To a gallery of more than 100 people Saturday, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), a native St. Louisian, asked, “What can the state, the city, the Mayor, the federal government do to fix this problem?”

The problem was more than 30 years of decay and disrepair in North City. The reason behind it was on the mouths of everyone in the room, and long in the minds of black St. Louisans old enough to remember – The Team 4 Plan.

Hosted by Rep. Waters, Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) and Rep. Al Green (D-TX), the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity held a field meeting at St. Louis City Hall where concerned citizens, community leaders and activists packed the hearing.

Representatives from the community as well as the government gave testimony, including Mayor Francis Slay’s deputy mayor of development, Barb Geisman, who said that she had never read the Team 4 plan, but nonetheless asserted that it was “not relevant to anything we’ve been doing the last seven years.”

Team 4 was a controversial plan developed in the 1970s that proposed the cutting off of services and funds to North City so the area could be slated for later redevelopment. Many North City residents blamed the plan for the deterioration of their neighborhoods even though the city has long denied that it was formally implemented.

Waters said the meeting was to find out if there had been an “informal” implementation of the Team 4 Plan and how the community and government could address these issues in the hope to move North City beyond the programs and developments of the past that failed the neighborhood.

Rep. Clay said North City has long suffered from many development ills.

“We have not received the proper attention from the government or the private sector,” said Clay, later recalling what North City was like in his youth, adding, “You can never go back to the past but you can reflect on that and know the potential for the community.”

The Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity will hold a field hearing entitled “The Use of Federal Housing and Economic Development Funds in St. Louis: From ‘Team 4′ Into the Future” at noon on Saturday, March 8, at the St. Louis City Hall, 1200 Market Street.

Congressman Wm. Lacy Clay (D-Mo), Chairman Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Congressman Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo) invite the public to join this important discussion about how St. Louis and other major urban areas can rediscover the overlooked economic opportunities in older neighborhoods, and how previous development policies have failed the residents in these areas.

THE HISTORY OF THE TEAM FOUR PLAN

On October 21, 1973, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported the city’s political leaders’ anger with the California-based Rand Corporation for a report that the company’s Urban Policy Analysis Program published predicting that the City of St. Louis “probably will soon lose its position as the commercial hub of the metropolitan area.”

The report largely blamed federal government policies for the City’s fate. Very similar to what was happening at the same time in New York City, the report said that highway construction, federal home mortgage programs, and property tax incentives all encouraged the exodus of people and commerce from the City into suburban areas. “The effect of such policies is not likely to be reversed,” the report stated.

The report went on to suggest that St. Louis City accept a diminished role as “one suburb among many in metropolitan St. Louis” and seek federal and state revenue-sharing programs and area-wide earnings taxes as ways of supporting a “shrinking and underprivileged population.”

The study, which also included much more favorable analyses of Seattle, Washington and San Jose, California, was financed by the National Science Foundation. Local political leaders at the time attacked the study on several points, including not making specific policy recommendations on how to turn around what it identified as the City’s doomed course.

Eerily similar to the mantra of today’s leadership, Mayor John H. Poelker and others adamantly pointed to development downtown as evidence of the city’s imminent turn-around; a theory that is clear today to have proven untrue.

Shortly after the Rand study was made public, two St. Louis aldermen took it upon themselves to make St. Louis a great city again.

Known as part of the “Young Turk” faction of the Board of Aldermen, in the fall of 1973, Aldermen John G. Roach and Richard Gephardt (later a U.S. Congressman) introduced Board Bills 19 and 20. While they never actually became law, the bills were early versions of what would become known as the Team Four Plan.

A November 8, 1973 article in the St. Louis Argus quotes the bills’ controversial language calling predominately black North St. Louis “an insignificant residential area not worthy of special maintenance effort.”

The bills called for the preservation of 74,000 buildings in South St. Louis–and prescribed the demolition of 70,100 buildings on the Northside. The Argus pointed out that a study by the City Planning Commission published in April 1971 pointed up the fact that 70,100 houses in the section of the City north of Franklin Avenue (Dr. Martin Luther King Drive) were recommended for demolition because “rehabilitation would be uneconomical”. Conversely, 74,000 buildings in South St. Louis met “or exceed the standards of local codes and need only to be maintained.”

According to press reports at the time, the report, which seemed to be the foundation for Roach and Gephardt’s bills, noted that 50,100 of the 70,100 buildings targeted for demolition were presently homes occupied by families.

The bills quickly became a lightening rod for St. Louis’ black political machine of 1973. Board Bills 19 and 20 never became law but, not more than two years later, Northside residents found themselves under attack again.

TEAM FOUR

Team Four, Inc. was hired by the City’s Planning Commission in 1973 to prepare a city-wide comprehensive planning study, an update to the City’s 1947 Comprehensive Plan.

