Walk along South Florissant Road in Ferguson, and you’ll find attractive restaurants, loft apartments, and a plaza that hosts the farmers’ market and a summer concert series. Farther north are the fire station, police department, library, and a quaint frozen custard shop housed inside the historic train station.
Across town, along busy West Florissant Avenue, liquor stores, carryout restaurants, and check-cashing and title loan establishments line the commercial strip. Large apartment complexes nearby sit among modest ranch-style homes.
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Flint Fowler, president of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater St. Louis, reflects on the striking contrast between West Florissant and South Florissant. “Visual change contributes to emotional change,” he says. “Living somewhere poor, you think, ‘People don’t care about where we live, and people don’t think we deserve vibrant places to live.’”
Fowler and other St. Louisans are working to change that, though.
At the corner of West Florissant and Canfield Drive, near where 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed five years ago, three teenagers chat as late afternoon gives way to dusk. One points hopefully to the Boys & Girls Clubs’ forthcoming $12.4 million teen center, slated to open this fall.
“It’s going to make a difference,” he says, “because a lot of black kids have the opportunity to go in there and fix themselves before they lose their life to the streets.”
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Ferguson’s population is approximately 21,000, two-thirds of whom are African-American. The median annual family income is about $50,000, about $11,300 less than the national median family income. But in the southeast part of Ferguson, where Brown died, the median family income is $25,000 a year, according to an analysis of 2016 Census Bureau data by Rise Community Development.
More than 40 percent of households in this part of the county live in poverty, according to a June 2018 Washington Post article, which reported how poverty’s been rising in the area since building owners used state and federal tax credits to turn apartment complexes into low-income housing.
Justin Hansford, who taught economic justice at Saint Louis University School of Law years ago, told the Post that developers hesitate to build in neighborhoods near West Florissant, because “they think if you open anything in that area, it’s going to be vandalized or robbed.” He faulted city officials for not drawing enough outside investors to the neighborhoods.
Elliot Liebson, Ferguson’s planning and development director, is quick to tick off the major projects started across the city over the past five years, totaling an estimated $65 million. On the site of the QuikTrip gas station burned down in 2014, the Urban League of St. Louis opened a job-training center in 2017. A string of big-ticket investments includes a Centene call center, improvements at Emerson Electric’s campus, a Starbucks, and a pediatric medical building. The St. Louis Economic Development Partnership also administered about $815,000 to 90 businesses and community partners.
Liebson says Ferguson offers advantages to corporate employers: the town’s proximity to the University of Missouri–St. Louis campus, Lambert International Airport, and major nearby employers such as Express Scripts and Boeing.
“The core economic characteristics that make Ferguson a marketable place have not changed,” Liebson says. “There is an economic value to being in Ferguson.”
Waiting for a manicure at the Nail Trap salon, Sharon Nelson says, “Nothing has really changed. They built a couple things, but I haven’t seen them do anything for small businesses in this area.” She owns a home health care business in Ferguson. “A lot of people lost their businesses in this area that they’ve not been able to recoup,” she says, “because there hasn’t been enough funding to help them improve their businesses.”
“Visual change contributes to emotional change,” says Flint Fowler, president of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater St. Louis. “Living somewhere poor, you think, ‘People don’t care about where we live, and people don’t think we deserve vibrant places to live.’”
In some ways, the conditions that have led to the economic fault lines in Ferguson stem from intricacies of urban planning. One reason that South Florissant Road looks so attractive is that it lies within the city limits and has a self-taxing business association that pays for improvements, notes Fowler. There’s no such entity for West Florissant. And what complicates the chance of improvements along West Florissant is the fact that the corridor runs through Ferguson, St. Louis County, and Dellwood, says Liebson; as a result, there’s been a lack of central planning for the corridor.
To remedy the issue, the governments are collaborating on a zoning overlay study “for that entire corridor to address issues of the lack of planning that will be based on the Great Streets Plan” for West Florissant Avenue, Liebson says. There will also be community input.
Adolphus Pruitt, president of the St. Louis branch of the NAACP, praises the Urban League job-training center, the Boys & Girls Clubs teen center, and other outside investments. But he believes that officials need to take more ambitious steps to significantly improve economic opportunities for Ferguson’s poorest residents.
Pruitt suggests that government officials examine how the state’s allocation of federal funds, such as Medicaid, affects the people of Ferguson and map out the existing conditions for all households, including social and economic conditions, health care, and other issues. The money coming into the community needs to be targeted to help low-income residents and tracked to assess its effectiveness, he says.
“Nobody documented what the existing conditions were,” he says. “When you know that, that is the actual baseline for everything you do after that. It buys you a means of measuring whether what you’re doing is effective or not. That didn’t happen.”
On a busy Saturday night, Tammy Cao, owner of Hunan Chop Suey, at 9806 W. Florissant, takes orders from customers and calls out names as the carryout bags arrive.
She recalls nearly shutting down the business after protesters knocked out her building’s plate-glass windows and trashed the interior. Because many of her customers were afraid to patronize her restaurant, she says, she lost more than $300 in daily business.
After an eight-month remodeling job, Cao reopened and regained almost all of her lost business. She says she’s committed to Ferguson for the long haul. Part of the reason is purely pragmatic. “Because I own the property,” Cao says. “I don’t have a choice.”
But there was also the matter of what she owes her customers. “At first, I was worried,” she says. “I don’t know if the business will go back. But I have good customers, so they come back.”
