Impacted Renters Fund Debacle and Park Sale Show Who Matters to City Leaders

Recent reports that the city’s “impacted renters fund” has remained totally nonfunctional for more than a year after its well-publicized passage speak volumes about the city government and local officials’ priorities. Elected officials touted the fund as a way to help renters being evicted from subpar housing, because the city has condemned the buildings in which they live. Later, it was also given more money to assist tornado victims. In reality, the legislation that launched the program and provided it with additional resources was almost entirely performative. While city voters may have thought that local officials were taking steps to ease the burdens faced by people who have lost their housing due to landlords’ negligence, it simply wasn’t happening.

This is an issue that festered for well over a year, meaning that two different mayors didn’t care enough to get the program operational. Neither did the members of the Board of Aldermen who voted for its passage. This comes despite media attention at the time of the program’s passage, as well as after being granted additional tornado-related funding. Until it became news that the program only existed on paper, nobody in the city government seems to have cared about whether it was real. Only public embarrassment seems to have motivated the city to take action. Meanwhile, developers are being given virtually anything they request from the city and SLDC. Mayor Spencer has gone through great lengths to tell the business community that St. Louis is “open for business” and won’t do things like joining our suburban neighbors in passing a moratorium on massive data centers. It sends a stark message that local officials care greatly about wealthy individuals, many of whom don’t live in the city. City residents facing actual hardship? Not so much.

The city has recently gone so far as to sell a public park, in violation of the city charter, while simultaneously failing to lift a finger to this program that helps the less fortunate functional. It is a clear example of the way that the wealthy in our society live with obscene amounts of privilege and are able to essentially ignore most laws. In the case of Interco Plaza’s sale, you can clearly see how elected officials will go above and beyond to enable the wealthy, while ignoring the law. The law that they are sworn to uphold as elected officials. Many aldermen weren’t shy about not caring about the city charter, with Ald. Rasheen Aldridge stating to the press that “I don’t legislate on getting sued. I just legislate on what I think is right,” said Aldridge. Clearly, he doesn’t think that the city charter really matters. He said so. What matters is what a major real estate firm wants to do in his ward. While some aldermen have admonished their colleagues for acting in violation of the city charter, most were happy to vote for the sale.

Thankfully, local reporting on the moribund assistance fund has illuminated the problem. We are now told that the impacted tenants program will be made functional, but that doesn’t erase the harm done by well over a year of inaction. How many families faced eviction, only to find the city’s promised aid was nowhere to be found? How many tornado victims had to futilely seek this assistance, before it became a news story? While some aldermen have now raised the prospect of city officials being held accountable, many families for whom the time when the assistance would have mattered is long past.

The whole episode serves as another example of how lazy our city officials have become. They care very deeply that you think they are working hard to improve our community. They don’t seem to care about actually helping people. What matters are the optics. In a time when discussions about Democratic Party politics often feature talk of how the party has become overwhelmingly performative and empty of actual substance, episodes like this show the issue is not one that only concerns our federal officials. Our local officials are just as disinterested in working to improve the fortunes of working class voters. In reality, even when the fund is made functional, it won’t fix the underlying issue: we don’t have enough housing that is affordable to people below 50% of the Area Median Income (AMI). The overwhelming majority of people don’t choose to live in housing that should be condemned. That’s not usually their preference. They do so because the market has failed to provide habitable housing that they can afford. Just like middle-class families, lower-income people also try to stretch their dollars and get the best deal possible. For many, there simply aren’t any good deals on the table. Their options are limited to housing that many would refuse to occupy. They live in substandard housing due to being exploited by slumlords. At the same time, the city regularly touts the fact that some units in upcoming developments will be affordable to people at 80% of AMI, while almost never announcing units that will be affordable to those below 50% AMI. This means that the city is continuing to ignore residents on the bottom half of the income ladder, while it is also forcing them into the streets for the crime of being poor. 

In turn, this means that more people are living on the streets. People like those who were living in Interco Plaza, prior to the encampnment’s eviction. That means that developers and downtown businesses will continue to complain about the number of unhoused individuals in the neighborhoods containing their investments. It’s a cycle that nobody seems to show much interest in breaking, despite the fact that it has continued for generations. It is truly a shame that city officials care so little about people who are being taken advantage of by unscrupulous landlords who have abdicated their responsibility to upkeep their properties. Unfortunately, that’s par for the course.