Team Four prepared several technical memorandums for the City for that purpose. It is Technical Memorandum 6B, officially known as Citywide Implementation Strategies: The Draft Comprehensive Plan, historically known simply as the “Team Four Plan,” that many believe became the blueprint for North St. Louis’ present state.

The Team Four Plan proposed public policy guidelines and strategies for saving the City from the circumstances clearly identified in the Rand Report.

As if on a sinking ship, Team Four called upon the City to buck up and make some tough decisions if it hoped to survive. “Major shifts in public attitudes” were called upon to make the kinds of changes Team Four saw as necessary.

Team Four recommended that the St. Louis make a “realistic appraisal of the short- and long-range potential of all areas in the City” and take determined and “clear-cut stances on the strategy for different areas of the City.”

The Plan recommended that each area of the City be grouped into one of three groups: Conservation, Redevelopment, and Depletion, these distinctions being based on factors including age, physical qualities, loan policies, public service level and population stability. Race is not mentioned specifically.

Using the following example, The Plan highlights the importance of labeling City areas:

“Rapid transit, which would be City-wide in impact, would not affect each area type in the same way. An improved rapid transit system would be influenced and shaped by impact areas as much as the areas are influenced by it… In Conservation Areas rapid transit must be planned to act as a stabilizing force and therefore must be properly buffered. In Redevelopment Areas, though, transit can be used as a major stimulus to encourage private investment.”

So-called Depletion Areas – areas identified as those which receive “spotty City services” and are the victims of “red lining”, where “large numbers of unemployed, the elderly, and the recipients of welfare are left to wait for assistance which does not seem to be forthcoming” – should not benefit, the Plan suggests, from the economic stimulation that would come from hosting a stopping point for the rapid transit described above (what we now call Metrolink).

Depletion Areas present the City’s planners with an interesting riddle. On the one hand, this question: What should the City do for the residents and businesses of these Northside areas in the way of city services while their neighborhoods are being abandoned?

And on the other hand: What should the City do to encourage investment in these areas to stabilize them?

The Team Four Plan: “To answer one question with a public policy decision immediately causes a conflict with the other. For example, proceeding with building demolition and assembly of vacant parcels for redevelopment results in a neighborhood dotted with rubble-filled lots and boarded up buildings” the 1975 document states. “Such neighborhoods do not induce new investment.”

“On the other hand,” it continues, “to expend public funds on new streets, libraries, schools or code enforcement in an area designated for total renewal doesn’t make sense either.”

Team Four goes on to concede that it would be less than humane to enact a total denial of services to Northside residents. “The City cannot abandon those trapped in Depletion Areas,” it says, “nor can it ignore the eventual need to redevelop these areas.”

Team Four warns of fence-straddling when it comes to making these tough decisions, “Allowing or encouraging scattered, uncoordinated investments within Depletion Areas will only sap the City’s too limited fiscal resources.”

“Efforts must be made to adjust services and public investments so as to provide for those who are remaining in these areas. Yet these efforts should be pursued without encouraging new investment until the City determined that Redevelopment can and should begin.”

“Without encouraging new investment”? In an area that is so obviously in need of reinvestment, people so in need of help and support, what could possibly be the motivation for such passive aggressiveness?

Money, Racism, Class Discrimination, Basic Survival? Take your pick.

CONSEQUENCES

“As a result of the Team Four Plan, [the City] spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the Central West End to stabilize and to create a barrier between North and South St. Louis so the [few] black people in South St. Louis [at that time] could never gain political power,” said Charles Quincy Troupe, in a 2002 interview with PubDef. Troupe spent 30 years in the state legislature and is now alderman of the 1st Ward in north St. Louis.

Powerless at the hands of the powerful. John Roach, the 28th Alderman who, along with Richard Gephardt, introduced Board Bills 19 and 20 in 1973, resigned from the Board of Aldermen in 1975 to become the first head of the Community Development Agency, the organization the Team Four Plan identified as the tool with which the City should acquire land and property for the purposes redevelopment, once the City determined the time was right to begin development.

Gephardt went on to become of the Democratic leaders in Congress and was instrumental in moving 30,000 Bosnian refugees to south St. Louis in the late 1990s, a move which helped offset that part of town’s population losses.

Many believe that, while neither the Team Four Plan nor Gephardt and Roach’s aldermanic bills ever became official law, the philosophy of benign neglect has permeated every policy effecting north St. Louis in the last 30 years — from spending, to police patrols, to trash pick-ups.

But one thing is for sure, the blight and the population losses have continued and the problems of north St. Louis (violent crime, depressed property values, and declining population) are now the problems which largely define the entire City of St. Louis.

