In St. Louis, Mo., crumbling neighbor- hoods in need of city government funding don't necessarily get the money they need to survive. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch uncovered this and more. For more de- tails turn to p. 2 Suspicions arose last summer when the reporters found that some city wards had a much higher concentration of abandoned lots and buildings than oth- ers. In St. Louis, Mo., crumbling neighborhoods in need of city gov- ernment funding don't necessarily get the money they need to survive.
That's what St. Louis Post Dispatch reporters Phil Linsalata, Tim Novak, and George Landau found in their investigation of city government's utilization of block grant money from the department of Housing and Urban Development. Suspicions arose last summer when the reporters found that some city wards had a much higher con- centration of abandoned lots and buildings than others. This led them to examine the city's use their annual $20 million in block grant money, which the city uses to help neighborhoods in trouble.
"We didn't know why certain areas had high concentrations of abandoned lots and buildings while others had low ones," Linsalata said. "We suspected the city had under- taken an unspoken urban policy of triage - dividing neighborhoods into healthy areas, areas that were saveable but at risk, and terminal neighbor- hoods that were so distressed they were not worth putting money into." The reporters first step was to obtain the city's Grantee Performance Report - a report required by HUD.
Th activity summary in the GPR to how much each program received but didn't tell what each program's unction was, or how much was spent, Linsalata said. To answer those questions, according to Linsalata, reporters requested work program contracts under the Missouri Open Records Act. After three weeks of negotia- tion, the city agreed to release the GPR and all the work program con- tracts - on paper.
Stacks of the report and programs were sent to a local printer who copied them for the Post Dispatch. "When we approached the city for the GPR and work program con- tracts, they intially wanted to charge for everything from copying fees to time needed to search for the rec- ords," Landau said. According to Landau, the GPR as not available on nine-track magnetic tape so Linsalata and Novak spent three weeks entering informa- tion from the paper reports into a database they created in FoxPro.
Landau said that the city pre- pares the records and are required to provide copies for HUD. "HUD is not required to keep the records for more than a few years, he said." Later they used Atlas GIS to map where block grant funds were spent in each ward. The end result showed that city administrators' claims were misleading. "The city claimed that 45 per- cent of the block grant funding went to housing," Linsalata said.
"When we looked at it most of the money was spent fixing broken gutters and giving residents paint to repaint their omes. In 1990, 17 percent of the funding was actually spent on devel- oping homes for sale or rent; build- ing new homes or renovating old ones. It blew away the city adminis- trators myths." "Neighborhoods are revived with substantial renovation and con- struction not quick fix-ups like new paint and gutters," Linsalata added.
The reporters also found: That neighborhoods most in need of funding have received little block grant money for housing rede- velopment or renovation. Block grant money that was improperly used to supply car phones for an agency run by the mayor's niece, which coordinates city wide flower distribution, recycling pro- grams and city-wide cleanups. A corporation, run by a for- mer city official, received more than $80,000 in block grant money to teach homeowners to do minor re- pairs and train construction workers.
The official hasn't held any home repair training classes in one year, and some construction worker train- ees have been in the program for eight years. City adminstrators countered that the Post Dispatch findings were seriously flawed because they exam- ined spending and not what was budgeted. Those adminstrators said that budgeting showed the city's intent to improve those neighborhoods. The reporters also discovered that renovated homes were sold in prosperous neighborhoods, while they were leased in the poorer St.
Louis neighborhoods. "Why should poorer neigh- borhoods not have the benefits of 'for sale' housing?" Linsalata said.