Poll: What Are Your Two Preferred Methods To Deposit A Check Into Your Checking Or Savings Account?

Banking has changed throughout the years, changing cities along the way. Every so often a new technology has come along that has changed the way we bank which go to thinking about methods of depositing manual checks (vs direct deposit of paychecks). The weekly poll question for this week is: You’ve got a check to deposit into your checking or savings account, pick your two preferred methods.

The poll is to the right, the answers provided will appear in random order for everyone. I’m not listing them here so the order doesn’t influence the outcome. Feel free to discuss in the comments.

— Steve Patterson

Poll: Where Do You Live?

The poll this week is very straightforward, I simply want to know where you reside.  Here is the list of options:

• St. Louis (North)
• St. Louis (Central Corridor)
• St. Louis (South)
• St. Louis County (North)
• St. Louis County (Central/West)
• St. Louis County (South)
• St. Clair County, IL
• Madison County, IL
• St. Charles County, MO
• Jefferson County, MO
• Illinois (not St. Clair or Madison counties)
• Missouri (not St. Louis city; St. Louis, St. Charles, or Jefferson counties)
• US Midwest, except Missouri & Illinois
• US Northeast
• US Southeast
• US Southwest
• US West/Northwest
• North America, NOT the United States
• Elsewhere in the world

The poll is in the right sidebar, mobile users need to select the desktop layout from the bottom of the mobile screen (sorry, doesn’t show within Facebook).  I look forward to seeing the results.

— Steve Patterson

Poll: Oppose or Support St. Louis Marrying 4 Same-Sex Couples on June 25th

Thursday morning I decided the poll I had planned to run this week will have to wait until next week. Late Wednesday St. Louis officials married four same-sex couples despite Missouri’s 2004 constitutional ban.

Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster sued the city of St. Louis on Thursday morning, seeking and getting an injunction to stop the city from issuing more same-sex marriage licenses. (stltoday)

The four marriages occurred on the same day a U.S. appeals court struct down Utah’s ban and a federal district judge tossed Indiana’s ban.

Before you scroll down to the comments to complain this has nothing to do with urban planning let me say it has everything to do with public policy, and St. Louis.

In a reader poll last year more than half indicated Missouri should wait on same-sex marriage until forced otherwise by the courts. In February the ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging Missouri’s ban.

Ok, so the poll is in the right sidebar (desktop layout) and the comments are open.

— Steve Patterson

Poll: Should the St. Louis Treasurer Suspend Parking Meter Enforcement During Downtown Events?

The following letter to the editor ran recently in the Post-Dispatch:

My wife, who is a cancer survivor, attended the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure walk on Saturday. We parked on the street at 17th and Locust to join the event. No one paid the meter;  we were the last space on the block, so we assumed the city waived parking fees.

Two hours later, we arrived back at the car and saw every car was ticketed. The city and Mayor Slay should be ashamed! Attila the Hun had better PR techniques. When 30,000-plus people come to downtown for such a worthwhile event, all meters in the area should be free for the morning hours.

Tom Carpenter  •  Shiloh

This prompted a response from Treasurer Tishaura Jones:

The St. Louis City treasurer issued a statement on Tuesday addressing parking meter enforcement during Saturday’s Susan G. Komen St. Louis Race for the Cure. Some people were ticketed during the race, and this is the first year parking meters were enforced since the office decided in July to start charging for metered parking on Saturdays.

Treasurer Tishaura O. Jones defended the meter enforcement, praising the race and the other events held downtown, and pointing out that if they offered free metered parking for one event they would have to offer it to everyone. (stltoday)

The poll this week asks if you think the St. Louis treasurer should suspend parking meter enforcement during downtown events. Parking meters are enforced Monday-Saturday, no charge on Sunday. The poll is in the right sidebar.

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Guest Post: Why It Takes More Than Changing Beliefs To End Racial Inequality

The following is a guest post by Clarissa Hayward:

“In Missouri, Race Complicates a Transfer to Better Schools.” That’s how the headline read last summer when the New York Times ran an article on the Missouri school transfer law that’s been in the news again these past few weeks.

State legislators have tried to amend the law, which allows students in disaccredited districts—this past year, Normandy, Riverview Gardens, and Kansas City—to transfer to public schools in accredited districts. Sending districts must pay tuition costs for the transfer, an expenditure that severely taxes these already-struggling systems. Last month the state Board of Education voted to lapse the Normandy District, which after a year of financing transfers, was near bankruptcy.

Of course, as the Times headline suggests, racial inequalities play an important role in the controversy. All three sending districts are majority African-American, as is St. Louis, which was at the center of the Turner v. Clayton case that first brought the transfer law to the State Supreme Court. Receiving districts are (as is Clayton) majority white.

