Photography by Wesley Law
"We are treating diversity as an accident, not as an asset," says Babich.
All sorts of cultural influences swirl through Luke Babich’s considerable brain. His father was born in what was then Yugoslavia, moved with his family to Ethiopia, then New York, studied medicine in California, then came here. Babich grew up in University City, and from middle school on, his closest friends were African-American. He’s come of age with a strong sense of place, a borderline-geeky fascination with the nuts and bolts of local politics, and a rare ability to bridge St. Louis’ divides.
What changed in middle school? I made a very conscious decision that I was not going to be an introvert anymore. The repeated small difficult things, talking to the person who sits next to you in every class even though you’re awkward and uncomfortable—doing that over a whole year, you can change a lot. Part of the joy was not realizing at the outset who I was going to be closest to. In elementary school, it was more of a decision than a discovery. Flynn Park Elementary sat squarely in the middle of the white upper-class part of U. City. In middle school, you awaken to the fact that you are part of a larger, interdependent society that you’d been living in the whole time.
What’s a memory that flashes back from those years? Me, Demetrius, and Willie walking to rehearsal and getting caught in a downpour. We were crossing a muddy field and Willie had these new shoes, some kind of blue suede something, so we figured out a way to get him on our shoulders. Everything else about us was a muddy disaster, and he’s just got these crisp shoes floating above it all.
Were your backgrounds different? Yes, but our friendship kind of masked all these massive differences. When we were together, we didn’t think about it. But I came back every day to two parents who cooked dinner and sat me down and taught me flashcards, instead of an empty house waiting for one parent to come back from a second job. My memories of younger years were way clearer, because I had people to talk to about it; my parents would ask what I did that day, and as I answered, I could turn experience into memory.
Did you guys talk about the differences? What I remember was more about the house itself, the Babich house and how nice it is. How slightly walled off it is, given that Chris had been sent packing multiple times by the police. When I was with them, I would get picked up constantly and asked if I was buying weed. We’d just kind of shake our heads. Honestly, it’s one of the scariest things that at the time you assume there’s nothing that can be done.
Did your parents ever worry? They’d made a conscious decision to keep me and my brother in public schools. Every parent gives walls to protect their kids and at some point, they don’t keep you any safer. I think they saw that. And I never felt at risk. The fact that my friends’ lives were in danger was something attached to their lives.
Because of their color? Yeah. But what I remember really distinctly is the physical side of it. Once we were all swimming at my house, and DeMarco’s body was covered with scars. Every one of them had a story. He’d just laugh, tell those stories so casually. Like, once he was walking down the street and somebody came up with a knife, unprovoked. When it’s your friend, you’re not thinking about the skin color. You’re thinking about the scars.
Were you the only white kid in the group? Yeah. I had white friends too, but separately.
Were the white kids not wanting black friends? Yes and no. The reality of that particular kind of racism and segregation is even uglier by being so banal. The white kids did soccer; they did jazz band; they lived in the same neighborhood; they all had cars. If you’re just letting forces act on you, you will be segregated. Yet if you were to divide a cross-section of U. City High by the people who share values, you’d end up with a really diverse group.
What values did you guys share? Being able to choose who you spend your life with; making sure the people in your life are the ones you want in your life. And I don’t think it’s easy to achieve. Those were amazing friendships because we repeatedly made the choice to spend time being creative together, make things together. Also, Demetrius and I were both oddballs for not wanting to drink in high school. When everybody’s pushing you, and you see somebody who’s comfortable standing there, not banging in the wind, that goes to much deeper things about how you treat your friends.
Why didn’t you want to drink? It seemed to be about trying to lose control of yourself, at which point you ask, “What is it you really want, and why are you not comfortable getting it for yourself when you’re not drinking?” I spent a year in college living in China, and that was when I started drinking, just because the culture around it was so different. Most of my friends there were—I guess something I took from U. City is, you just talk to the people around you. So my closest friend ended up being a security guard at the university research center. He had this incredible, brilliant, switched-on mind. He used his time watching camera screens to memorize poetry. In China, when you’re sitting there drinking at the end of a long day’s work, you are appreciating your friends. The American teen culture didn’t really seem to be about appreciating friends.