The issues of equity continue to permeate the politics of this once-great city: Power-sharing in government and city departments, spending in infrastructure repairs north and south of Delmar, and stalled government investment and incentivization in the areas that need it most — These are the challenges and controversies that continue to prevent St. Louis from reclaiming the status that the researchers at the Rand Corporation so correctly predicted it would lose: its position as the political and economic hub of Missouri.

Until it learns to work together, as one city, St. Louis may never regain what it has lost.

The following statement comes from the Organization for Black Struggle:

“All We Want is Justice!” That was the last statement made by Charles “Cookie” Thorton before he opened fire in Kirkwood City Hall.

The tragedy in Kirkwood, MO where six people lost their lives is a result of the continuation of racial tensions that bubble and erupt. The Organization for Black Struggle (OBS) is saddened by the preventable loss of life and the impending sorrow that will grip the affected families and community. We hope that the City will seriously begin to address the racism and deep feelings of disenfranchisement by African-Americans who reside in Meacham Park.

OBS Chair Jamala Rogers talked with Thornton last year as the trial of Kevin Johnson was underway. Johnson was on trial for the 2005 murder of Kirkwood police officer William McEntee. “Cookie Thornton was adamant that he was not going to be intimidated, disrespected or dismissed by the City,” stated Rogers, “and as a black man in America, that has consequences.” Rogers encouraged Thornton to stand up to the injustices but also cautioned him to be careful. Most of Thornton’s protest actions were solo including his interaction with the courts where he served as his own legal counsel.

OBS urges the Mayor and Police Chief to take some leadership and immediately bring the community together to resolve divisive and deadly issues which keep getting glossed over. Beefing up security in City Hall is merely a bandaid for a festering cancer in the City of Kirkwood.

Citing this video from last week’s tumultuous events at the Old Courthouse, the group opposing Mayor Francis Slay is asking jazz artist Wynton Marsalis to forgo his plans to perform in St. Louis next week in honor of the call for an economic boycott of the city resulting from Slay’s rift with the black community.

To: Mr. Wynton Marsalis

Dear Mr. Marsalis:

We are forwarding to you a video which captures the recent incident of the Mayor of St. Louis, Francis Slay, being literally shouted down at the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. celebration at the Old Courthouse last week. This video demonstrates how the racial tension in this city is escalating to a fever pitch, receiving front-page coverage last week in both the white and black press and being widely broadcast on every TV and radio station.

We bring this to your attention because I have not heard back from Ms. Stewart, who I understand is your agent, since my January 7, 2008 e-mail to her, which was in follow-up to previous correspondence and e-mails concerning a Boycott Alert that we have issued because of this racial strife.

It is now critical that you communicate with us immediately - prior to your scheduled concert - so that we can make you aware of our position with respect to your appearing here in St. Louis.

We would ask that you show the black community here during this crisis the same kind of courtesy and respect being demonstrated by the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), which is threatening to cancel its 2011 convention that is expected to generate $30 million in business for the city. (This information was sent to Ms. Stewart as well).

We hope and trust that you will follow NSBE’s example of hearing first hand the concerns of our community, and then let that weigh on your consciousness and conscience. This video amply illustrates how disruptive this situation potentially is because of the deeply felt racial injustice, and we think that you, like NSBE, can and should play an important role in curing this.

Thank you, and because of the urgency, we will expect to hear from you within the next 24 hours.

Eric E. Vickers
Chairman Boycott Committee
Citizens to Support Fire Chief George

Marsalis is scheduled to perform February 1 and 9 at the Sheldon Concert Hall.

Reporter Lucas Hudson interviews Mayor Francis Slay in this week’s issue of the Vital VOICE.

From Hudson’s intro:

The city’s sweltering racial thermometer portends an all-out political meltdown as Mayor Francis Slay was booed right out of the Old Courthouse by supporters of the city’s ousted first black fire chief, Sherman George, as he gave a speech Jan. 21 honoring Martin Luther King Jr. This humiliating show of resentment demonstrates that Slay’s legacy is in danger of being permanently branded with the scarlet R of racial unrest.

African-American displeasure with his administration did not start with the political game of chicken that resulted in the public demotion of George, but that event lit the match in an environment already filled with the fumes of African-American distrust, suspicion and anger at what some have described as Slay’s “racial politics.”

In a Jan. 11 interview with the Vital VOICE, Mayor Slay speaks to these issues, and also outlines African-American progress that has taken place under his administration, declaring that “There isn’t enough coverage of positive news.”

