St. Louis: So Hot You Can Fry an Egg on the Sidewalk

Another event worth attending: Modern-StL’s talk: “Public Housing in St. Louis: Vanishing Mid-Century Architecture.” It will be held Thursday, June 23, 7:00 p.m., at the St. Louis Artists’ Guild.

Learn more at http://www.modern-stl.com/our-next-event-public-housing-in-st-louis-vanishing-mid-century-modern-architecture/.

Thanks once again to Wellston Loop reader Dave Durham for calling my attention to this event.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been providing highlights from Colin Gordon’s provocative study, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Penn Press, 2008). This week, I’ll continue recapping some of Gordon’s salient points, with a focus this time on what he terms “hypersegregation.”

As with other phenomena related to urban decay, St Louis, says Gordon, “offers a particularly graphic and sustained version” of segregation: “the City’s racial demographics were starker and simpler than those of its peers.” “The national pattern of white flight and inner city decay,” Gordon quotes one observer as saying, “could be found in St. Louis ‘in somewhat purer and less ambiguous form than almost anywhere else.’”

Indeed, Gordon asserts, “St. Louis retained (decade after decade) its dubious distinction as one of the nation’s most segregated metropolitan areas.” In terms of its “segregation index,” “St. Louis ranked eighteenth of 237 MSAs [metropolitan areas] in 1960, fourteenth of 237 in 1970, and tenth of 318 in 1980.” In short, “St. Louis in 1980 ranked as one of a handful of ‘hypersegregated’ metro areas.”

So profound is the segregation between black and white, between City and County, that one observer has described the border between the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County as a kind of “Berlin Wall” between “city and county, the poor and the affluent, the black and the white.”

Such segregation didn’t just happen, according to Gordon. Rather, federal, state and local policies shaped residential patterns. Since I’m a former Professor of English (with a specialty in American ethnic literature), I immediately thought of Louise Hansberry’s 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, particularly as Gordon discusses real estate policies and practices designed to keep African Americans out of “white” neighborhoods.

Such policies and practices were based on “the conviction that African American occupancy was a blight to be contained, controlled, or eradicated.” “City planners (especially through the 1940s and 1950s),” says Gordon, “routinely equated black occupancy with ‘blight’ and watched its expansion north and west like the spread of a disease.”

The policies that shaped residential segregation “tilt[ed] the playing field dramatically in favor of those who were already winning” – so much so that it came to seem that “inner-city poverty” was “something African Americans had done to themselves.” “As a rapidly growing African American population crowded into hastily but strictly circumscribed blocks or neighborhoods,” Gordon says, “the immediate consequence was not only extreme stress on the housing stock but also an easy equation of overcrowding, crime, poor sanitation, and poor health with black occupancy itself.”

To get a stark visual of St. Louis’s hypersegregation, visit Gordon’s website and explore the numerous maps Gordon uses to illustrate the story of St. Louis’s decline. For example, click on “White Flight” – and then explore what happened in the years 1940-1950, 1950-1960, and all the way through to 1990-2000. The years 1970-1980 offer the most dramatic visual of white flight, with black and red sections of the map highlighting the intense racially-based residential patterns of the City and the County. The Documents page contains links to revealing primary sources, showing the policies that were used to segregate the City and its neighborhoods.

Next week, I’ll discuss Gordon’s analysis of what happened in the inner-ring suburbs, communities like Wellston that themselves felt the impact of abandonment, decay, and segregation.

Earlier this week, while reading Cindy Brown’s excellent site/blog, Girls’ Guide to Swagger, I learned about architect-in-the-making Alicia Ajayi. Alicia’s journey to architecture is inspiring — and I’m especially moved by her quest to participate in the design-build program, CityStudioSTL, to be led this summer by Theaster Gates Jr.,  a prominent artist and social activist. With Cindy’s and Alicia’s permission, I’m reposting Alicia’s guest Girls’ Guide to Swagger blog entry.

