Charles home of Pat and Lisa Petroff, who were hosting a neighborhood watch gathering of “the residents of a recently built suburban subdivision.” To understand the forces that drove this population further and further north, Suarez visited the St. Louis County and, in recent decades, into St.

Louis and in the first-ring suburbs such as Wellston began to lose their white population, which was moving further into North St. They didn’t want the big brick bungalows.Įventually, neighborhoods in North St. And you could buy these houses for twenty thousand dollars, eighteen thousand dollars. You had two bathrooms, three bedrooms, it was different. We bought our first home on the GI Bill, that’s the way everyone was going then. There was lot of old real estate in the city, and the new subdivisions was where the young people wanted to go. So sure, there were houses, but they were not the houses that the young people would have wanted. The city was really emptying out quickly at that time. So they all moved, and bought homes out in the county. People our age at that time all wanted to buy houses, and there just weren’t any houses available in the city of St.

Louisan Charles Manelli describes the forces that prompted whites to leave the City of St. Charles County and the current (African American) residents of the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood (immediately adjacent to Wellston). Louis tells a familiar story, contrasting as it does former (white) residents of the City who now live in St. To better understand what happened to the old neighborhood, Suarez visited cities across the United States and interviewed both those who left the old neighborhood (largely white Americans) and those who live in those neighborhoods today (primarily racial minorities). What emerges is a tale tinged with racial politics.

The old neighborhood, Suarez observes, was populated largely (sometimes entirely) by whites, and the subsequent ghettos found today are populated by African Americans and other racial minorities. bill, which encouraged white Americans to purchase new homes in the suburbs and devastating real estate practices such as racial redlining and blockbusting.īut Suarez also considers the profound role that race played in the decimation of the old neighborhood. In his survey of numerous American cities, Suarez explores the institutional and societal pressures that contributed to the decline of the old neighborhood: the rise of automobile culture the G.I. Suarez’s book looks at the phenomenon of the “old neighborhood” – once-bustling, tight-knit urban communities that are now ghettos or that have been largely abandoned. Last week, I introduced Ray Suarez’s 1999 book, The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966-1999.

The Old Neighborhood by Ray Suarez