Housing

St. Louis passed legal segregation in 1916 via ordinance but also used other means to segregate Blacks from Whites (Primm, 1981). For instance, agreements were written among property owners with the expressed purpose of restricting property ownership to Whites (Shelley v. Kraemer, 1948). Black St. Louisan John D. Shelley moved into a home near the Ville and his White neighbor tried to prevent him due to these restrictive covenants (Rivas, 2019). The U.S. Supreme Court ruled restrictive covenants unconstitutional in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948). Segregation still continued, however. A real estate agent often would be expelled from the real estate membership company for selling a house to a Black owner, just one example how segregation continued (Greene et al., 1993). 

In addition to mandated segregation and restrictive racial covenants, Blacks in St. Louis were victims of disinvestment and other forms of oppression (Green et al., 2016; Johnson, 2020; Lipsitz, 2015b). Merriam-Webster dictionary defines oppression as, “unjust or cruel exercise of authority or power” (Definition 1). One of those practices was redlining. Redlining is a legal practice that has a profound impact on communities of color to this day (Brown, 2021). The practice started with the Federal Housing and Lending Corporation (HOLC) rating neighborhoods based on census data. The neighborhoods with the most funding were White, where HOLC deemed giving money was “low risk” (Jackson, 1985). Jackson (1985) explains that red areas, or areas with Black people, were deemed “high risk” and denied funding. Red areas were denied bank loans to help improve properties, which hurt Black Americans’ abilities to fix and upkeep properties (Brown, 2021; Johnson, 2020; Rothstein, 2017). Black areas in St. Louis, such as the Ville, were all redlined (Jackson, 1985; Gordon, 2009; Rothstein, 2017). Redlined areas meant less money given to the area for upkeep and many of those houses would then decline in value, reducing the amount of money the seller would be able to get for their home (Faber, 2021; Imbroscio, 2021; Lipsitz, 2007a; R.A. Williams, 2020).