An Indelible Black-and-White Line
By JOHN ELIGONAUG. 8, 2015


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 messed-up city,” said Ms. 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.

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 suggests 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 Mr. 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 two miles away in the city’s amenity-filled central business district, 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 Mr. 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.

Interviews with residents, activists and academics suggest that an array of forces perpetuating segregation remain very 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 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 shortly after receiving her letter, Ms. 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 Ms. 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.

Limits of Affordability

Katina Combs browsed apartment listings on Craigslist one recent morning, carefully searching for clues of discrimination. The lead tester for the Metropolitan St. Louis Equal Housing and Opportunity Council, her job is to send testers to see if landlords treat everyone equally. When they do not, she files complaints with the government.

Ms. Combs homed in on listings in St. Louis Hills, a south side neighborhood in the city that is 93 percent white. Posing as a woman named Chanequa looking for a unit for herself and a 3-year-old daughter, she asked a few obligatory questions of the woman on the other end of the phone. Then came the crucial inquiry.

“I have a Section 8 voucher,” Ms. Combs said. “Do you accept Section 8?”

“Um,” the woman replied. “Not for that property. We have two houses in North County that we have, um, that accept the Section 8 vouchers.”

Ms. Combs rolled her eyes.

The city of St. Louis, population 317,000, is almost evenly split racially, with blacks accounting for 48 percent of residents and whites 46 percent. St. Louis County, which, at 524 square miles, is nearly eight times larger by area, surrounds the city and is separately governed. It is far less mixed, with whites accounting for about 70 percent of the approximately one million residents, and blacks about 24 percent.

Blacks are concentrated on the north side of the city and the adjacent northern part of the county. Whites, meanwhile, reside heavily in the city’s southern neighborhoods and the county’s western and southern towns.

In one measure of the region’s segregation, a Brown University study found that either 70 percent of all the black people or 70 percent of the white people would have to move to achieve racially balanced neighborhoods. The analysis named St. Louis the ninth most segregated region in the country, among metropolitan areas with large black populations. Other studies have reached similar conclusions.

The residential differences can have serious consequences.

Clayton, the well-off seat of St. Louis County, for instance, is more than 77 percent white, with a median household income of nearly $90,000 and a life expectancy of 85. Travel about a mile and a half north to Wellston, which is 95 percent black, and life expectancy drops by 15 years, median household income by about three-fourths.

The roots for the current racial divide are deep. In 1916, St. Louis voters codified segregation with an ordinance that prohibited racially mixed communities. The law was struck down by the courts, but deed covenants and realtor agreements prohibiting home sales to blacks kept segregation intact. The impact of those policies persist.

“Even though the on-the-ground mechanisms of segregation are now frayed, you end up with really a spatially divided housing market in which blacks can afford to live in one band of housing stock and whites in another,” said Colin Gordon, a University of Iowa history professor and author of the book “Mapping Decline,” which traces St. Louis’s urban history.

One major hurdle for blacks searching for housing in whiter communities, fair housing advocates said, was the unwillingness of many landlords to accept Section 8 vouchers. Refusing to accept vouchers is legal in most places and has contributed to the concentration of blacks in poor communities, housing experts said.

The city of St. Louis enacted an ordinance this year essentially prohibiting landlords from discriminating based on Section 8. The county has no such ordinance, and the Ferguson Commission has recommended that the Legislature pass a statewide one.

Blacks today also struggle to get financing, experts say. Even when controlling for income, whites are approved for home loans at higher rates than blacks in St. Louis County, according to 2012 data published in the county’s fair housing analysis last year.

And fair housing advocates say they still see racial steering. The woman Ms. Combs called about listings in St. Louis Hills, for example, had pointed her toward properties in predominantly black areas of North County that were poorer and more dangerous than St. Louis Hills, and yet had higher rents.

Ms. Combs has both lived segregation and escaped it. The seventh of eight children raised by a single mother in downtown St. Louis, she spent most of her early life in majority black communities.

Her mother migrated here from Arkansas in the late 1950s, and Ms. Combs spent the first years of her life in a housing project, the Cochran Gardens. The family moved several times, living in predominantly black areas. But when Ms. Combs was about 15, relatives helped the family find a rental home in a majority white neighborhood on the city’s South Side.

It was life changing, Ms. Combs said. Suddenly she had white friends. She worked at Pizza Hut and was fascinated that some co-workers read books for fun, something she was not used to seeing in her previous neighborhoods. So she started reading more herself and fell in love with Edgar Allan Poe. She learned how to socialize outside of her race.

That became useful in navigating society. When, for instance, she and her husband, Michael, were searching for an affordable place on their relatively low income years ago, a white friend told her about a beautiful loft building made up entirely of low-income units in a decent part of downtown. They got a spacious one-bedroom for $450 a month, she said; it seemed the perfect place for poor black families looking to take a step up. But the building was not well advertised, she said, and most of their neighbors were white.

They also landed in their current house in the south St. Louis County suburb of Affton, which is 94 percent white, with a bit of good fortune and connections. Colleagues at the housing council recommended her and Michael, who works in construction, for a reality show, Home Team, which finds a home for a family, remodels it and pays the mortgage for a year.

Ms. Combs, 42, said she loves her home. As a child her only real escape from her tough surroundings was playing the flute in her attic. Today her 7-year-old son, Michael Jr., can play with his train set in his room or dally in the backyard without worrying about gunfire.

Yet in her job and in her life, she says she still sees racial bias. “Discrimination is different today,” she said. “It’s with a smile. It’s with a pleasant voice.”