From the interview:

The Vital Voice: We both know that some of the city’s African-American leaders are up in arms over what many have described as your “racial politics.” With racial tension inflamed in the wake of Fire Chief Sherman George’s removal, The National Society of Black Engineers has threatened to move its 2011 conference scheduled to take place in St. Louis unless the situation changes. In addition, a citizen’s group primarily made up of African-Americans called the Citizens to Recall Mayor Slay has started an effort to recall you from office.

Consultant and blogger Antonio French’s site (www.PubDef.net) lists major gripes the black community has with your administration, which I have paraphrased. They include:

• Disassembling the city’s largest black voting ward (the former 20th).
• Removal of the city’s only ever black fire chief and the subsequent 4-to-1 promotion of whites over blacks.
• The closing of more than a dozen schools (neighborhood anchors) in North St. Louis.
• The disproportionate investing of hundreds of millions of tax dollars in downtown and white neighborhoods, while northern black neighborhoods continue to suffer.

Mayor Slay, if you don’t agree with African-American disillusionment regarding your administration, can you at least understand it?

Mayor Slay: I am very aware of some racial unrest in the City of St. Louis. I am very aware of some of the reaction to what happened in the Fire Department. I will also tell you that if Chief George had made the promotions, he would still be the chief. I talked to civic, political and clergy leaders throughout the community during the process before any decisions were made. I want you and the community to know that I did everything I could to try and get the promotions done without confrontation or controversy. I respect Sherman George as a man of principle, but ultimately, we disagreed how to handle that situation.

There isn’t anybody in St. Louis that agrees with every decision I have made, but there are some people that want to divide the city. However… I don’t think anybody can argue with the fact that St. Louis is much better today than it was seven years ago. We were losing jobs and people faster than virtually any other city in America. Now, our job base has stabilized, our population is on the increase, and we’re getting national and international recognition for our successes. Chief Mokwa and I just announced that crime in the city has dropped 16 percent from last year. Crime is now at a 35-year low. That is something that impacts everybody positively.

Have we solved all the issues? We have not. And some of those allegations like disassembling the largest black ward in the city…Well, the people are still there. If that was the largest black voting ward the city, it is still the largest black voting ward in the city, but it just has a different number on it.

Most people only hear the negatives, and there is no balanced view. For example, the affordable housing initiative that I helped pass is spending $5 million a year, with much of that money impacting people of color. When I took office in the year 2000, 31 percent of the kids tested were positive for lead, and now it is only six percent. The neighborhoods with high incidences of lead poisoning are in predominately African-American areas. I am not suggesting there are no more challenges and everything is fine, but there isn’t enough coverage of positive news.

VV: What specifically have you done, and what more can you do to defuse the current racial tension in the city?

MS: I have been working hard to call upon fair-minded people who are very interested, regardless of what they think of my decision or how it was done—to pull together, begin the healing process and move the city forward. I believe that is going to take some time, but I have been very encouraged by conversations with a number of black leaders. I believe I realize how deep this issue goes, and I am not taking this tension for granted. It is going to take a lot of work and leadership from me and my office.

Click here to read the entire Vital VOICE interview.

Dr. Henry Givens, Jr.
Chairman
Martin Luther King, Jr. State Celebration Commission
3026 Laclede Avenue
St. Louis, Mo. 63103

Re: St. Louis Racial Climate - Economic Boycott Alert

Dear Dr. Givens:

We write concerning the current intense racial climate in the city of St. Louis, which was sparked by Mayor Francis Slay recently ousting the city’s first and only black fire chief, Sherman George, replacing him with a less qualified white, and then promoting white firefighters to 80% of thirty-four high-ranking captain and battalion chief positions that were open.

As you may be aware, we have initiated a Recall campaign against the mayor, and have also issued a Boycott Alert to organizations, entertainers and celebrities planning to come to St. Louis, advising them of the atrocious racial circumstances and conditions now pending in the city, and of our intention to launch a boycott of the city if this situation is not corrected.

As you may also be aware, the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), in responding to the Boycott Alert, has put the city on notice that it may cancel its national convention that is scheduled to be held in St. Louis in 2011, and that is expected to draw over fifteen thousand and have a $30 million economic impact on the city.

We are aware, of course, of the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. activities being planned by your Commission for January 21, 2008, including the program at the Old Courthouse and the march to Powell Symphony Hall.

Because of the manner in which the mayor has totally disrespected the black community with his handling of this issue, we respectfully request that your Commission not invite Mayor Slay to either speak at the Old Courthouse or participate at the head of the march. Frankly, given what the mayor has done, it would be slap in the face to the memory of Dr. King for him to participate in any sort of prominent way at this hallow event.

We commend you and the Commission for the fine work you have done over the many years in honoring and preserving the important message of Dr. King, and we thank you for your earnest consideration of this request.

Sincerely yours,

Eric E. Vickers
Chairman Economic Boycott Committee