A recent Congressional subcommittee meeting on the deterioration of North St. Louis will not be in vain, according to a representative of Congressman Lacy Clay (D-Mo.)

Steve Englehardt, Clay’s communications director, said inquiries will continue, including an on-going HUD investigation to determine if the City of St. Louis used federal dollars meant for poor neighborhoods properly. Based on some preliminary findings, Englehardt said it’s “unlikely that is the case.” Englehardt also said the city could be doing “a lot more” to clean up north city by going “after bad, negligent land owners.”

Last Saturday Clay, along with Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Ca.) and Al Green (D-TX), held a Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity meeting last Saturday discussing the northside and what action the controversial Team 4 Plan may have had in North City’s economic downturn. Clay and others at the meeting said that while Team 4 was never officially approved by city government, the plan may have been unofficially used. The plan called for the lessening or elimination of city services to the northside in an effort to get people out of the homes. Once the homes were abandoned the property could be resold for development.

The city has consistently denied any formal or informal implementation of the 30-year-old plan.

At the meeting, a representative of Mayor Francis Slay, deputy mayor of development Barb Geisman said that she’d never read the plan, but asserted that it was “not relevant to anything we’ve been doing the last seven years.”