Southern Illinois and East St. Louis or The donut and the hole
In our first in the community experience weekend in our Leadership St. Louis year we visited and heard from leaders from south western Illinois, just across the the river from St. Louis. We heard two stories.
The first trumpeting the tremendous growth of the area - nurtured in large part by the cooperation between various jurisdictions, particularly Madison and St. Clair counties. This was capped by a presentation about East St. Louis which was passionately portrayed it as an ideal location ripe for economic development. That presentation had me ready to move in for the great views of St. Louis from the high end (but yet to be built or even planned) condos. These presentations had me worried that soon the Illinois tail would be wagging the St. Louis dog.
The second was by individuals working in the East St. Louis area with its large number of poor and marginalized residents. These folks told the well know story of East St. Louis. Of how the area’s major industrial employers incorporated their own company towns to avoid paying taxes to support East St. Louis and its infrastructure. That that lack of support made the town focus on residential and entertainment - which during the post WW II boom seemed good enough. However, with the exodus of manufacturing jobs from this country in general and the southern Illinois river bottom in particular, East St. Louis, and its surrounding communities lost their status, their jobs, and their residents. As the years went on they fell further and further into disrepair and, for some at least, ill repute.
East St. Louis was described as the hole in the donut. That little of the economic boom we heard about in Madison, St. Clair, and the other surrounding counties actually got to East St. Louis. This is not universally true. For example, in the following class discussions it was pointed out that public transportation carried many East St. Louis residents to the new warehouse jobs in the east side. But on the whole the area is rather sad. For all of the impassioned presentation about East St. Louis the list of city tasks they shared with our class were simple and practical - getting street signs on every corner, cleaning up vacant gas stations, …
When the counties spoke of their successes they said that they were the result of cooperation between the small towns that make up their communities. It was of sharing and of joining together in common purpose. There are undoubtedly a legion of reasons why East St. Louis is the hole. One serious and obvious underlying cause for this is the historic lack of cooperation and sharing between it and the other southern Illinois communities. Without that cooperation success and prosperity are not widely shared to the detriment of the whole region. While I understand those as historic reasons - what it the excuse for this today?