![]() Black residents in the city are three times more likely to live in concentrated poverty than whites. Louis ranks as the 10th most segregated large metropolitan area in the country, similar to peer cities such as Buffalo, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. Racial undercurrents lie beneath such a seismic regional reallocation of residents: the white share of the city’s population fell from 82 percent in 1950 to 43 percent in 2018. The city’s population has more than halved since 1950, while that of the surrounding county has doubled, testifying to the zero-sum nature of intra-metro migration in the segregated and jurisdictionally-fractured region. The result was massive disinvestment from once-stable, majority-Black neighborhoods. As urban conditions deteriorated, the sequential blows of white flight, Black middle-class flight, and then the flight of most remaining households with the means to get out exacerbated the decline of North St. Louis, and the mid-century wave of suburbanization crashed across an already-segregated map. ![]() However, deindustrialization also took hold early and swiftly in St. ![]() Louis County, just over the municipal boundary. Louis, where poverty has persisted the longest, but many challenges are shared with neighboring communities in north St. The core of the study area rests within the bounds of the City of St. Our study focuses on the Missouri portions of this cluster, which includes the historically marginalized neighborhoods north of the “Delmar Divide,” referring to the east-west Delmar Boulevard which divides the city by race and class. Altogether nearly 200,000 people (62,000 below the poverty line themselves) live in this PPTG-one of the nation’s largest. Louis County suburbs to the west and north, through the city, and all the way across the Mississippi River to East St. In reality, the region hosts a continuous expanse of persistent neighborhood poverty forming a single PPTG encompassing 75 census tracts stretching from inner-ring St. However, a more granular look at the census tract level provides a very different picture of the geography of local poverty. Louis County and has county-equivalent status, is itself considered a persistently poor county, with a poverty rate of 21.8 percent in 2019 (compared to 9.7 percent for St. New initiatives to cultivate local suppliers and contractors, stabilize communities by improving schools and building out from neighborhood cores, and intentionally marry advanced manufacturing with inclusive development hold promise, but decades of divides and mistrust have left even cautiously optimistic residents waiting to see results. Leaders recognize that repairing that civic fabric is a top priority. Louis remains a stone’s throw from economic opportunity in the city’s flourishing central corridor and western suburbs, but residents expressed the feeling that their neighborhoods’ fates were nearly completely cut off from those of the broader regional economy, so deep are the divides across all facets of economic and social life in the region. Fragmentation extends to the civic sector, too, where community development organizations proliferate but achieve less separately than they could together. Revitalization is made all the more challenging by local government fragmentation, which, combined with such depopulation, has left many municipalities with depleted local tax bases and few resources to invest in themselves. This quadrant of the city is representative of the Black urban poverty that was seeded decades ago by deindustrialization, suburbanization, and discriminatory housing policies all across the Rust Belt. Louis struggles under the weight of depopulation and decades of private disinvestment. The persistently poor group of census tracts centered around North St. Louis region struggles with slow growth and a long history of racial divides. Once a thriving industrial metropolis, the St.
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