The Tornado-Ravaged Neighborhoods St. Louis Left Behind
Date Posted: August 5, 2025
Posted In: Ideas, White Papers,
From The New Republic: On May 16, a mile-wide tornado with winds up to 152 miles per hour ripped through the city of St. Louis, its worst damage leaving parts of the city’s already disinvested northern neighborhoods in rubble. Missouri’s only statue of Martin Luther King Jr. was toppled. Century-old trees were uprooted. Homes were cracked down the mortar between bricks; roofs collapsed. Three people at the 121-year-old Centennial Christian Church were caught unaware when the tornado touched down and collapsed the north chapel.
As it happened, people throughout the city were caught by surprise because St. Louis’s 60 outdoor warning sirens were not triggered. St. Louis’s emergency management chief, Sarah Russell, was in a workshop at the time, and failed to provide clear instructions to the Fire Department to give the warning. It wouldn’t have mattered; upon later inspection, city officials learned the button to trigger the warning system was not working.
Nature Collides With Disinvestment
Meanwhile, inside Centennial Christian Church, DeMarco K. Davidson, Metropolitan Congregations United executive director, was trapped under rubble, using his body to try to protect 78-year-old church member Sherril Jackson. He knew Patricia Penelton, who had been volunteering with people experiencing homelessness in the neighborhood, had been trying to close the church door before the collapse. Davidson tried calling 911. The call infuriatingly went to an automated message telling him if he was experiencing an emergency, to call 911. He called a string of people he knew: his sister, a fraternity brother who is a police officer, a minister friend who in turn called a city alderwoman—who in turn called various first responders.
Eventually, Davidson and Jackson were rescued. Penelton, along with four other St. Louisians across the city, died. Dozens of people were injured. Thousands of buildings were damaged or destroyed, with an estimated $1.6 billion in damage across the city.
“Hazardous Investments”
But in North St. Louis, an act of nature collided with city blocks that have been historically disinvested, redlined, and neglected. For weeks, people have stayed in tents at the front of their properties, bricks still strewn and fallen into the yard, waiting for help, unable to safely live in their homes, their loss made worse by poverty. Some who have spent the past many weeks distributing baby diapers, bottled water, and other basic necessities now worry that their neighborhoods have been left uniquely vulnerable to another, altogether unnatural sort of disaster: developers.
A drive through North St. Louis shows at least two kinds of damage. There are gorgeous, old brick buildings—some boarded up long ago. Payday loan shops are frequent. Some homes are toppled. In front of some, people guard fallen bricks, which can go for $270 a pallet, valuable material that belongs as much to the home as St. Louis’s history of well-built structures.
Some of it is irreplaceable, and not just the memories that get folded into a home. Many people in this neighborhood do not have or have lost their insurance.
In the days after the storm, NAACP St. Louis issued a report that tied historic redlining from the 1930s—which designated predominantly Black neighborhoods as “hazardous” investments—to modern insurance bias. Decades ago, color-coded maps labeled in red those neighborhoods that were deemed unsuitable for mortgages or insurance. Although this practice was outlawed by the 1968 Fair Housing Act, old-school redlining has been updated through other modern methods. A Missouri Department of Insurance study found race was the most predictive factor in determining a person’s insurance score today, and therefore their premium. Poor credit scores, which are also linked to race, can increase premiums by 78 percent.