The house at 4635 North Market Street, on St. Louis’ near northside, was built in the 1890s. Like many of the north St. Louis homes of this vintage, 4635 North Market was a simple yet substantial structure: two stories, brick from the foundation up, skylighting on the second floor. The house and its immediate neighbors were each built close to one property line of long, narrow lots (25 feet wide, 100 feet deep) that ended with a small garage on the alley.¹ 4635 North Market stands in the Greater Ville, one of a number of older residential neighborhoods in an...

The politics of property and race rest not just on the motives of local interests but also on the discriminatory opportunities opened by fragmented local governance. State and local law regarding incorporation, annexation, and consolidation vary wildly—but in most settings have made it easy to incorporate new localities on the City’s fringes.¹ Beginning in the late nineteenth century, new municipalities, widely celebrated as a harbinger of economic growth and political self-determination, not only bounded “the city” but also began competing with it (and each other) for investment in real estate and commercial development. “By the early twentieth century suburbanites...

The history of 4635 North Market, and of greater St. Louis, is bound up in a tangle of local, state, and federal policies that explicitly and decisively sorted the City’s growing population by race. These policies yielded both an intense concentration of African Americans in certain wards or neighborhoods of St. Louis itself and a virtually unbreachable wall between the City and its suburbs. The isolation of African Americans on St. Louis’ near northside was accomplished and enforced in a variety of ways; some private and public strategies of exclusion overlapped and reinforced one another, others were cobbled together as...

The folly of fragmented governance and home rule is most evident in local control over zoning. Local governments interested in maintaining property values and in funding local services by taxing those properties have every incentive to exclude the poor and compete for the rich—to sort the population by race and class in such a way as to maximize tax returns and minimize other demands on the public purse. “At the edge of metropolitan regions,” Myron Orfield concludes, “developing communities engage in as restrictive and as low-density a pattern of land-use as their economic circumstances will bear.” Zoning, in other...

The net effect of political fragmentation, real estate restrictions, and exclusionary zoning was the virtual devastation of north and central St. Louis. City planners began taking stock of these conditions (substandard housing, abandoned commercial property, aging infrastructure) as early as World War I, but all that really changed over the following decades were the terms—obsolescence, decadence, blight, ghettoization, decay—used to label them. While midcentury urban interests disagreed over the causes of “blight,” they had little trouble reaching a consensus that a cure was beyond the reach of either private investors or the municipal police power.

The prescription, in...

A half-century of urban renewal and redevelopment programs, as I traced in the last chapter, not only failed to stem the decline of central St. Louis but pointedly avoided the very neighborhoods in which that decline was most palpable. This was a complex failure—a tangle of good intentions and bad policy, steep challenges and shallow resources. The original postwar concern for substandard living conditions was increasingly distracted by redevelopment schemes that put economic development ahead of residential renewal and the central business district ahead of troubled neighborhoods. In turn, commercial and residential redevelopment projects alike failed to spur the...

Today, 4635 North Market—vacated, abandoned, razed, and unrenewed—is a poignant monument to the history of the modern American city. At its construction in the 1890s, 4635 North Market was part of a broad swath of middle- and working-class housing that stretched across St. Louis from the western edge of downtown to the eastern edge of St. Louis County. Over the subsequent decades, these neighborhoods were transformed from within and without. Cycles of boom and bust (punctuated by two world wars and the Great Depression) culminated in a drawn-out pattern of deindustrialization, which robbed the near northside of its...