DECAY OF CITIES CAUSE FOR ALARM FOR CITIZENS IN ALL PARTS OF STATE

Scenes on a St. Louis Street Show Fear, Divisions -- and Surprising Resilience

- Wall Street Journal headline

One day before Missourians went to the polls to choose party nominees for statewide offices, the Wall Street Journal published a page one story on the decline and decay of our state's largest urban area. It was a painful reminder to some that despite a political campaign that seemed unending, a major problem facing Missouri was virtually ignored by nearly all of the candidates. The newspaper article made it painfully clear that our state does, in fact, have an urban problem that directly affects at least 52 percent of its population and indirectly influences the lives of the remaining 48 percent.

The Journal article, focusing on St. Louis' Jefferson Avenue which is located just a few blocks from the downtown area, is really not fit for human habitation, although it serves as home for hundreds of citizens who are daily confronted with dangers unknown to much of the rest of the state. At the northern end of Jefferson Avenue, where drug wars, cocaine dealers and boarded-up homes are the most conspicuous components of the environment, a baby born to a black mother has less chance of living to its first birthday than one born in Sri Lanka. This is a nation that boasts of the finest medical facilities in the world, and a city that is home of two of the nation's leading medical schools.

At the southern end of Jefferson Avenue live white residents who are daily confronted with the prospect of robberies, rape and murder. The Journal reporter interviewed a 74-year-old white woman who related her own personal accounts of break-ins, intimidation and sidewalk homicides. She is afraid of blacks, and exclaims, "This is like living in Africa."

Just a few blocks east of Jefferson Avenue stand a dozen tall, gleaming office buildings housing the headquarters of some of the state's largest companies. Despite losing half its population since 1950, the City of St. Louis still remains a corporate bastion that stands in stark contrast to the blighted neighborhoods just a few blocks away containing families too poor to desert their dilapidated houses for better quarters in the county. It is a story that has been told over and over again as the nation tries to understand what has happened to its once-great metropolitan areas.

Fully one-half of Missouri's population now lives in St. Louis, Kansas City and the smaller metropolitan areas of Springfield, Columbia and St. Joseph, but the crisis of urban decay resides primarily in the two largest regions, where crime is pervasive and personal comity is almost unknown. Whether or not out-state Missourians like to acknowledge it, it is our cities that provide many of the resources for development statewide. They are the source of much of the funding, much of the energy and much of the leadership that propels Missouri. When these urban centers experience decay, the entire state suffers, just as Missouri suffers when out-state agriculture finds itself in the middle of hard times.

Although virtually all of the gubernatorial candidates touched on issues affecting the cities, few chose even to recognize that state government has a role to play in stemming the destructive and disruptive forces located within these areas. None of the candidates discussed in any detail any proposals to expand the state's role in a task that many are willing to assign to leaders only at the municipal level. "Let the cities solve their own problems" is not an uncommon remark in Jefferson City, yet such casual dismissals are harmful not only to St. Louis and Kansas City but to every city and citizen in the entire state.

One candidate, GOP gubernatorial hopeful Wendell Bailey, did address urban neighborhood redevelopment, but the context of his remarks centered principally around how the state could avoid further multimillion-dollar desegregation payments. The focus of other positions by other candidates was how state government could improve its services in education, welfare and health all important subjects that deserved far more attention than they received from both the candidates and the public. Too often, however, the emphasis was not on how services could be improved but how the state could save money, sometimes at the expense of aid recipients. And almost none of the candidates recognized that in many areas of public services, there are differences in urban and out-state needs and thus there should be differences in urban and out-state delivery systems.

It is time for Missourians everywhere to recognize that decay of any neighborhood in any part of the state is cause for alarm and remedy. Missouri needs to address this decay.

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