ST. LOUIS — Ask Mayor Tishaura O. Jones about crime and she talks about her son.
Several years ago, she and her son were driving along Page Boulevard near Goodfellow Boulevard. It’s a section of town where murals of several of the city’s historical Black leaders are painted on boarded-up windows and doors.
“There’s Papa’s picture,†Aiden noted, recognizing a painting of his grandfather, Virvus Jones.
But he had a question: “Why are all the pictures on vacant buildings?â€
The mayor recounted the story for me recently in an interview that started about crime but often turned into one about investment priorities.
The buildings are vacant because that is the story of ºüÀêÊÓƵ. For nearly a century, the city’s north side, and to a lesser extent its south side, have been ignored while investments are made over and over in the same central corridor locations, often to the detriment of traditional African-American neighborhoods.
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The Gateway Arch may be a monument to western expansion, but it was built on a once-dense Black business district — a reminder of why historian Walter Johnson titled his book on the city’s history of racism “The Broken Heart of America.â€
When thousands of soccer fans descend on CityPark stadium this weekend to watch the home opener of ºüÀêÊÓƵ City SC, they will walk by a sculpture park memorializing the destruction of another Black neighborhood, Mill Creek Valley.
As Black neighborhoods in central ºüÀêÊÓƵ were wiped out in the name of “progress,†those in the north part of the city were neglected, allowing poverty — and crime — to take over.
“As children drive Page Boulevard in the future, they will not see the pictures of their leaders on vacant buildings,†Jones vows.
That vision led to a meeting at the airport recently with U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois. Durbin grew up in East ºüÀêÊÓƵ, just a few blocks from where Jones’ grandparents once owned a home. Durbin has long known that the success of the area across the Mississippi River is tied to the success of ºüÀêÊÓƵ.
One of the reasons for the meeting was to discuss funding for a long-debated Northside-Southside MetroLink transit line. Planning for a new configuration of that line, which would run by the new headquarters of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, is ramping up. Both the city and county have a growing pile of tax money previously approved by voters. Durbin, Jones believes, might be key to getting federal money for a transit project that could revitalize long-ignored neighborhoods.
What does that have to do with crime?
“Jobs,†Jones says.
Access to jobs was one of the major reasons the Ferguson Commission as one of its calls to action in its 2015 report. That year, the East-West Gateway Council of Governments determined that a typical ºüÀêÊÓƵ resident can reach “13 times fewer jobs by a 45-minute transit commute than by a 45-minute driving commute.â€
That puts Black people in north and south ºüÀêÊÓƵ at a disadvantage in terms of accessing jobs, and that reality is a contributor to crime in the region, Jones says. It’s why she’s asked East-West Gateway to help organize a regional crime summit this spring. She doesn’t want to discuss the same old “law-and-order†approaches that previous crime summits have tried, and retried, with no long-term success.
She wants to talk about transit, about universal basic income, about investing in Black neighborhoods, about reversing a century of disinvestment.
“We didn’t get to this place overnight,†Jones says.
And while that’s true, her critics are frustrated that the big things she wants to talk about to reduce crime won’t help overnight either. A few days after Jones and I spoke, a 17-year-old from Tennessee, Janae Edmondson, had her legs amputated after a horrific car crash downtown. That was a crime story, as the man driving the car, Daniel Riley, was out on bond in an armed robbery case that appears to have been botched by Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner’s office.
Crime stories like that tend to take over the narrative, and indeed, Jones responded with a statement that came as close as she has ever come to publicly criticizing Gardner.
That, too, is part of the larger story of ºüÀêÊÓƵ. Crimes downtown attract outsized attention because it is the front porch of the city. There will now be a magnified focus on spending resources to prop up that porch, even while the rest of the house sags.
Meanwhile, Jones wants to talk about making long-term, generational investments in people, in transit, in rebuilding hollowed-out neighborhoods with boarded-up buildings that have a few nice pictures painted on them.
“People who have options and opportunities don’t fall into a life of crime,†Jones says. “North ºüÀêÊÓƵ has been abandoned for decades. We have to use the same intentionality to build it up.â€