SIGNS OF HOPE AMID FERGUSON’S DEVASTATION
As violence subsides, residents hope for a brighter future
Anyone driving through this small city outside St. Louis Friday would be confronted with some striking scenes.
At a typical suburban intersection, bounded by a strip mall, gas station and a Walgreens pharmacy, a former beauty supply shop is now a pile of snow-dusted rubble, caved in as if hit by a bomb. Across town, a pizza parlour lies similarly collapsed and charred.
And along West Florissant Avenue, the heart of the city’s poorest, African-American neighbourhood, several businesses are in ruins, burned down like the others in rioting on Monday night.
The destruction was wrought by a sub-set of protesters incensed that a grand jury had decided not to charge the white police officer who shot Michael Brown, an unarmed, black teenager.
It has left some locals wondering if the real Ferguson — as opposed to the one that, justifiably or not, became an international symbol of American racial dysfunction — can ever truly recover.
Will businesses re-invest in a community, they ask, that became a target for demonstrators all too willing to decimate others’ property?
And with the race genie fully out of the lamp, can the 70 per cent of Ferguson residents who are black live in unity with the white minority?
“I’m completely against racism, I love everybody, but this has turned it into a racial thing,” said Darius Collins, 20, who is black and lives steps from the devastation on West Florissant. “Now you know there’s tension when you walk by somebody (white). I hate for somebody to feel that way around me.”
Ferguson is in some ways a surprising place. Even in the midst of a race-based conflagration, most African-Americans remain nothing but gracious and friendly toward non-black visitors. Blacks and whites mingle amicably at a downtown church and do business with each other.
Yet while African-Americans almost universally say they are glad to see long-simmering issues of race and police conduct come to the fore, there is a sense that relations between ordinary people have suffered.
At the same time, though, there are signs of a surprising hope in this city of 22,000. The owner of a small cake bakery whose store was damaged by looters, for instance, has seen donations of more than $250,000 on a crowdfunding site.
It is unclear if insurance companies will cover damage caused by rioters, but a push has begun to demand that state and federal governments help fund the recovery, said Brian Fletcher, head of the I Love Ferguson civic-booster organization.
“I’m very optimistic about our future. ... People are not shying away from investing in Ferguson,” he said in an interview Friday. “We will survive and we will become stronger.”
A high-end cigar store and associated bar is opening soon, and a new barbecue restaurant is coming, too, said Fletcher. As a further indication of the city’s resilience, he pointed to how it scrabbled back from two tornadoes over the last five years.
Ferguson is not a rich city, but neither is it a place of urban blight. It has some of the lowest-income census tracts in St. Louis County — the crazy quilt of 91 municipalities around the city of St. Louis — but also very affluent neighbourhoods, said Fletcher.
Homes sell from $30,000 to as much as $600,000, he said. Even some of the less-august enclaves feature well-tended bungalows; the street where Brown died is lined by neatly kept garden-style apartments.
Yet there is clearly a black-white
There’s people who can’t pay their rent now because they got no job, because their business has burned down.
economic divide.
Of the city’s two main business streets, West Florissant is the most heavily patronized by AfricanAmericans, in the midst of one of Ferguson’s poorer neighbourhoods.
South Florissant, on the other side of town, has seen a renaissance of sorts in recent years, with several new businesses and new, multimillion-dollar police and fire department buildings.
Most of the dozen businesses destroyed by fire Monday were on a six-block stretch of West Florissant, which police opened to traffic for the first time on Friday afternoon, after closing it off for most of the week.
“How many jobs were lost?” wondered Carmen Ross, a music student, as she stood at the end of the strip. “There’s people who can’t pay their rent now because they got no job, because their business has burned down.”
The city, however, had already drafted a plan to revitalize West Florissant, make it more like the flashier South Florissant, and that project will push ahead, said Fletcher.
“It’s going to be a tremendous economic engine,” he predicted.