Political corruption, minimal policing and firefighting resources, limited transportation, public works deficiencies and condemned buildings. It’s not the backdrop for a prime-time cop show – this is a city three hours from Champaign.
Over the past 50 years, East St. Louis, Ill., has developed a reputation as a failing city ravaged by poverty and crime.
In fact, East St. Louis is not an urban ghetto and is not an isolated case, but rather part of a rapidly growing trend in the U.S.
“We tend to think of poverty and struggle as being isolated in urban areas, but it is now in the suburbs as well, and it is spreading,” says Jennifer Hamer, the author of “Abandoned in the Heartland” (University of California Press).
Hamer, a professor of African American studies, calls East St. Louis “a canary in a minefield.”
The city’s problems are effects of what Hamer calls “systematic abandonment.”
This phenomenon resulted from industry leaving the city, which was dependent upon it for jobs and tax revenue. East St. Louis was a prosperous industrial city with prime riverfront property until the manufacturers left in the 1950s and 1960s to avoid paying high union labor costs and property taxes, Hamer said.
When manufacturers left and took resources needed to maintain infrastructure, many of its citizens left, too. In 1960, East St. Louis had a population of 82,000; today it is home to fewer than 30,000.
The first people to leave were those affluent and mobile enough to find a new hometown that could provide them with the necessities of life, leaving the poorer segment of the population, primarily African Americans. In 2000, African Americans made up 98 percent of the city, compared with 45 percent in 1960.
Residents who stayed were left to struggle to find the means to maintain a decent quality of life without sustainable wages, health care or even waste disposal.
“Abandoned in the Heartland” takes a sociological approach to the challenges, emotions, roles and values of East St. Louis residents. Hamer examines these as well as historical conditions, changes in demographics, and the city’s circumstances within a broader political context by way of anecdotes from East St. Louis residents, whose own voices can be heard discussing the everyday issues they face, from parenting to police discrimination.
Hamer acknowledges that there is a tendency to focus on the negatives and pinpoints steps that can be taken to remedy some of the city’s difficulties, citing education, living wages with benefits, and rebuilding of infrastructure as crucial for East St. Louis and similar-city suburbs such as Cincinnati, Cleveland and Gary, Ind.
“There is nothing romantic about being poor or working class,” Hamer says. “Those living in East St. Louis are people who want the same basic things as everyone else: education, jobs, quality housing, to feel proud of their community, to be socioeconomically mobile and to reach that American dream.”
