An effort to alter the course of the history of Black wealth in St. Louis

In the West End of St. Louis, a concrete staircase leading up to a vacant lot is a reminder of how the building of wealth involves history and potential.

The rusty iron railing and hard pavement evoked Tulsa's "Steps To Nowhere," a public art project that used an abandoned staircase leading to an emptied lot to remind visitors of the 1921 race massacre that decimated an area called "Black Wall Street" and the wealth that had been built by the area's Black residents. In St, Louis, the isolation inhabited mostly by overgrown weeds signaled a space that should have contained a tangible asset and — if a nonprofit enlisting financial planners to help longtime Black residents avoid displacement in a gentrifying neighborhood is successful — a fertile place to create generational wealth.

Invest STL's program, "Rooted: Cultivating Black Wealth in Place," provides grants of $20,000 for West End residents for investments with advice from planners working on a pro bono basis. This series of articles and discussions will examine the role of wealth management professionals in an effort to confront displacement and disparities in one geographic area as a lens for their potential involvement in that mission nationwide. The planners' participation offers a snapshot into the larger potential ripple wealth effect of fiduciary services for just one client.

The Rooted program is testing the profession's ability to serve historically excluded clients trying to amass wealth and stay put in a changing neighborhood marked by beautifully maintained old mansions and a nearby world-renowned university alongside some uninhabited fields and ramshackle abandoned structures. 

In this first part of Financial Planning's feature on how Rooted came to be, why planners are integral and the possibilities it poses for the future, understanding the mission behind the program requires a grasp of the local history of St. Louis — and how that ties into so many of the factors that have driven the racial wealth gap in America. Public policies caused the movement of many Black residents into the West End of the city after the destruction of another neighborhood, Mill Creek Valley, in the late 1950s and early '60s. Rooted is investigating what resources keep Black residents in the community and nurture long-term wealth in the process. 

The "overriding concern" of residents of the West End and a smaller area within it, Visitation Park, is that "this may no longer be a place for them" amid rising property values and shifting demographics, said Dara Eskridge, the CEO of Invest STL. The group is an equitable community development nonprofit focusing on investment, research and "reframing narratives to shift our collective understanding and awareness of St. Louis residents and neighborhoods," according to its website. 

After engaging in a previous community planning process with the residents, the organization was seeking to come up with "some ways that we can take a crack at anti-displacement strategies that would support this community" and "stay and hold and keep this community for people," Eskridge said in an interview. "Positioning them to direct the transition that the neighborhood was on the cusp of, to their benefit — that was the motivation."

READ MORE: Wall Street's DEI retreat has officially begun

Local and national trends

Across the country, Black wealth disparities and displacement are persistently stubborn facts and an accelerating trend over the past two decades. 

On one hand, median Black wealth was 16% of that of white Americans as of the Fed's latest report — a gap that has remained "stagnant" for the last 40 years, according to other research by the central bank. On the other, a reversal of the "white flight" to the suburbs in the previous century has gentrified many urban areas and contributed to the loss of Black residents. Between 2000 and 2020, only 1 out of 10 cities with the largest Black populations, Houston, gained Black residents, according to census data cited by a report in Politico in 2022. The other nine metropolitan areas, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, Detroit, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., saw a combined decline of more than 1 million Black residents.

Invest STL's analysis of the West End of St. Louis shows statistically why there is a risk of displacement of longtime residents. 

Through a collaboration with a research partner, the Center for Civic Research and Innovation, compiled a "Wealth Building Pilot Displacement Analysis" in 2021 using formulas developed by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin to identify which of six types of gentrifying displacement could be occurring in the three census tracts included in West End and Visitation Park. 

Invest STL and Center for Civic Research and Innovation 2021 “Invest STL Wealth Building Pilot Displacement Analysis” study

After tracking measures of vulnerability, demographics between 2000 and 2019 and the area's housing market, the report concluded that the southwestern section closest to Washington University in St. Louis was in "late stage displacement, indicated by vulnerable population, discernible demographic change, and home values (that) have appreciated." The other two were in "an early stage as shown by a vulnerable population and a discernible demographic change," and being "adjacent to an accelerating or appreciated tract."

