Putting St. Louis on the Map

 With GPS, Google Maps and cell phone navigators everywhere how often do you see an actual map these days - red-and-blue-state U.S. maps aside?

Within a recent two-week period I had the opportunity to look at more maps of our area than I'd seen in a long time, and the picture that they painted wasn't pretty.

Richard Ward, Vice President - development management for Zimmer Real Estate Services, delivered the keynote address for our Nov. 5 CNR Executive Summit. His presentation, "St. Louis Region:  Investments in Progress" was complemented by charts and maps.
Ward's maps showed clearly that the rivers and Ozark hills that ring our area have dictated our growth patterns. He pointed out the ways that the rivers have served as funnels to force growth to the east and the west.

Richard called the rapid development of the area's flood plains a major disaster waiting to happen. He questioned the collective wisdom that has resulted in such decisions as voting against funding mass transit toward the development corridor to the west and the reduction in size of the eight-lane Illinois/Missouri bridge - which provides access to the area's largest parcel of developable land - to four lanes. Based on Ward's presentation, political, racial and other considerations have been used to redraw the St. Louis development map - and not in a good way.

A week after the summit at St. Louis Community College at Forest Park, I heard Dr. Colin Gordon present the themes from his new book Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of American City.  Gordon is a professor of history at the University of Iowa.

His latest book includes a series of maps that trace a story that those of us with deep roots here know all too well: political division, insider deals and racial segregation.  The maps  show how, beginning almost a century ago, St. Louis governmental agencies and developers systematically sought to limit where African Americans could live by denying financing and through restrictive covenants and zoning.
St. Louis was one of four cities in the United States to create blatantly racial zoning laws in 1916. When the Supreme Court struck down the zoning, the real estate community went door-to-door to promote restrictive covenants. They skewed real estate evaluations to create financial impediments to integration.   

According to Gordon, every suburban St. Louis subdivision prior to 1948 had a restrictive deed covenant associated with it. As the restrictive covenants expired, suburban developments incorporated and used zoning to enforce segregation, resulting in the St. Louis area becoming what Gordon termed "one of the most over-governed areas in the country."

Later laws designed to promote improvement in housing standards were exploited to promote the vested interests of commercial projects.  One of Gordon's maps shows a bizarrely gerrymandered line zig-zagging around poor neighborhoods.  It was drawn to create an enterprise zone near Lambert Airport.

Looking at the maps presented by Richard Ward and Colin Gordon, you get a disturbing picture of how, in seeking to protect interests of one group over another, we drew a roadmap to economic and social decline.

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As economic times tighten, partnerships have started to emerge to help us weather the tough times. Some of these partnerships would have been unheard of just a few years ago.

I spoke with Pat Kellett, Business Manager of Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 562 about  an overture that his union sponsored. Kellett hopes that the effort will begin a continuing dialogue with contractors and buyers of construction. On Oct. 14 the union, in cooperation with the St. Louis Council of Construction Consumers, the Mechanical Contractors Association of Eastern Missouri and the Plumbing Industry Council, held the inaugural "Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 562 Tripartite Conference".

The full-day program included presentations on training, welding certification, manpower needs, safety and substance abuse. It concluded with roundtable discussions among union representatives, contractors and owners.

"We're looking for a better relationship with the direct consumer of our members' services," Kellett told me. "I think we accomplished that. The feedback we had was that roundtable discussion was pretty blunt with each other."

"We must give them a safe, educated, drug-free product. There are things that the consumer can teach us that we don't know," Kellett said. 

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