Alicia Ajayi

My name is Alicia Ajayi, and I am a young women just coming into her own swagger. I am a University of Colorado graduate and received my Bachelors in Environmental Design in 2008. After graduation I worked as an Intern Architect for a successful architecture firm in Boulder, CO. I was fortunate enough to work for a woman in a male-dominated industry who taught me that every success she had achieved was due to fierce tenacity and creativity. As my confidence in my abilities, determination and passion continue to grow, so do the risks I take.

While it is nerve-racking, stressful, and totally against my Type A personality to go outside of the box I am taking the time to realize my dreamsand building the courage to chase them with a “by any means necessary” attitude!

I am taking a non-traditional path to becoming an architect. This fall I will be attending Washington University in St. Louis (Wash U) to pursue a Masters in Social Work. I decided to diverge from a strictly architecture driven career and pursue an education in social work to understand how to design healthy, livable and inspiring spaces for under-served populations
specifically in urban areas.

Recently I was accepted into a design-build program entitled CityStudioSTL (Somethingness: Ways of Seeing and Building), which will be led by Theaster Gates Jr.,  a prominent artist and social activist. The intent of the program is to encourage students to think of innovative designs that are directly fueled by the cultural and physical characteristics of the site while providing a positive space for one of the most run down areas in St. Louis. The program will result in a built work in the Hyde Park community of St. Louis.

Unfortunately I will not be able to participate in this program due to the cost to attend the program, unless I can raise some money to do so. Therefore I have launched a fundraiser site to help raise enough money to be a part of this amazing opportunity.

I recently found a quote by Nikki Giovani, a female poet with an abundant amount of swagger, that will not leave my head nor my heart.

“I really don’t think life is about the I-could-have-beens. Life is only about the I-tried-to-do. I don’t mind the failure but I can’t imagine that I’d forgive myself if I didn’t try.”

I know that it will be nothing short of a miracle for me to raise this money in the next few weeks but I am willing to risk failure at the chance of achieving my dreams. Please visit the website and help me to raise $4000 by July 1st!

Swag On Ladies!

Alicia Ajayi

Last week, I introduced Wellston Loop readers to Colin Gordon’s detailed study, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Penn Press, 2008).

This week, I want to zero in on twin issues in the book – “urban abandonment” (nearly synonymous in St. Louis’s case with “white flight”) and the simultaneous phenomenon of suburbanization.

“By almost any objective or subjective standard,” says a 1970s New York Times report Gordon cites, “St. Louis is still the premier example of urban abandonment.”

As I noted last week – and as virtually every historian of St. Louis reports – the City of St. Louis saw dramatic losses in population throughout the twentieth century. Here’s a quick snapshot, from the highest population in 1950 to the current figure from the 2010 census:

1950: 856,796

1960: 750,026

1970: 622,236

1980: 452,801

1990: 396,685

2000: 348,189

2010: 319,000

In fact, St. Louis’s population is now equal to what it was in the 1870s!

While the City was emptying out, the surrounding County was growing – pushed forward by rapid suburbanization. Gordon describes a 1947 pamphlet that “extol[ed] the virtues of the suburbs.” The pamphlet “portrayed St. Louis County as a demographic rocket and the City as a horse and buggy” and “rated the area’s neighborhoods according to average rents, population density, and the ‘presence of negroes.’” The pamphlet’s bottom line? “People Who Can, Move Away.”

What was behind the abandonment of the city and the push out into the County? Gordon points to “the impact of federal housing policy.” “FHA mortgage insurance flowed primarily to the suburbs, subsidizing white flight,” Gordon maintains. “To the casual observer,” he says, “this was just the market at work: the dispersal of population from the old urban core to the suburban periphery is a fairly universal pattern, accelerated in the postwar American setting by a combination of available land and general prosperity.”

At the same time, “[f]ederal public housing assistance flowed primarily to the inner city,” and “residential opportunities” were “regulated, restricted, and rigged,” “crowd[ing]” mostly African American populations “into a few older neighborhoods while effectively barring their escape to the suburban fringe.” Thus, these policies “cement[ed] the region’s spatial organization of race and poverty.” (More on this move toward hypersegregation in next week’s post.)

One 1950s City official described the situation this way: “The segregated black community was left to fester, while developers aided by the federal government rushed out to build new white enclaves on the city’s edge.”

