today in that status. CMHP is home to over 300 people living in 135 homes. Most of the individual trailer residents are elderly or disabled living on limited incomes. A larger number of residents are families with one or more wage earners working in low wage jobs in Chesterfield’s stores and restaurants. Many of these are Hispanic. A few are independent, small business owners. There are more than 120 children in the community, most of whom attend Rockwood Schools.

In 2017 a developer approached the owner of the Mobile Home Park to buy the land to build apartment buildings. The sale was contingent upon the developer’s ability to get the land rezoned for that use. If the land was rezoned, CMHP would be closed and the occupants forced to leave. There is no other low income housing in the area, so they would lose their homes, jobs and schools for their children.

An informal committee of residents and concerned citizens successfully fought the rezoning of the property. Rezoning was denied and the developer has withdrawn. Unfortunately, the residents may have “won a battle to lose the war.” The property owners will eventually sell.   

The CMHP Resident Association is now looking at potential ways for the residents to buy the land. They are in contact with several national organizations and financiers who specialize in cooperative housing and the purchase of trailer parks for resident ownership (ROCUSA, Grounded Solutions, Community Land Trusts, and others). These efforts will be strengthened by the development of a viable plan for the mobile park which would meet the city’s expectations for improvements in the mobile park. Achieving community ownership would be a win-win-win for the residents, the current land owner, and the city and surrounding neighbors (by means of improvements to the mobile park).

HUD recognizes the utility of such housing in the current market (cf. articles in Evidence Matters and other HUD publications). Several states have also taken action to promote conversion of mobile home parks to “Resident Owned Communities,” among them New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Oregon. All of these have “Opportunity to Purchase” law, which requires the land owner to notify intent to sell and provide a 90-day period of negotiation that requires clear notification of sale expectations and good faith negotiation with residents and others interested. As usual, Missouri lags behind. 

Local zoning laws will also need to be addressed to find what is required to make mobile home parks a welcome addition to the community housing stock. And finally, community development practioners should update their views on the parks as real communities where engagement with and mutual support among neighbors is often more easily obtained than in other environments.

If you share my concern about this critical issue and would like to get involved, here are a few ways you can help:

1. Area citizens and preservation groups are invited to provide moral and public support for the preservation of this low-income housing and to encourage both legal and zoning changes.

2. Funds are needed in the short term to assist in pre-development activities, surveys, research, organizing, and outreach to the broader community.

3. Should a Community Land Trust be needed, supporters will be needed to serve in the short or long term on the Board of the Land Trust, both to acquire the land and to assist residents in negotiating improvements with the City of Chesterfield.

4. CDCs and housing and community development nonprofit partners who are interested in working with Resident-Owned Communities USA (ROC-USA) could assist by serving as a local partner, thus enabling ROC-USA to bring their expertise and support to Missouri and Southern Illinois. Many mobile home parks in these areas are potential sources for upgraded low-income and affordable housing stock.

ROC-USA has managed 200 conversions of mobile home parks and has access to finances to make such conversions possible. But they will not enter our marketplace without a local partner.   

For more information, please contact Jim Moore at moorejd59@gmail.com.

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Jim has no experience in housing development, but began work life in community organizing in the 1960s, working his way from the street to city then state government positions in workforce development.  The second third of his career was in OD work in the private sector, returning to program and process improvement in the non-profit and government sectors to finish work life. After a 1970s experience with cooperatives in Ecuador, he takes pride in founding four service collaboratives to address employment of ex-offenders and other disadvantaged job seekers.

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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.

We invite readers to contribute to the civic conversation about community development in St. Louis by writing an op-ed for the Community Builders Exchange. Op-eds should be short (400-700 words) and provocative. If you have an idea for an op-ed, contact Todd Swanstrom at swanstromt@umsl.edu.

Why Cherokee Street’s Success Threatens the Status Quo

By Chris Naffziger, Writer at St. Louis Magazine

This column was originally published by St. Louis Magazine.

Cherokee Street is dangerous.

No, not in the cliché definition we see plastered all over the nightly news. It is dangerous to the status quo inSt. Louis politics. Despite very little attention from City Hall, the street has rebounded from absentee landlordship to become a thriving, multicultural community. Scanning through national coverage of St. Louis, places such as the Saint Louis Zoo, Saint Louis Art Museum, the Cardinals, and the Arch get much of the attention, and logically so, as they are large institutions with commensurate budgets. But it’s Cherokee Street that gets into the headlines despite having a fraction of the finances of those other St. Louis icons.

