Will indelible black-and-white line ever fade?
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 north side townhome, where the air conditioner was broken again, where a baseboard was black with mold 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 center.
“It’s my way out from our messed-up system, our messedup city,” said Wade, 25, who lives with her boyfriend and their three daughters.
But she quickly learned that when you’re black and poor, free-
dom has its limits.
Torrent of unrest
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.
Questions about whether minorities have access to good jobs, high-performing schools and low-crime neighborhoods have been fiercely debated. And for many, one question informs all those others: Can the barriers that keep blacks out of prosperous, mostly white communities be toppled?
Data suggest that they often cannot. By several measures, the St. Louis region remains among the most segregated places in the country, where most blacks and whites, though sometimes separated by only a short walk, live in different worlds.
Such is the case in Ferguson. The part where Brown died is a predominantly black east-side neighborhood 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 2 miles away in the city’s amenity-filled central business dis- trict, surrounded by pockets of predominantly white, affluent neighborhoods with sturdy brick and clapboard homes.
Responding to concerns that the conditions in black, lower-income neighborhoods 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, including vigorously enforcing fair housing laws to reduce discriminatory lending practices.
Falling short of the goal
Interviews with residents, activists and academics suggest that an array of forces perpetuating segregation remain much a thing of the present. In some ways, they are fueled by the attitudes of people, both black and white, molded over generations. In other ways, they are an economic reality that is fortified by real estate practices and government policies.
Over the years, the federal government has regularly failed to enforce fair housing laws that could reduce segregation. The Obama administration last month introduced new regulations through the Department of Housing and Urban Development that are intended to get localities to work more vigorously toward breaking down racially divided housing patterns.
The Section 8 voucher program, started four decades ago, is one of the tools that federal of- ficials 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 shortly after receiving her letter, 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 upfront, something she could not afford.
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 children, but not to her boyfriend.
And so Wade, who grew up in all-black 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 percent 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.