The Tornado-Ravaged Neighborhoods St. Louis Left Behind

At this point, though, people are tired, Higgins tells me. North St. Louis was already experiencing an unemployment crisis, a housing insecurity crisis, a fentanyl crisis. People in North St. Louis heard about the rapid response to restore Forest Park, an urban space larger than Central Park. With people in North St. Louis still living in their cars and suffering in the heat, she can’t help but wonder why help has been so slow to arrive.

“People call us a brick city, and a lot of developers want to move Black, poor people out of this area so they can buy it cheap and basically build another downtown, another Central West End, another business area,” she says, adding more pointedly, “If they starve our people up here, we’ll eat crumbs and they can displace us.”

Her view of the city’s response is tangled with mistrust of developers. Those suspicions are fueled, in part, by the recent mayoral campaign in which former Mayor Tishaura Jones, whom Higgins calls a “Northside baby,” was ousted by Spencer just weeks before the tornado. Spencer ran with financial backing from developer Bob Clark’s Clayco, which donated $111,330.25 to Spencer’s PAC—the amount he said his firm, Clayco, spent on a redevelopment bid rejected by the former Mayor Jones’s office. A construction company gave $10,000 to Spencer; real estate companies gave thousands; another Clayco subsidiary, Lamar Johnson Collaborative, gave $50,000 in March. Spencer (whose office did not respond to multiple requests for comment) out-fundraised and outspent Jones this spring. Jones, who defeated Spencer in 2021’s mayoral race, had campaigned on restoring underserved areas like North St. Louis; her coffers were not entirely free of architecture and builders’ dollars either.