In addition to being ignored by City Hall, Cherokee Street has rarely been the recipient of tax abatements of the quantity lavished on the Central Corridor. I counted around 16 total tax abatements on Cherokee Street, which runs through the heart of South City. Nonetheless, despite having only minimal relief from taxes, the street thrives. I began to contemplate why this is; if tax subsidies are so necessary to spur development in the Central Corridor, then why did growth happen anyway in the Cherokee Corridor? Here are my observations, having watched the street mature over the past decade.

Individual initiative, without help or even in defiance of the political leadership in the neighborhood. Mexican Americans moved to Cherokee Street and began to open stores and restaurants, bringing life to a commercial corridor that was largely abandoned. Yet again, as has been shown over the past 250 years, this city has always been nourished with the blood of immigrants, and their contribution has been ignored for just about that length of time as well. It was Mexican Americans who built the first new buildings on Cherokee Street in decades.

Hard work, which tax incentives cannot replace. Look at the work required to renovate the Cherokee Brewery. Despite receiving no tax abatements, the Earthbound Beer team transformed a historic brewery building into a modern microbrewery. I was always amazed by the sheer amount of grunt work required, particularly the summer that I witnessed a steady stream of dirt and rock pour out of a rickety but perfectly functional conveyer belt rising from the depths below. With the help of friends (including one who singlehandedly picked up giant blocks of discarded limestone), Earthbound cleared out a historic lagering cellar filled with rubble for a century. And unlike other big-ticket developments in the Central Corridor, Earthbound is now even attracting international attention.

A sense of purpose beyond profit. I’m not arguing that businesses should not worry about being fiscally solvent. Far from it. But I’ve discovered over the years that most people can smell a person who’s only in business for the money. When I walk into a place such as Blank Space, I feel like I’m somewhere special, a place where there is community. When I walk into StL Style, I don’t just see a custom T-shirt shop; I see a place where the Vines brothers and their staff have created a business that advocates for their community. When I walk into the Hop Shop or Teatopia, I feel like I’ve entered an oasis of calm in a bustling world. When I walk into Yaqui’s Pizza, I think about how the owner once bought his class ring in the same building decades ago.

It must be terribly confusing to the bigwigs in City Hall: a thriving community without the excessive use of tax incentives. Ironically, it made me think back to my days playing Sim City and how I, along with many others, used a cheat code that gave me free money. What did I do after getting the free money? I spent it recklessly because, after all, it was free money. The problem was that I built a city too quickly for tax revenues to catch up. Eventually, my little simulated city, awash with the electronic equivalent of subsidies, ran out of money. And I couldn’t keep using the cheat code to get more money, because the game’s designers would trigger an earthquake if the cheat was used too much. I would be left high and dry, with a city that couldn’t pay for itself due to subsidized growth. And of course, that was right when my power plant blew up because it was 50 years old. I realized that the only way to win Sim City was slow, organic growth in which tax revenues matched development. It took more time, but it was ultimately more rewarding.

Sound familiar? Our city has given away close to $1 billion in tax subsidies for development that very well shouldn’t have occurred in the first place due to market demand. Or even worse, many projects would have done just fine without subsidies—and got them anyway. Just like in Sim City, you can only raise taxes so high before people start leaving. St. Louis even has its own proverbial power plant that needs to be replaced; the estimates for updating the Convention Center are in the hundreds of millions. There is no money. No, really, there is no money.

Back to the first sentence of the article: Cherokee Street is dangerous. It is dangerous to those at City Hall who insist that we were obligated to give away hundreds of millions of tax dollars or our city would see no new development. Cherokee Street proves that when individuals are left alone to work hard, experiment, and dream, real change and rebirth can occur. It must be incredibly humbling for politicians to hear that.

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Chris Naffziger writes about architecture at St. Louis Magazine. His architecture blog, St. Louis Patina, just celebrated its ten-year anniversary in May of 2017. He is an internationally published authority on the history of brewing in St. Louis, and has been investigating the Lemp Brewery recently. He has worked in several art museums, including the National Gallery of Art and the Saint Louis Art Museum.

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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.

We invite readers to contribute to the civic conversation about community development in St. Louis by writing an op-ed for the Community Builders Exchange. Op-eds should be short (400-700 words) and provocative. If you have an idea for an op-ed, contact Todd Swanstrom at swanstromt@umsl.edu.