According to a survey paid for by the Downtown St. Louis Partnership and reported today by the Post-Dispatch, “those living [downtown] are younger, richer and better educated than the average St. Louisan.”
Just one problem: the mail survey doesn’t include downtown’s largest population: the poor and the homeless.
“Developers say the number of young adults moving to downtown validates their investments,” reports the Post. Self-validation is a dangerous thing when it involves public money.
The Post’s articles offers a few clues to why the survey’s results differ from what anyone who’s spent any time downtown has surely observed: there are more homeless people than yuppies downtown.
- The survey was sent in late summer to 5,000 downtown residents (that is, people with known addresses)
- Only 14.5% of those people bothered responding
- Of those 727 residents who did respond, 46.3% were between the ages of 25 and 34
- Only about 7% of respondents said they had children (maybe those with children were too busy to respond)
- Of the respondents, 146 had dogs and only 53 had kids
Though it will probably never show up on any Downtown Partnership survey, one of the largest populations downtown, without a doubt, is the homeless.
Any given day, a downtown visitor is more likely to see homeless men and women than they are groups of these mysterious 25-34 year-old hipsters the Post writes so much about.
Despite making up such a large population downtown, very little in comparison has been spent to address this homeless downtown population. In fact, many resources have been spent to sweep them away.
In 2004 more than a dozen homeless persons, many of them veterans, filed a federal lawsuit complaining that the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department has a policy of attempting to drive the homeless from downtown St. Louis and telling them downtown is “off limits” to them.
The suit, filed with the assistance of the ACLU, alleged that St. Louis police officers have routinely arrested the homeless without any suspicion they have committed crimes, have thrown fireworks at them to get them to move from a public park, have taken the homeless to remote areas and dumped them, have taken their food, medication, driver’s licenses and insurance cards, have made them engage in forced labor prior to ever seeing a judge, and have generally attempted to remove the homeless from downtown, particularly before major events.
The word “homeless” does not appear one time in the Post’s story about the face of downtown.
