St. Louis
The "Great Divorce"
"In 1876 residents voted to secede from the surrounding territory, now St Louis County, because they did not want to pay to increase services...But by the 1950s, the automobile, cheap gas, fast highways and
Government-backed mortgages had helped the county attract large numbers of city dwellers."
-TIME 5/4/1981
Government-backed mortgages had helped the county attract large numbers of city dwellers."
-TIME 5/4/1981
"While other cities can expand their territorial reach to include new and future industrial parks, housing developments, retail centers, and manufacturing intrests, St. Louis cannot."
-www.stlouis-mo.gov
-www.stlouis-mo.gov
"Locked in by the Mississippi River on the east and St. Louis County on the other three sides, the city cannot expand." -"Residental Patterns in a Midwestern City: The St. Louis Experience" by Mandelson and Quinn
The "Great Divorce" permanently fixed the boundaries of St. Louis, leaving it unable to expand its tax base.
A Changing City
Like most other major cities, St. Louis' population grew rapidly during WWII. Most of the city's housing stock was built during the 19th century and suffered from extended use. Overcrowded, decaying slums burdened city services and strained St. Louis' economy.
"...Wartime migration played substantial strains on the housing stock of the old neighborhoods, with families doubling up in apartments, cramming into rooming houses, and filling in backyard alley houses and shacks."
-Joseph Heathcott
-Joseph Heathcott
"During World War II, the crowded city's [St. Louis'] 860,000 residents included many newcomers who found jobs in defense plants and housing in grim 19th-century tenements." -Tim O'Neil, St. Louis Post-Dispatch "In 1946, the U.S. Department of Labor reported that St. Louis had the worst rate of overcrowding of all large cities in the United States."
-Joseph Heathcott |
"White Flight"
"In the forty years following 1940, more that half a million whites fled to the suburbs while net black growth amounted to less than 100,000."
-Roger Montgomery, "Pruitt-Igoe: Policy Failure of Societical Symptom?"
-Roger Montgomery, "Pruitt-Igoe: Policy Failure of Societical Symptom?"
"Like many other cities in the postwar era, St. Louis was experiencing a massive shift of its predominantly white middle-class population towards the suburbs. At the same time, central city slums were expanding as poor households moved into units abandoned by those leaving the city."
-Katharine Bristol |
Source: Mapping Decline, by Colin Gordan
|
"After World War II, many working class people were able to buy their own homes using low-interest mortgages through the VA and FHA." -J.A. Stoloff
"...White flight left behind an increasingly poor black urban population."
-Heathcott and Murphy, "Corridors of Flight, Zones of Renewal" |
Economic Decline
"[There was] a mass exodus of textille, apparel, shoe, machinery, wholesalers, and meat packing firms out of St. Louis city...
...From 1955 to 1967, St. Louis city lost approximately 300 major plants and 3,000 small businesses."
-Heathcott and Murphy, Corridors of Flight, Zones of Renewal
-Heathcott and Murphy, Corridors of Flight, Zones of Renewal