Where’d you go to college? Stanford. I think I came in with a bit of a chip on my shoulder, wanting to prove that a public school education would outperform private. I didn’t feel competitive with my classmates in high school; it felt more like a community. But the perceptions at Stanford, the elitism, the amount people had already had invested in them just in a dollar sense, could be a little intimidating. Everyone jokes about St. Louis question, but there, you don’t need to ask. They’re telling you.
Was it hard leaving home? Yeah. That summer, I’d watched my high school friendships come under great strain for the first time in our lives. I had a really clear set of opportunities. And the friends I’d been seeing day in, day out, for the majority of our waking hours, didn’t. It was just stark, how unfair it was. How it wasn’t what we had done in high school, because most of what we’d done, we’d done together. And after living in that world with those friends, being forcibly taken out of it—[a muscle in his cheek jumps.] I didn’t realize leaving meant I couldn’t come back.
Things would never be the same, you mean? There wasn’t even a path back. We ended up in walks of life where there were no natural spaces for us to coexist. Demetrius was in California with the Marines. Demarco, I saw him on Thanksgiving, bumped into him in the Loop. He said, “Hey, I didn’t think you were coming back until winter. We should spend some time together.” My Thanksgiving break was designed to be a cram session for finals, so I wasn’t planning on seeing anybody. I said, “Oh, I’ve got too much going on.” I can’t remember for the life of me what I thought was so important. On December 16, I got home for winter break and messaged him. He messaged me back. And two hours later, I found out he was dead.
What happened? He’d been shot. They said it was related to drugs. The next day, there was one article published: a teen has been shot, was declared dead at the hospital. And that was it. It seemed like one of those times when people shake their heads and assume this is one of those things that can’t get solved. After he died, we all got together and stayed out really late, talking. Willie and Demetrius processed it a lot better than I did.
Because they were more used to people dying young? I think so. We were talking about Demarco and what we remembered about him, and I distinctly remember Dave Brubeck playing in the background and Demetrius cracking jokes and I felt like reality was falling apart, because something ought to be stopping. Everything ought to be different. It bothered me how quietly Demarco could go.
Did Demetrius and Willie think you were naïve? I thought so. Just realizing how fragile and unprepared I was, especially for that particular way to lose someone, for that particular kind of violence. No one sets that expectation for you in the course of a white childhood.
You graduated with a poli sci major and a focus on data science, and now you’re helping run a real-estate startup? Clever helps people sell a home and save on real estate commission. Normally you’d pay about 6 percent, and we provide agents from the same brands, but when you come through Clever, they do all the same work for 3 or 4 percent. It’s a bit like Groupon; we can send a volume of business that’s meaningful for their brokerage—because the cost of selling a home has gotten way cheaper, but the cost of finding new clients is high. Since April, the team’s grown from four people to 16. We’re moving into the old Riverfront Times office on Delmar.
You also ran for U. City council. I came away from those early experiences thinking that disinterest and dysfunction were crippling University City. That there should have been this local structure that cared when a kid died. So I had no love of our local government. But U. City was in the midst of this fight over the ambulance service, two factions arguing. I emailed my friends at Stanford with the subject line “My people need you.” We looked at the data, analyzed the speed, tracked the care. Over the course of doing that, you lose all of your imposter syndrome, because no one had done that analysis. Which was a little bit terrifying.
You lost the race, but you made some strong points. My campaign was mostly about publishing, because all these decisions have been made without a good written record. As you know, there’s a lot less local press than there was, and that’s devastating for a city. Kids can die quietly, and it’s impossible to get people to care, and there’s no regulation on development… It all ties back to the fact that the city is unable to tell its own story and build its own written record. If everyone is getting the story from one side or the other and people can’t commit things to a space where they are equally available to everyone and then stand by their words, it’s hard to have a conversation.
What do you see in St. Louis that you’d like to fix? It’s the little things. The fact that we allow developers to turn two- and four-family buildings into one- and two-family buildings. Technical things that people don’t realize will impact our culture, because in letting that happen areas become “nicer,” we are taking diversity out of that neighborhood, making it harder for someone with a lower income to live close to the things that made it a nice neighborhood. We are treating diversity as an accident, not as an asset. You need to have someone’s attention for a full minute to make them understand why it’s important to care. We talk a lot about political fragmentation, but one of the dangers is, there’s no one with a mandate to talk to the whole city.
Meaning St. Louis city and county? [He nods.] The only way young people mean that word.