Social Barriers

For Crystal Wade, allowing her children to play on the grassy lot next to their house is hardly ever an option. With violent crime common in her neighborhood, Ms. Wade said she looked over her shoulder when she walked in the house. Her rambunctious and curious 2-year-old daughter, Crystian, once rambled toward the window when gunshots popped outside. Ms. Wade and her boyfriend, Bryant Goston, 26, also have a 7-month-old daughter, Ava. Mr. Goston’s 7-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, Tamia, stays with them occasionally.

Five days a week, Ms. Wade takes a 30-minute drive with her best friend to their jobs at a Verizon call center in St. Charles County, where they work eight-hour shifts. She clocks 40 hours a week, but her roughly $10-an-hour salary has not been enough to afford housing in the area where she works.

Her family moved into a subsidized federal-style townhome in St. Louis after their previous house on the city’s west side burned down last year. Their current block has a Church of God in Christ on one end and about 16 standing structures, 11 of which are abandoned. On one side of her home is a vacant townhouse, on the other, a weed-filled empty lot.

She has tried to make this all work. She decorated the living room with a framed drawing of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. accompanied by a poem. “He was a man for our times, like Moses in his day, for God used him mightily, to pave a better way,” it starts.

Optimism comes hard in Ms. Wade’s St. Louis neighborhood, where only about one in four families earn above the citywide median income of $35,000 a year, according to census data. For a third of the population, formal education ended at high school.

The voucher program, with a $19.3 billion budget this year, is structured in a way that makes it difficult for the 2.2 million families that receive assistance nationally to rise into better communities. Housing officials have regularly complained that funding from Congress was inadequate and they are seeking a 9 percent increase this year that would add about 200,000 vouchers, including 67,000 eliminated by the 2013 sequestration cuts. In the city of St. Louis, 25,000 families are on the voucher waiting list.

The voucher pays a certain amount toward a family’s rent based on a regional fair market rate calculated by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. The family is expected to contribute some money toward the rent, usually about 30 percent of its household income. Like other metropolitan areas, the higher income parts of the St. Louis region tend to have rental rates that are too expensive for the voucher to cover. That often leaves properties in dilapidated neighborhoods as a voucher holder’s only viable option.

The disparity in property values between black and white communities also tends to push subsidized housing development toward poorer places, housing experts said. And the federal government actually gives greater financial incentives for building affordable housing in low-income neighborhoods.

But developers and housing advocates say there is also a major social barrier to bringing low-income families to better neighborhoods — resistance from people already living there.

A report prepared for St. Louis County last December analyzing impediments to fair housing found “that some residents of the study area hold strong ‘Not In My Back Yard’ (NIMBY) sentiments as well as attitudes prejudiced against people of low-income, those residing in subsidized housing, and racial/ethnic minorities.”

Three out of four Section 8 renters in the St. Louis region live in the northern part of the city or the county, even though it has a smaller overall population than the southern region. In the north, the median household income is less than two-thirds of what it is in the south. And in the county alone, there are nearly 20 times as many Section 8 renters in the northern part than in the southern.

It is no surprise, then, that Ms. Wade’s search funneled her to neighborhoods that were only marginally better, and in some cases worse, than her current residence.

Her goal was to move into the Parkway school district in the western part of the county, where test scores are far higher than the city district where she lives. The Parkway district is also just 10 minutes from her job. And violent crime in Chesterfield, one of the towns she was considering, is a fraction of the rate in her neighborhood.

Searching, and Settling

Ms. Wade searched websites tailored to Section 8 seekers — Socialserve.com and GoSection8. She asked friends on Facebook and at work. She broadened her search criteria on Zillow, but only came up with options in the same neighborhoods she has been hoping to avoid. Some people told her they did not accept Section 8, she said. Others just did not return her calls or emails.

Ultimately, her search for Section 8 housing brought her on a recent overcast Saturday to a street of red brick bungalows in a part of northern St. Louis that was 97 percent black with a median home value of nearly $53,000.

The violent crime rate in this neighborhood is slightly higher than where she lives now, and it is sandwiched between an industrial area and the county border. But it looked more stable, with few empty lots and most houses seemingly occupied. The two-bedroom home the family toured needed interior work before it would be ready for renters, and Ms. 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. The smell of polish from the hardwood floors suffused the air. The walls were painted in a rich blue. The rooms were square and small. 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, Ms. Wade said: the safety of the neighborhood.

“Go with what you feel is safe for you,” Ms. Wade recalled her best friend telling her.

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.

That same day, the family decided to escape the humid afternoon with a trip to a swimming pool in the mostly white suburb of Richmond Heights west of the city.

As Crystian stepped onto the synthetic turf of a playground outside, she paused and looked at her father wide-eyed, Mr. Goston recalled. “She’s used to dirt, grass and wood chips,” he said.

The child was not the only one who found the surroundings a bit uncomfortable. As Mr. Goston sat in a hot tub near the pool, he struggled to relax. He worried about whether the police would stop him when he left, whether the recreation center’s white staff were looking at him suspiciously, about whether he was behaving in ways that somehow fulfilled their stereotypes of black people.

He found himself wishing, he said, that all the things that he and Ms. Wade had wanted from a more affluent white neighborhood — the better schools, the lower crime, the nicer lawns and the recreation center — could be transplanted to their mostly black neighborhood. But then reality sank in.

“It’s not what I know,” he said, referring to all that surrounded him at that moment. “I can adapt, yeah. Because, to be honest, that’s what all black people have to do.”

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