Resources needed to fix vacancy, reduce gun violence in Missouri cities, panel says

Reinvesting in communities is key to addressing vacancy and reducing gun violence in Missouri’s cities, panelists said Wednesday during a digital discussion hosted by The Kansas City Star and American Public Square at Jewell.

The event was part of Gun Violence in Missouri: Seeking Solutions, a series of virtual events hosted by The Star in conjunction with the Missouri Gun Violence Project — a two-year, statewide journalism collaboration that investigates the causes and potential solutions to gun violence.

Wednesday’s event focused on Star reporting that examined how the built environment of a community — including negative features like vacant lots and abandoned buildings — has an impact on the risk of gun violence. It is part of an overall picture of well-being in a neighborhood that includes factors such as income, housing, food insecurity and education. Cleaning up and maintaining neighborhoods can reduce gun crimes, studies show.

Both St. Louis and Kansas City are blighted with acres of abandoned property, owned publicly and privately. Gun violence follows the vacancy from neighborhood to neighborhood virtually without fail, data shows.

The panel discussion Wednesday was moderated by Humera Lodhi, a reporter on The Star’s gun violence team. The project is supported by nonprofits Report for America and Missouri Foundation for Health.

The panelists included Laura Ginn, a vacancy strategist for the St. Louis Land Reutilization Authority; Erin Royals, a neighborhood outreach and research coordinator at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Center for Neighborhoods; Sundy Whiteside, board president of the St Louis Association of Community Organizations and John MacDonald, a criminology professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Redlining and disinvestment

Cleaning up and maintaining a neighborhood’s built environment is a key part of reducing gun violence through public health approaches, MacDonald said. That means reinvesting in communities that have been neglected for decades, ensuring that abandoned and vacant buildings are up to code and cleaning up vacant lots so that they don’t attract crime.

To understand how and why neighborhoods were neglected is to recognize that redlining is alive and well, Royals said.

Starting in the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation created maps of American cities that were color coded based on “risk,” meaning a risky place for financial investment. However, Royals said, marking an area as a risk was a way to codify the racial make-up of American cities and prevent loans to Black residents.

“[Those maps] do a lot to explain why certain neighborhoods that were deemed risky investments are still in a disinvested state today,” Royals said.

And those predatory and racist lending practices continue to happen today. In her work with the UMKC Center for Neighborhoods and her research as a PhD candidate in geography at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Royals has heard from people who still either can’t get loans from banks or they are only offered subprime loans or ones with bad terms.

“This practice of redlining, this practice of keeping lending out of certain neighborhoods, is something that, though it started historically a long time ago, is still imprinted on the maps of the spaces we interact with day to day.”

At the heart of disinvestment and blighted land is systemic racism, Royals said, and it is directly tied to enduring racist lending practices and segregation.

St. Louis solutions

Ginn, who works with a handful of agencies and organizations addressing St. Louis vacancy, said that a greater financial investment is needed, but that money has to be spent efficiently and wisely.

“The availability of capital to invest in these communities is huge, but also recognize that money doesn’t solve everything,” Ginn said.

The St. Louis Community Land Trust was launched back in June with a $1 million grant from the Missouri Department of Conservation, with the hope that more local private and public agencies will provide more funds. The trust will be overseen by a board of local residents.

“There’s no authority or autonomy in these communities to do something about the vacant land in their neighborhoods,” Ginn said. “A land trust is about intentional ownership at the community level, and decisions are made by the most local group of residents as you can get.”

Whiteside, who is also a resident of Walnut Park East in north St. Louis, said strengthening communities and supporting residents would help many overarching problems including vacancy and gun violence.

“We have to embrace each other to really heal our communities, we have neglected our young people, we have to bring them into the fold and be a part of community engagement and development,” Whiteside said.

“If we don’t focus on some of the systemic, racial issues that exist and prevent us from having economic equity, we will never be able to attain equality or fairness in job placement, in housing, in any aspects of living in our nation, I think we have to work on that and provide money to repair the damage that as been done.”