East St. Louis: The Invisible City
Imagine a city where corruption and poverty are the rule, not the exception. A city so polluted that the rates of lead poisoning and asthma in children are astronomical. A city where sewage regularly backs up into homes, schools, and parks, sickening residents who are under-immunized. Less than half of the children here will graduate from high school, and only a small fraction will obtain a college degree. The city’s biggest employers include the drug trade, funeral homes, bars, and prostitution.
Where is this city? Mexico? India? Guatemala?
No. This city is in the United States. This city is East St. Louis.
As the name implies, East St. Louis is located near St. Louis, Missouri. However, it is not a part of the city, or even the state, because it lies in Illinois, just across the Mississipi river from the nicest parts of Downtown St. Louis. East St. Louis has always been presented to me as a place that I should never go if I valued my life or the vehicle I was in. Of course, the more I heard people talk about it, the more curious I became.
As recently as the late 1980s, the city had no obstetric services and a very high rate of infant mortality. There was no trash collection, because the city couldn’t afford it. People just piled up all their trash in the backyard and burned it occasionally. They sometimes saw rats the size of puppies. The sewage backups couldn’t be cleaned because the city couldn’t afford to repair the vacuum truck that could have alleviated the problem, and the sewage in East St. Louis is particularly dangerous because of the toxins that flow into it from nearby chemical plants.
The city has about twenty elementary schools, but so many children don’t stay in school that there are only two high schools. In the schools, it is common for light bulbs to be burnt out, windows to be broken, equipment and books to be scarce, and toilets nonfunctional. The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development called East St. Louis “the most distressed small city in America.” In the past, the city has been left off the Illinois map, and its businesses and residents excluded from the phone book.
How did things get so bad here? Essentially, East St. Louis is a city without a social contract– the government of East St. Louis does not exist to serve its residents, but rather, it exists to serve the interests of private industry. It is not the only city of this kind, but it is one of the few where a large residential population developed. This meant that the city had to deal with the needs of citizens, but that business interests were always first.
This type of city is known as an industrial suburb. Industrial suburbs are created solely to serve the interests of the businesses that locate themselves there. These businesses pollute heavily and thus cannot locate in places where citizens will complain about pollution. They are also highly sensitive to tax rates because they have narrow profit margins, so they must locate where taxes are extremely low or nonexistent.
Originally, the city was mostly white, but blacks were drawn from the Deep South by the promise of jobs. When they arrived, they were used as strikebreakers, which created a great deal of racial tension. The tension eventually lead to a massive riot in 1917. The records, which are rather hazy, indicate that anywhere from 100 to 250 blacks were tortured, burned, hanged, and killed, and their homes and neighborhoods burned, while the police either sat idly by or joined in. It was one of the worst race riots in the history of our country, and ultimately the National Guard had to be called in to end it. I had never heard of this riot. Had you?
In the 1950′s, industry began to leave the city, so many residents left, including most of the remaining white population. Today, the city’s population is down to about 30,000 from a high of about 80,000, and it is 98% black.
East St. Louis is still an industrial suburb today, and it is surrounded by other industrial suburbs . This means that the city glows brownish yellow at night from all the air pollution caused by toxic waste plants. There are extremely high levels of pollution in the soil. The threat of chemical spills is constant, and so is the threat of exposure to toxic fumes. Whenever a local company deems that residents have been exposed to fumes that are especially hazardous, they give out a cash payment of $400 per person in exchange for release from future liability. East St. Louis is run by companies that don’t provide jobs, don’t provide tax revenue, and that pollute the air, water, and soil, leaving an entire city impoverished and in ill health.
Will things change? If we look at the historical data, the answer is no. The glaring absence of a social contract has always prevented the city from functioning in a way that is beneficial to its citizens. No matter who has been mayor of East St. Louis, corruption has always been rampant, and the city has always been deep in debt. They don’t even have a city hall, as it was lost in a court settlement to pay for a bad debt. Furthermore, East St. Louis continues to be invisible: If you go to the website for St. Louis’s main newspaper, you will find archives of the papers of other nearby Illinois towns, but no archives of East St. Louis’s paper. If you’ve ever been to the Cahokia Mounds, you may have driven around it on the freeway, but you can’t see much of it from there.
Yet, while the city continues to be invisible and impoverished in most ways, there are others who are very much aware of its prime location across from Downtown St. Louis on the banks of the Mississippi. Some want to build hotels here that would house tourists visiting St. Louis and its casinos. What they seem to be overlooking though is the massive soil contamination, the area’s location in a floodplain, and the seedy and dangerous reputation of the city.
What would happen if upscale development began in this area? Would gentrification force existing residents into even greater poverty, or force them to find a new city to call home? Would the tax revenues from hotels pump much needed funds into the city and its government and help revitalize it? And if these hotels are not constructed, which seems more likely, how will things ever get better?
The thing is, no one really seems to care. No one goes to East St. Louis.The only things that draw people to this city are the Casino Queen gambling boat, which, while technically in East St. Louis, is actually located on the Mississippi river; and strip clubs, which are racially segregated. The city’s segregation and isolation only adds to its poverty: it can’t rely on business from people in nearby areas, nor on tourism, to keep its economy strong.
So did I ever go to East St. Louis? I did. One day last November, I took my conspicuously nice rental car, my ipod, my digital camera, and my best friend–in short, all of my most valuable possessions-and went to this condemned city. I was quite surprised by what I found. No one tried to carjack me, attack me, or shoot me, including the man who was selling newspapers who was only inches away from my car. Surprisingly, there were some large, nice houses. There was a new looking hospital. The school that I saw, from the outside, looked all right.
Other things were about what I expected: on most streets, I saw no people at all, and very few cars, and in the places where there were people, they walked somewhat aimlessly with no care to whether they were in the middle of the street or not. There were many abandoned and decrepit buildings, but nothing worse than what is common on the other side of the river. To be honest, I only stayed for about 15 minutes, because I didn’t have a map and I was afraid I would get lost, and I didn’t take any photos, because I felt it would have been rude, and because I obviously didn’t belong there. What I saw didn’t quite match up with what I later read, but I wasn’t there long, and I didn’t talk to anyone (I’m not exactly outgoing). Thus, the casual observer of East St. Louis, if one were actually to visit, may not have any idea how or why East St. Louis is in such bad shape.
One thing is for sure, though: in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, a city like East St. Louis should not be allowed to exist. And because most people know that we should not have third world cities in our first world country, they choose to ignore the problem, to let it be invisible.
