Struggles follow long-term disinvestment in Black neighborhoods
Most Holy Trinity Parish in St. Louis recently joined a coalition that is doing something about long-term disinvestment in primarily Black communities of north St. Louis.
The parish joined a neighborhood group called Link-STL, the Child Care Entrepreneurs Partnership and Dream Builders 4 Equity to add a desperately needed child-care program in a vacant building on North 14th Street next door to the parish. The Child Care Entrepreneurs Partnership also is targeting resources to the two other licensed child-care centers in the Hyde Park area and is committed to underserved neighborhoods.
Sister Gail Guelker, SSND, director of mission advancement at Holy Trinity, sees the need for child care and other resources in the neighborhood, which Census data shows is 90 percent Black with 66.3 percent of children living in poverty.
“If we’re going to make a difference, we have to do this,” Sister Gail said. “People need child care or they can’t work.”
>> How to help: For information on how to help counter the disinvestment in the Hyde Park neighborhood, contact • Most Holy Trinity Parish, 3519 N 14th St., St. Louis, MO 63107 or (314) 241-9165 • LinkSTL, 1426 Salisbury St., St. Louis, MO 63107 or (314) 584-0344
A lack of resources
Sister Gail said that “housing, employment, child care and education — all those things that continue to be problematic in the neighborhood based on a lack of resources, a lack of people pulling together to partner in order to make something happen. This group is dedicated and committed. We want to bring resources back into the neighborhood that make sense for the people who live there.”
Dream Builders and the Hyde Park Neighborhood Association are working to increase housing availability in the neighborhood. “There’s good things going on in the neighborhood to address the structural racism that continues to exist. The neighborhood has real potential,” Sister Gail said.
Pam Mitchell, a St. Margaret of Scotland parishioner and co-chair of the Child Care Entrepreneurs Partnership, said data shows “the stark, persistent disparities in our region, with Black children disproportionately affected by risks to their well-being.”
Vision for Children at Risk compiled public data in its 2020 Children of Metropolitan St. Louis book, showing such facts as a student mobility rate — those transferring into and out of a school in a given school year and who face a greater risk of dropping out of school. The primarily white Lindbergh School District has a mobility rate of just 9.4 percent, but the primarily Black Normandy Schools Collaborative has a rate of 43.5 percent, and St. Louis Public Schools has a rate of 46 percent. Ten percent of children in the 63107 zip code, which includes Hyde Park, have elevated blood levels of lead poisoning; 26.3 percent of youth ages 16-24 in that area are not in school or working.
Vision for Children at Risk states that the 22 worst-rated zip codes have some of the lowest income averages and some of the highest percentages of African-American residents.
Mitchell said the response to the need for affordable child care, which began with Link-STL, is “neighbor serving neighbor” in an underserved neighborhood. The COVID-19 pandemic shed a light on the importance of child care, showing it is essential work whose providers are undervalued, Mitchell said.
Dream Builders purchased the building and is doing the rehab work.
Segregation legacy
Jeff Schulenberg, a parishioner of Sacred Heart in Valley Park, presents part of the “Am I My Brother’s Keeper: The Racialization of America” workshop with Joyce Jones, program director of the Racial Harmony Office of the Archdiocese of St. Louis. Schulenberg focuses on the history of discrimination in housing in the United States.
“Little is understood in the white community of the history of segregation and the African-American experience,” he said, adding that he was oblivious of the facts himself until he looked into it after the unrest in Ferguson in 2014. “I see the same looks on people’s faces that I know I had on mine.”
People often don’t understand the extent to which some circumstances have been forced upon the Black communities, Schulenberg said. The view is that they don’t take care for their neighborhoods, aspire to the same things or raise their children with the same values as white suburbanites. “We judge what we see. But when we understand more of the history and the extent to which they were forced into neighborhoods, the lack of opportunities of this disinvestment and the hurdles that were put in front of them, you realize no population broadly could succeed in that circumstance.”
Redlining and racially restrictive covenants were legal until 1968. “We recognize now how immoral they were, but we’ve conveniently forgotten it,” Schulenberg said. “The Black community has to live out the consequences of that reality. The white community, in not recognizing it, just passes judgment on the behavior that we see and the circumstances that we observe.”
Separate and distinct neighborhoods that were created by segregation policies created a large wealth gap between whites and Blacks. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reported the racial wealth gap in 2016 as about $162,640 in net worth for the typical white family compared to $16,216 for a typical Black family and $21,296 for a typical Hispanic family.
Many whites don’t recognize the advantages they had, Schulenberg said. “It’s not to say we didn’t work hard and face our own hurdles. But one of the hurdles we did not face was the color of our skin.”
>> Study shows wide disparities
Racial disparities affect health, economic burdens and quality of life, finds a report released in November 2019 by the School of Law’s Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic (IEC) at Washington University in St. Louis.