Such a finding indicates signs of gentrification and displacement, Urban Institute researchers Michael Neal, Noah Johnson and Fay Walker wrote in a report about the Rooted program last year. The nonprofit research organization "is evaluating the program to assess its impact on displacement risk and wealth-building," which will "uncover financial planners' role in helping beneficiaries" and shed light on whether "scaling it could help address the racial wealth gap more broadly," they wrote.

"Invest STL was noticing greater economic development — changes in the face of the population across some of the neighborhoods in St. Louis — and thought that there was an idea that could help not just to stem the risk of displacement but also help Black families grow their wealth and potentially even close the wealth gap in that area," Neal, an economist with the Urban Institute's Housing Finance Policy Center and the Office of Race and Equity Research, said in an interview. "Urban was a part of it early on in terms of thinking about what are the right parameters that need to be in place."

READ MORE: How taxes reflect and exacerbate racial wealth disparities

The historic backdrop

That kind of planning aimed to alter the course of history in St. Louis, which is second to no major city in its scars from residential segregation, highway construction and forced removal of residents. Specifically, the West End drew many of its Black residents when the city labeled a 100-block area occupied by 20,000 people, 95% of them Black, in Mill Creek Valley as "blighted" and demolished nearly every structure as part of a 1947 city plan that was nothing less than "a beginner's guide to building a racist city," according to "The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States," by Walter Johnson, a professor of history and African American studies at Harvard University. That was just one episode in a long pattern.

"From the time of the Missouri Compromise through the decision in the Dred Scott case, whites in St. Louis used Indian removal as much as slavery as the model for dealing with their Black neighbors," Johnson wrote. "And from that time on, Black St. Louisans have been repeatedly driven out: from East St. Louis in 1917; from the riverfront, Deep Morgan, Chestnut Valley, and Mill Creek Valley in the middle years of the century; from Pruitt-Igoe in 1972; and from whatever neighborhoods were wanted for 'economic development' down to the present day."

Courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri’s Thelma Blumberg Collection

Many problems in St. Louis today stemmed from "the lasting legacy of fragmented metropolitan governance" that separated the administration of the central metropolitan area from the jurisdictions outside of it in St. Louis County, where "successive rings of suburban development poached the central City — and later the inner-ring suburbs as well — of their population, their wealth and their taxable value," according to "Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City," by Colin Gordon, a history professor at the University of Iowa. That history is "irretrievably racial in its logic and in its consequences," as "a particularly graphic and sustained version" of what happened in other American cities, Gordon wrote.

"Throughout the 20th century, private discrimination and public policy combined — intentionally and explicitly — to constrain the residential options available to African Americans, to confine them to certain wards or neighborhoods and to stem what was widely perceived (in St. Louis and elsewhere) as the threat of 'invasion' posed by north-to-south and rural-to-urban migration," he wrote. "A variety of private and public policies — including explicitly racial zoning, state-enforced restrictive deed covenants and redlining by banks and realtors — overlapped and reinforced one another over the course of the 20th century. In a pattern not unique to St. Louis, local reaction to early African American migration yielded restrictions and expectations that were replicated and exaggerated in the decades to follow."

READ MORE: Black Americans need to see Black financial advisors across the table

The part of St. Louis that was once known as Mill Creek transformed into a desolate landscape that was known as "Hiroshima Flats" for decades as it awaited redevelopment, according to Vivian Gibson, whose family lived there before the destruction of the neighborhood led them to the West End. 

In 2020, Gibson published a memoir called "The Last Children of Mill Creek" that preserves many memories of the lost neighborhood, paints a vivid portrait of her parents and siblings and describes the sight of "the empty space where my family and friends had lived a few years before" from her sixth- and seventh-grade classrooms in the basement of the original location of Vashon High School. The area had been home to Stars Park, where Negro Leagues baseball legends such as James "Cool Papa" Bell once played, and the People's Finance Building.

"Residents boasted about it being one of the first commercial buildings in the United States built entirely by Black investors; it was the center of African American commercial, political and social life in St. Louis," Gibson wrote. "Tenants included the NAACP, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the Missouri Pacific and Wabash Railroad offices, and the two major Black newspapers: the St. Louis American and the St. Louis Argus. There were doctors, lawyers and insurance offices, a drug store and a penthouse ballroom that was booked most weekends for dances and large celebrations."