The impact was stark. Gordon writes:

Over time, the accumulation of residential choices achieved no equilibrium but only hardened patterns of residential segregation and, by robbing the central city of its tax base, encouraged even more people to escape the fiscal wreckage (baser public services, underfunded schools) left behind. Over time, the City dipped below the demographic and economic thresholds necessary to sustain even basic urban activities or expectations (public transit, downtown retail and leisure, industrial clusters.

Gordon describes the basic pattern early in Mapping Decline ­– and then spends the rest of the book showing exactly how the pattern played out in St. Louis. He writes:

This general condition . . . is the seemingly iron law of urban decay: Rising incomes breed suburbanization. Suburbanization robs inner cities of their tax base. Inner city concentrations of poverty widen gaps between urban residents and substantive economic opportunities, and between suburban residents and urban concerns. And all of this encourages more flight, not only from the metropolitan core, but from decaying inner suburbs as well.

Though St. Louis was to reach its high population in 1950, already the forces of urban abandonment were being felt in 1936, when the City Plan Commission concluded:

To state the condition in its simplest term, if adequate measures are not taken the city is faced with gradual economic and social collapse. The older central areas of the city are being abandoned and this insidious trend will continue until the entire city is engulfed.

Ultimately, urban decay was not to stop with the City of St. Louis’s restrictive boundary – but would go on to plague inner-ring suburbs, such as Wellston. In a later post, I’ll look at Gordon’s analysis of what happened to those inner-ring suburbs.

Next up: Gordon’s analysis of “hypersegregation” in St. Louis.

Hang on to your hats. It’s going to be a bumpy – and depressing – ride for the next few blog entries.

Why?

Because I’m going to be focusing on Colin Gordon’s Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Penn Press, 2008). The journey won’t be depressing because of the quality of Gordon’s book and accompanying website – but because of the very sad story Gordon tells about St. Louis and its decline over the last half-century.

Gordon quotes an observer from the late 1970s: “St. Louis is not a typical city, but, like a Eugene O’Neill play, it shows a general condition in a stark and dramatic form.” “More dramatically than most,” Gordon says, “St Louis followed a middle-American pattern of concentrated inner-city poverty, intense racial segregation, and dramatic population less.” This pattern, he says, was “suffered by many of the nation’s older urban area, but . . . St. Louis led the pack.”

The chronology is devastating.

In 1941, the League of Women Voters reported: “St. Louis has been losing population to the county at such a rapid rate in the last few years that soon it will be left with its slums and too few taxpayers to support them.”

In 1956, a visiting French businessman noted that St. Louis “looks like a European city bombed in the war.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, “it became increasingly common to refer to the ‘bombed out’ appearance of devastated inner cities. This allusion held for cartographic snapshots of urban poverty, racial segregation, fiscal capacity, crime, and private investment – all of which identified a growing statistical crater, its epicenter in the City’s oldest residential wars, its edges, by century’s end, circumscribing not only the bulk of the City but many of its inner-ring suburbs as well.”

By 1978, “St. Louis had the highest vacancy rate of all central cities.”

In the 1980s, the situation was becoming decidedly worse. “When the City challenged the results of the 1980s canvas,” Gordon writes, “census officials only rubbed it in: ‘If they don’t wake up and acknowledge the exodus, they’re going to lose it all. They ought to get out of their offices and drive through north St. Louis. A lot of it looks like a ghost town. When we come back to count in 1990, it may not even be a city. It may be a village.’”

The 1999 City Plan reveals a deteriorating vision of the City: “a visual survey of the neighborhood reveals a tree-lined block of stable, well-kept, two- and four-family homes followed by a block of overgrown board-ups on a one-to-one ratio with intact housing.  . . . Two blocks later, a once commercial area of St. Louis Avenue is now totally empty with vacated lots and derelict buildings. This trend is not specific to St. Louis Avenue; the same can be said of Taylor, Greer, Labadie, and most other neighborhood streets. For businesses, the situation appears even worse. Signs of life are few and far between the corner store board-ups and chain-link-fence-covered storefronts.”

