A Tale of Two Cities

The Delmar Divide stands as a ghost of its racial history. The phrase, coined to find a way to summarize revealing census data showing a wide disparity marked by the street of the same name, signifies St. Louis’s understanding of its most economically divided area. But the phrase also imparts an incomplete view of not only the scope of wealth disparity, but also of its scale.

Sitting in the shadows of these statistics, the Divide marks where the average mortgage collapses from $310,000 to $78,000, where the rate of individuals over the age of 25 with bachelor’s degrees drops from 67 percent to 5 percent, and where this self-ravaging cycle of urban economic behavior to the south of the Divide is destroying the opportunity for economic growth to the north.

The economic dichotomy that aggravates the development of the two halves acts as a determinant of their sociopolitical trajectories. To the west of the Gateway Arch, technology startups nestle themselves among charming housing development projects. To the east of the Arch, 45.8 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, and commercial employment opportunities are constrained to education and welfare administration. Neighborhoods to the west have a 30 percent African-American population, and those to the east have a 99 percent population. In St. Louis city, the average man is expected to live 70 years, while his St. Louis county counterpart is expected to live 76 years. In the city, the average woman lives 77 years, but her county peer leverages four more.

The singular disparity in these data points does not tell of the lives of the individuals, but it does tell the story of healthcare access and of public education—the two primary indicators that determine the stability of a community.

[pullquote]The singular disparity in these data points do not tell the lives of the individuals, but they do tell the story of healthcare access and of public education, the two primary indicators that determine the stability of a community.[/pullquote]

The health disparities observed by the census were constructed from a legacy of policy that favored white wealth fleeing urban centers in favor of suburban land developments. Because of this Delmar Divide, St. Louis is now one of the most racially and socioeconomically segregated metropolitan areas in the United States.

[pullquote]Because of this “Delmar Divide,” St. Louis is considered one of the most racially and socioeconomically segregated metropolitan areas in the United States.[/pullquote]

The concise assertion is that the city currently reads two different census reports: one of the thriving and one of the surviving.

These socioeconomic factors have morphed into passive ones that empirically determine where wealth lands and flourishes. While wealth disparities remain a modern symptom of an “urban renaissance,” their roots take hold in a much darker period of the country’s history.

These residential prejudices have adopted new pseudonyms: public safety, loan records, and education quality. As a city with some of the widest gaps in regional public health as well as unfair access to a thorough education, St. Louis is built on the legacy and reputation of zip codes.

In 1917, East St. Louis riots took at least 40 lives, fueling the Roaring Twenties with iterations of Caucasian homeowners’ failed attempts to restrict housing for their minority neighbors. In the closing months of 2017, a full decade later, the Carnahan Courthouse sits regally on the intersection of Market and Tucker, just four short miles west of East St. Louis and just 12 miles from Ferguson. Defended by metal gates in the hours preceding the controversial Stockley decision, the swelling tension was an eerie reminder of Ferguson and the racist history in the bones of these neighborhoods.

This is not the St. Louis most of us know.

The narrative dictated by this data has inadvertently constructed an empathy gap in the way that we discuss wealth inequality. Like most complicated subjects, urban economic inequality is layered, confusing, and contradictory. Only in the context of the people is that empathy gap brought to light.

[pullquote]The narrative dictated by this data has inadvertently constructed an empathy gap in the way that we discuss wealth inequality.[/pullquote]

This is not to say that the data is wrong. Accurately collected and processed, data is unbelievably valuable in locating public need, writing policy, and surveying trends, among a myriad of other benefits. Instead, this is to say that data is a poor storyteller; it aids in defending urban stereotypes. It is unbelievably easy to confuse trends in data with trends in communities, families, or individuals, and it is unbelievably easy to pretend that there is no difference between those two distinct forms of information.

The pulse of this city has blossomed on tense racial lines. The 90-some municipalities bounded by the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers exacerbate the seething residential narrative of the city that is—at its best—bleak, and—at its worst—suffocating. St. Louis has served as a national symbol for systematically-derived racial inequality, and because this is not a new story we’re telling. But this will never sculpt the people of this city alone, because this is not the story we have to build.

Emma Baker ’21 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at emma.baker@wustl.edu.

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