Gibson's book has become part of a notable collection of reminders of the area's past in art and monuments in the former Mill Creek. Some are on the campus of Harris-Stowe State University, a historically Black university that has the former location of Vashon High School on its campus. 

Tobias Salinger

"Pillars of the Valley," a sculpture by Damon Davis, opened last year in a permanent installation outside CITYPARK Stadium, the home field of the city's Major League Soccer team, St. Louis City SC. Eight hourglass-shaped monoliths made of black granite and tan stone bear quotes from Gibson and other former residents of the neighborhood, and the work includes a list of the name, age and occupation of everyone who once lived on the block, as well as a map of the demolished structures.

A few blocks away, the headquarters of Wells Fargo Advisors contains another monument paying tribute to the steeple of a church that once stood on the site. The sprawling campus now contains the corporate offices of the megabank's largest wealth management division. Wells Fargo's philanthropic arm is the primary financial backer of the Rooted program.

Vivian Gibson

For Gibson, the commemoration of what was lost should come with financial support and much more education for area residents and students of institutions like Washington University and Saint Louis University — which took over a major chunk of the land in Mill Creek for its campuses — she said. Her memoir came out of a writer's workshop for seniors, Gibson, 75, noted in an interview. 

"I thought I was writing about my family, about the neighborhood, because that was the setting, but I really didn't realize how important it was to talk about that community," she said. "I feel like a tail wagging the dog because the book has taken me into discussions about urban renewal and displacement and racism, and that was not part of the initial plan."

Yesterday and today in the West End

Gibson's older sister still lives in the West End home their family moved to after the demolition of their former neighborhood. The city plan and the white flight encouraged by construction of highways through neighborhoods like Mill Creek created the infamous "Delmar Divide" between the white areas south of the boulevard and the Black ones to the north. 

Courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri’s Arthur Witman Photograph Collection

Many Mill Creek families completed the same relocation as that of Gibson when the remaining white families were leaving the city for the suburbs in St. Louis County. Some more affluent Black homeowners had already decamped as well to the historic mansions in one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city.

READ MORE: Legendary role models whose achievements laid the foundation 

Boxer Sonny Liston, rock 'n' roll legend Chuck Berry and his wife, Themetta, and physician Dr. Paul Williams each lived on a single block of large brick homes on Windermere Place in Visitation Park. Williams' daughter Paulette (who later used the name Ntozake Shange) memorialized the block in a novel called "Betsy Brown" and in one brief snippet of her "choreopoem" that became a broadway hit and a star-studded film, "For Colored Girls," referring to a fanciful ride on the Hodiamont streetcar with Toussaint Louverture amid other references to St. Louis in the work. The Hodiamont Tracks once ran through the West End.

"Blacks were relocating to the area, and white flight was underway, but on Windermere enough whites stayed to give the street a feeling of ease distinct from tensions elsewhere in the city," journalist and historian RJ Smith wrote in "Chuck Berry: An American Life" of the block where the songwriter and guitar player purchased the 11-room home at 13 Windermere Place in 1957. 

"Chuck was on the road for weeks at a time, and when he came home he wanted the whole block to know it," Smith wrote. "'I remember him coming up and he loved opening up his attache and he'd show us the cash,' recalled his daughter Melody. Berry would buy bags full of White Castle burgers and give them out to the children of the neighborhood. 'Everybody would say, 'You're dad's so cool!' remembered Charles Berry Jr. Hamburgers for all, an integrated street; Windermere Place was an idyllic image of success." 

Tobias Salinger

Today, that strip remains a picturesque, leafy residential block where John Nicks, 72, said many of the homeowners are neighborhood fixtures and own businesses like two establishments run by him and his son Jay, 47, nearby on Delmar Boulevard, the Legacy Bar and Grill and The Cellar Cigar Lounge. Nicks and his wife won't be moving out anytime soon.

"Other than a few folks, everybody is pretty much settled. We've been here 40 years. I'm in my mid-70s, so I'm good. And it's the same with most of the other people that live in these houses," Nicks said. "We don't have a big turnover in this neighborhood."