Decade after decade, the City lost population. Gordon writes, “After 1970, the depopulation of the City (and especially the near northside) accelerated, falling by almost 170,000 (from 622,236 to 452,801) by the 1980 census, and by more than 100,000 more (to 348,189) by 2000.” And in February, we learned that the 2010 census shows the population yet again, now down to 319,000. According to New Geography, “Among the world’s municipalities that have ever achieved 500,000 population, none have lost so much as the city of St. Louis. The new figure of 319,000 people is 63 percent below the 1950 Census peak of 857,000 people. Indeed, the 2010 population is nearly as low as the population in the 1870 census.”
With this loss in the City’s population came increasing “hypersegregation” (a phenomenon I’ll talk about in a later post). By 2000, says Gordon, “whites were fleeing the inner suburbs as well, and white population growth was concentrated in the western reaches of St. Louis County and beyond. In a sense, the suburban color line had drifted west from the City limits to encompass much of near northeastern St. Louis County (Wellston, Bridgeton, Normandy, Jennings, Ferguson, Bellefontaine Neighbors) south and east of Lindbergh Boulevard (Highway 67). ‘Ghetto spillover, ‘a local observed noted bluntly, ‘now stretches almost all the way across the county in a northwesterly direction.’”

This “stark and dramatic” story featured St. Louis as “the poster child of white flight,” Gordon said in a 2008 interview with St. Louis Magazine. Local, state, and federal policies “yielded both an intense concentration of African Americans in certain wards or neighborhoods of St. Louis itself and a virtually unbreachable wall between the City and its suburbs.” One commentator, says Gordon, referred to the hypersegregation of St. Louis City and St. Louis County as a kind of “Berlin Wall.”

In future posts, I’ll recap more of Gordon’s book. I’ll look at “urban abandonment” (AKA “white flight”) and hypersegregation, and I’ll also look at the specific points Gordon has to make about Wellston – a key player in the exodus of whites and the rise of ghettoized African American communities.

To learn more about Mapping Decline, read the Riverfront Times feature on Gordon’s May 2008 talk at Left Bank Books and Frank Kovarik’s December 2008 St. Louis Magazine article, “Mapping the Divide: A Lifelong St. Louisan Grapples with the City’s Racial Disparity.”

And of course, stay tuned to The Wellston Loop for more on Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City.

Last month, I reflected on the wonderful neighborhoods I’ve been fortunate to call home over the last 20+ years. In that post, I mentioned a great film, Designing a Great Neighborhood. It tells the story of my present neighborhood – North Boulder’s Holiday Neighborhood – and focuses in particular on the development of the Wild Sage Cohousing Community, where my husband Jim and I live.

The film can be streamed on Netflix. It runs 54 minutes, and I hope you’ll take a look at it yourself. I’ll share a few highlights here (to whet your appetite!).

The old Holiday Drive-in Sign (complete with the "Congratulations Jim and Linda" message that was displayed when Jim and I got married!).

The documentary, made by cohousing enthusiast, writer and filmmaker Dave Wann, looks at the 330-home neighborhood known as Holiday – so named for the drive-in movie theater that formerly occupied the site’s 27 acres. Adjectives used to describe Holiday include “sustainable,” “affordable,” “diverse,” “lively,” “walkable,” “pedestrian-oriented.” Having lived here for nearly five years, I can testify to the accuracy of these descriptors!

Cindy Brown, co-director of Boulder Housing Partners and master site planner for the Holiday Neighborhood (and now author of the forthcoming The Girl’s Guide to Swagger), describes the history of the development:

The site was acquired by the City of Boulder in 1997, and the city had a vision for what this site might be. There was at the time a ‘big box’ – a Price Club – that wanted to buy this and locate there. But the city decided that they had a different vision for this area, that it would be a smaller scale, that there would be neighborhood businesses and multi-family and single-family, all oriented around a central park.

