An indelible line of black and white
One year after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, race, class discussion continues
ST. LOUIS— When she tore open the manila envelope on a sweltering morning in early June, Crystal Wade thought she had unlocked her ticket to freedom.
“The St. Louis Housing Authority is pleased to inform you,” the letter read, “that you have been determined eligible to participate in our Housing Choice Voucher Program.”
Colloquially referred to as a Section 8 voucher, it would allow her to use a housing subsidy at any suitable rental property she could find anywhere in the city or county of St. Louis. So as she wilted that June morning in her subsidized northside townhome, where the air conditioner was broken again, where a baseboard was black with mould from a leaky window, where she avoided the ground-floor living room for fear of catching a stray bullet, she began to dream of the possibilities.
And her top dream was a single-family rental home in the well-appointed suburbs to the west, where the school districts are among the best in the state and where she would be a quick drive to her job at a Verizon call centre.
“It’s my way out from our messedup system, our messed-up city,” said Wade, 25, who lives with her boyfriend and their three daughters.
But she quickly learned that when you’re black and poor, freedom has its limits.
A year after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, unleashed a torrent of unrest in Ferguson, the St. Louis region has been embroiled in a difficult discussion about race and class, and not just regarding the police. On Saturday, Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr., led a march that started at the site where the teen was fatally shot.
Time has not healed his wounds, Brown said before the procession, in which several hundred people, a drum corps and some cars joined the eight-kilometre route to Normandy High School. “At the end of the day, I still lost my boy,” he said. “I’m still hurting. My family’s still hurting.”
Brown said the anniversary brings back all of the grief and raw emotions, but that it’s important to continue voicing concerns about police brutality and the use of force.
Other questions are part of the fierce debate in St. Louis: do minorities have access to good jobs, highperforming schools and low-crime neighbourhoods?
For many, one question informs all those others: Can the barriers that keep blacks out of prosperous, mostly white communities be toppled?
Data suggests that they often cannot. By several measures, the St. Louis region remains among the most segregated places in the U.S.
In Ferguson, the area where Brown died is a predominantly black eastside neighbourhood where residents have complained of police harassment and high crime in a cluster of apartments that stretches into the census tract with the most Section 8 renters in Missouri. Life is much different just three kilometres away in the city’s amenity-filled central business district, surrounded by pockets of predominantly white, affluent neighbourhoods.
Responding to concerns that the conditions in black, lower-income neighbourhoods contributed to the problems that sparked the unrest after Brown’s death, the Ferguson Commission, convened by Gov. Jay Nixon, recently proposed measures to promote more integrated housing.
Over the years, the federal government has failed to enforce fair housing laws that could reduce segregation. The Obama administration last month introduced regulations through the Department of Housing and Urban Development that are intended to get localities to work more vigorously to breaking down racially divided housing patterns.
The Section 8 voucher program, started four decades ago, is one of the tools that federal officials had hoped would provide access to high-opportunity communities for low-income people — and, by extension, minorities, as two out of three voucher recipients nationwide are not white.
In practice, however, the voucher system often falls short of that goal. When she began her housing search, Wade plugged her wish list into the websites on which many landlords who accept Section 8 vouchers advertise — a two-bedroom house with a landlord who did not require two months’ rent. When the hits came back, not a single property was in one of the more affluent towns where the schools are better and crime lower. The few that were near promising areas had monthslong wait lists. Some landlords told her that they would rent to her and the kids, but not to her boyfriend.
And so Wade, who grew up in allblack projects and went to predominantly black schools, recalibrated her expectations. She began to confine her search to the communities where most of the region’s black people live, where the majority of the region’s Section 8 holders — 95 per cent of whom are black — are able to find obliging landlords, on the city’s north side and in north St. Louis County, which includes Ferguson. Segregation was laying its trap. With violent crime common in her neighbourhood, Wade said she looked over her shoulder when she walked in the house. Her rambunctious 2-year-old daughter, Crystian, once rambled toward the window when gunshots popped outside.
Five days a week, Wade takes a 30minute drive with her best friend to their jobs at the call centre in St. Charles County, where they work eight-hour shifts. She clocks 40 hours a week, but her roughly $10an-hour salary has not been enough to afford housing in the area where she works.
Ultimately, her search for Section 8 housing took her on a recent overcast Saturday to a street in a part of northern St. Louis that was 97 per cent black with a median home value of nearly $53,000.
The two-bedroom home the family toured needed interior work before it would be ready for renters, and Wade was not happy with that. So the property manager took them to another home on a street that was much more tattered than the one they had just left. They looked at another two-bedroom brick bungalow renting for $650 that was just about move-in ready. She reluctantly said she would take it.
As she explained the pros and cons to her best friend that night, a theme kept coming up, Wade said: the safety of the neighbourhood.
So she changed her mind and decided on the first house instead. Unable to find something in the tonier western reaches of the county, she figured this was the best they could do. But she pledged to keep searching.