Some other parts of the West End haven't stood the test of time as well as Windermere Place. On a walk during a pleasant spring day last month along a path through the middle of the West End named for a late resident and activist, the Ruth Porter Mall Park, the many gorgeous old homes throughout the area often sat next to big vacant lots or structures that appeared abandoned or in various states of disrepair. The latter group included the de Hodiamont House on Maple Place, a city landmark named for a monk-turned-real estate investor whose onetime home is the second-oldest residence in the city. 

Next to the unmarked, rickety structure whose Gothic Revival style needed a new coat of paint, lifetime residents James Tyler, 30, and Jay Tee, 37, talked about the area's rent prices and shuttered schools like the ones they attended when they were growing up. The West End needs affordable housing in the vacant lots around the area, they said.

"They're buying all the property up and raising the property values, and people can't afford to live over here anymore," Tyler said. "They're raising all the rent up, knowing motherf— can't pay that right now, basically flushing motherf—- out of their crib."

The lack of schools leave many parents without an option besides moving to other places outside the city in St. Louis County, Tee noted.

"If you don't live in these certain counties, you can't enroll your kids in school. So that's how they're forcing you out of the community," he said. "They're forcing you out, basically forcing you to go to the county, have a county address to enroll your kids in school."

Tobias Salinger

Investing in the future

Others in the West End are trying to deploy capital toward the community alongside business owners as well. Build-A-Bear Workshop founder Maxine Clark turned the previously vacated St. Luke's Hospital into the Delmar DivINe, which opened in 2021 as a home for nonprofit agencies, conferences, coworking spaces and retail tenants, including a credit union, an urgent care clinic, a pharmacy, a deli and an Edward Jones office, as well as a 150-unit apartment with 15% of the units designated as affordable.

"The name 'Delmar DivINe' came from my total distaste for the word 'divide,'" Clark told The St. Louis American last year. "If we continue to call Delmar 'the Divide,' we will never make progress towards connecting our neighborhoods. I really just changed the 'D' to an 'N' to form the word 'IN' for investment, innovation and inclusion. At first, it was a working name, but the neighborhood began to use it in daily conversation, and so it stuck. As we developed our strategy to inform the community, the more we used 'Delmar DivINe,' the less people were using 'the Divide.'"

READ MORE: One year after Secure 2.0, retirement race gap remains stubborn

Residents welcome investments and positive changes they have seen over the past 10 or 15 years, but they "don't want to lose the culture of the neighborhood," said Tameka Stigers, the owner of Locs of Glory, a beauty salon and spa on Delmar.

Tameka Stigers

"When new people come into the neighborhood, they want to see things, it seems like, drastically different," Stigers said. "I want to change. I see our neighborhood transformed, but I don't want our culture to be lost. And I think those sorts of things happen, especially as more white people move into a neighborhood that's predominantly Black. You want to see the neighborhood look this way and then the people that are already here want to see it look a different way. And so there's that clashing."

Invest STL's office is also on Delmar, a few blocks away from Stigers' store along the southern boundary of the West End.

"The issue becomes, when people move in and prices rise, how does that price people out of the neighborhood?," said Michelle Witthaus, the policy design + activation partner with Invest STL. "It's one of the first neighborhoods north of Delmar to experience this type of rapid gentrification. … When we started doing this work, it became more and more apparent why this needed to happen in this neighborhood."

Still, the nonprofit and the planners advising the grant participants are pursuing their lofty goals in the backdrop of a painful history around the country that has been especially evident in St. Louis. 

Asked how financial professionals can alter the industry's legacy of blocking access to wealth, the memoirist Gibson brought up the apology delivered in September 2022 by St. Louis Realtors President Katie Berry for how real estate companies and the association's members "perpetuated discrimination against the Black community and created barriers for the pursuit of property ownership." In a speech at Harris-Stowe, Berry unveiled 22 initiatives designed to promote Black homeownership, including supporting the passage of state legislation that "should help to reduce the number of vacant properties in the city."

Courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri’s Arthur Witman Photograph Collection

After the apologies, the question then turns into, "Now we want to know, OK, so what do we do to repair it," Gibson said, noting that the query of "how do you fix it" extends to real estate professionals, governments, banks, institutions, universities and others, too.

"You benefitted. You're still benefiting. Saying you're sorry is not enough," she said. "What do you do to repair that, to make sure that this wealth gap closes?"