The neighborhood, says Brown, includes permanently affordable housing units, neighborhood businesses (including offices), live/work units (perhaps with an artist’s studio downstairs and living quarters upstairs), multi-family townhouses, single-family or duplex units. Thus, says Brown, “a rich variety of different types of homes and income levels [are] represented across the site.” “Some really nice features,” she adds, “are a park at the heart – this is a two-acre park that the City of Boulder will own and manage. And there’s a pedestrian walkway that gathers everything up, a community garden, and then [a] buffer zone.” Also included in the neighborhood are businesses that cater to leisure time, including coffee shops with indoor and outdoor seating, an Italian restaurant, a gourmet bistro, a fitness center, a pizza shop, and a bicycle shop – all within a five- or ten-minute walk from most homes. George Watt of Barrett Studio Architects says that the neighborhood is “a place for people to live and work and play, all within the same 27 acres.” (Take a “tour” of the neighborhood by clicking here!)

In addition to being community oriented, the neighborhood is also built around green, sustainable principles. Hallmarks of green building are used throughout the neighborhood, including passive and active solar, paints with no volatile compounds, recycled building materials, and minimized resource use. Several segments of the film feature Wild Sage architects Jim Logan and Bryan Bowen talking about the extraordinary care they took to make Wild Sage green and sustainable. The film also points to the fact that the Holiday Neighborhood focuses on smaller, denser housing, with each home having a much smaller footprint than in suburban developments. (Holiday runs about 20 dwelling units per acre, compared to typical suburban densities of 3 units per acre.) Moreover, the entire neighborhood is well served by public transportation, and many residents commute to work either by walking to their in-neighborhood offices or by biking – thus residents tend to rely less heavily on cars than most Americans. According to the film, “residents will drive an estimated 30% less, pay 50% less in utility bills, and use 40% less water than the average American.”

Also key to the neighborhood’s success is the emphasis on affordability. In a city with high real estate prices, a development that features 40% affordable housing and that provides a number of Habitat for Humanity units is welcome indeed. One speaker in the film calls attention to the range of incomes, “from someone who is making . . . 30% of the average median income to someone who can afford a half-million-dollar home.” This leads to a “sustainable neighborhood because there’s enough diversity there that overall you end up with a mix that is lively and actually echoes back to some of the earlier neighborhoods that we all grew up in.”

While the film takes a broad look at the Holiday Neighborhood, it zooms in to focus on the creation of the Wild Sage Cohousing Community, the 34-unit, 1.48-acre development that, in 2004, was the first Holiday Neighborhood community to be built and inhabited. The film documents the five-year process the prospective Wild Sage residents went through to envision their community. Viewers follow the journey from initial conversations about what the community would look like and how it would function to the groundbreaking and the ten-day “blitz build” of four Habitat for Humanity Units. View Wild Sage in Google Maps!

Near the end of the film, Wild Sage resident Roberto Rivero sums up the essence of the neighborhood:

I grew up with that sort of thing. I grew up in Mexico City, but my mother would always bring food to the neighbors when she would cook something special. And the neighbors would do the same thing, they would stop by after work for a cup of coffee or if my dad was around, they’d stop in for a beer maybe. So there was that community linkage. Everybody knew everyone, and that’s what we’re trying to build here now.

And finally as Mark Fearer, another Wild Sager, puts it: “My hope is that we are a role model of what can be done on a community level, on a neighborhood level because we lack so much of that in traditional neighborhoods now. We desperately need role models for how to do things right.”

I hope I’ve piqued your interest in this gem of a film. For me, the film is a real treat, since it preserves the history of my community (and since our friend and neighbor Bryan Bowen is featured so prominently!). But others who are curious about alternatives to suburban neighborhoods will find a lot of food for thought in this film about the Holiday Neighborhood, considered by many experts to be one of the nation’s premier examples of “new urbanism.”

And if you want more, consider reading the filmmaker’s essay on Holiday, the Boulder Housing Partners’ page about the neighborhood, Barrett Studio Architects’ feature on the neighborhood (complete with a great photo of the Holiday Drive-in sign), and Sustainable Futures Society’s website detailing the “best practices” evident in Holiday. You might also want to view this photo gallery.

In some future post, I’ll say more about new urbanism (with a look at the Congress for the New Urbanism) – but for now, watch Designing a Great Neighborhood!

The Wild Sage "Common House," the heart of the community