Elma Ademovic | Staff Illustrator

When I tell fellow students that I’m from St. Louis, I often get a look of pity, followed by a game of 21 questions: crime-rates edition. Even better are the reactions when I say I went to school in Ferguson: “Isn’t that place crime-ridden?” and “I feel so bad for you,” or my personal favorite, “Ew, Fergu-Sh*t.” I hear students criticize St. Louis all the time. Whether making fun of the city as a whole or calling any neighborhood outside of Clayton “ghetto” or “dangerous,” students can be insensitive when it comes to describing the St. Louis area. However, these criticisms are often misguided, sheltered, and classist. If we take a deeper look into the St. Louis region, we can see that St. Louis might not be exactly what these students make it out to be. 

The first thing that students point to when discussing crime in St. Louis is the fact that for a time, St. Louis was ranked as having one of the highest homicide rates in the country. This homicide rate however, can be attributed to a statistical quirk: The area considered for this crime statistic only includes the inner city of St. Louis, which is about 62 square miles and has a population of 290,000 people. The greater St. Louis metropolitan area, including the county, has over 2 million people who are not included in the city’s homicide rate. This makes online statistics misleading, especially when other cities like Chicago, Houston, and Los Angeles include suburban populations in their counts, diluting their homicide rates. While crime stats may look scary, they don’t represent the reality of what it’s like living here. 

Even after debunking the common criticisms students have about St. Louis, negative attitudes about the city may still persist. At WashU, affluence comes face-to-face with poverty. Twenty-two percent of students here are part of the top 1% of median family income, while the poverty rate in the surrounding area of St. Louis is 18.5%. This poverty that students encounter may cause them to turn their noses up, but the conditions of St. Louis are due to a deep history that must be understood, not judged. 

In 1877, St. Louis split in two, making St. Louis City and St. Louis County two separate government entities. This is known as the “Great Divorce” and consequently created drastic economic differences between the city and the county. These economic differences were then exacerbated by the intentional segregation of the region via redlining policies that aimed to prevent Black St. Louisans from living in white neighborhoods.

The best example of this is only one mile off campus. The Delmar Divide is an invisible line separating the wealthy and white area south of Delmar from the poor and Black area north of Delmar. This intentional separation of neighborhoods has led to stark economic differences you can see by just walking one block over. Multi-million dollar mansions and bustling streets filled with restaurants coincide with abandoned buildings and food deserts. The poverty surrounding campus, poverty in which students point their judgmental finger, are a direct result of these racist policies. To dismiss the poverty and struggle of St. Louis as some sort of moral or personal failure trivializes the long history this city has faced. 

It may be hard to impress students coming from cities with gorgeous skylines and glamorous downtown streets, but St. Louis has so much to offer. Free attractions, large-scale greenspaces, and developing nightlife can be found all over the STL area, not far from WashU. Students look down on the abandoned buildings and empty streets they see around the city and don’t take time to engage with all that the city is. 

Whether you love every last museum and restaurant that lines the streets of St. Louis or think that it’s a sad excuse for a city, one thing is true for all of us: we chose to be here. When you commit to a college, you commit to live in the city that it resides in, and choosing to live in a state of sheltered privilege won’t make your college experience nearly as fulfilling. St. Louis remains resilient despite its history. Spend less time making snide comments about the city you live in and more time appreciating the fact that after decades of struggle, St. Louis continues to push forward and be a great place for all of us to live.