The Ravaging of St. Louis
Built St. Louis: The North Side | St. Louis Place
The Ravaging of St. Louis
In 1890, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in America. Today it’s ranked 48th.In 1950, there were almost 900,000 people living inside the city limits. Today that same land is home to only 300,000. That’s out of two and a half million people in the metro area.
In the 1990s, the metro population increased by 1 percent. The land consumed by that population went up fifty percent.
At any given time there are about 6,000 abandoned buildings in St. Louis. I say approximately because the old ones keep falling down and new ones keep taking their place. An entire industry has built up around the millions of red bricks that come from wrecked houses. They’re stacked on pallets and shipped to other cities.
A hundred years ago, fifty, even 30 years ago, the city was full of life, the streets vibrant and bustling, the neighborhoods full of people and activity. But today you can walk around many of the streets in the old city and they’re empty. Nobody’s there. Four decades of urban decay have left the city of St. Louis, Missouri with some of America’s most devastated urban landscapes.
As I live and work in some of the city’s more economically depressed and architecturally devastated areas, I can attest to the truth of this. There are efforts being made to restore some areas, but the current economic situation is hampering those. The people who want to buy in those neighborhoods can’t necessarily get loans anymore, the people who can get loans are finding more house (and better neighborhoods) for their money due to the soft real-estate market, and developers/rehabbers are pulling out of projects because they understand that the buyers for those projects just aren’t there.
For those of us who are committed to sticking it out in our “developing” neighborhoods, that means watching more and more houses crumble around us, no reduction in crime (empty houses = not only squatters like the houseful of prostitutes in the condemned building behind me, but also a lack of pride in the neighborhood in general which leads to further deterioration and more crime.) that we’d hoped for and the value of our own investments plummeting. In the meantime, more and more buildings are torn down, like the historic African-American movie house that I used to drive by on the way to work. This spring the bulldozers came, now it’s an empty field. I have no answers, I think it comes down to individual commitment to the city and helping it improve even if it’s uncomfortable and kind of scary at times - and frankly few people have the patience for it. It tries mine at times, that much I know.
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