Hence news coverage of the school transfer issues typically features comments from angry and anxious parents, white and black alike. Are white parents racists, one common worry is, who want to exclude transfer students because they’re African-American? In short, these stories suggest that race “complicates” the law because of what people believe, think, and say about race.

In a city with a long and storied history of racial segregation and racial inequality, the suggestion is that misguided ideas are the root of the problem. If only people would change their beliefs and their attitudes about race, the hope seems to be, racial justice will follow.

But it isn’t that easy. New beliefs alone cannot overcome practices that are deeply embedded in the institutions and the physical spaces in which St. Louisans live their daily lives.

I came to this conclusion while conducting research for my most recent book, How Americans Make Race. Let me explain with an example that is not from the last few weeks, but from the early part of the last century.

In the 1940s, dominant beliefs about race in this country changed radically. This was partly because scientists at the time came to reject the nineteenth century understanding of race as a biological fact. It was also because racial hierarchy came to seem repugnant to many white Americans, as they began to associate racism with Naziism.

But these new racial attitudes and beliefs didn’t obliterate racial inequality. They didn’t radically alter how we practice and live race in the United States. Why not?

Because when people construct identities—including racial identities—they don’t just use language and ideas. They also use institutions, like laws and rules and policies. And they use material forms, like the urban and suburban spaces that were built in and around St. Louis and other American metropolitan areas over the course of the twentieth century.

Here’s a concrete example of an institution that helped to construct race in St. Louis and other American cities: the underwriting guidelines created by the Federal Housing Administration starting in the 1930s. As many readers will recall, the FHA was established during the New Deal era—so in other words before mid-century changes in dominant racial beliefs—in order to help homebuyers by providing government-backed mortgages.

These underwriting standards were supposed to help the government identify which buyers and which properties would make good investments. But in fact, they did much more. They institutionalized pre-1940 racial beliefs by defining African-American buyers as an investment risk, and by identifying the exclusion of blacks from a neighborhood as a sign of its economic health and stability.

The historian Kenneth Jackson illustrates with an example from St. Louis. Government studies conducted by the Homeowners Loan Corporation in 1937 and 1940 gave the very highest ratings in the metro area to Ladue. Appraisers emphasized that Ladue was “highly restricted”—in other words, that racial deed restrictions prevented African-Americans and other minority groups from buying or owning houses there. They emphasized, in their words, that Ladue was not home to “a single foreigner or negro.”

The very few parts of St. Louis County that received the lowest ratings—signaling the highest investment risk, and prompting the FHA to avoid backing mortgages—were African-American.

In St. Louis city, the same racial patterns prevailed. Colin Gordon, in his masterful Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City, notes that the only two areas in St. Louis to receive the highest rating in 1940 were “a few blocks on the County border west of Forest Park and a horseshoe of homes in the City’s still lightly and recently developed… southwest corner—both of which enjoyed the protection of restrictive deed covenants far removed from the contested neighborhoods of north St. Louis.”

Between 1934 and 1960 the federal government pumped more than $550 million in state-backed mortgages into homes in St. Louis County, investing almost $800 per capita. It spent just $94 million, or about $125 per capita, in St. Louis city.

The example makes clear why a change in beliefs is never enough. Imagine a white St. Louisan in the 1950s. Imagine that this particular individual is persuaded by the moral and scientific critiques of old racial ideas, but that she also wants to buy a house and needs an FHA mortgage to do so.

This would-be home buyer has to act as if she believes the old racial stories if she wants to qualify for an FHA mortgage. If she wants a government-backed loan, in other words, she needs to buy in a racially exclusive white neighborhood. She needs to do so even if she does not prefer or endorse racial residential segregation.

Of course, after the civil rights victories of the late 1960s, the U.S. government no longer participates in or condones racial residential segregation. So what does this example have to do with St. Louis today?

The larger point is that real racial justice, today like in 1950,  requires more than new racial attitudes and new racial beliefs. It requires new institutions, and it requires new ways of organizing urban and suburban space.

Think of the many local jurisdictions that are at the heart of the school transfer case. These are institutions that have a tremendous power to shape racial inequality. They do at least as much work in maintaining racial hierarchy in metropolitan St. Louis as do racist ideas and racist attitudes.

That’s why many political experts recommend centralizing important aspects of urban governance, such as schooling, to the metropolitan or even to the regional level. Others emphasize changing tax policies or the way we organize local elections.

Some recommend changing the physical spaces of our cities and suburbs, for example by encouraging the construction of affordable housing alongside market-rate units.

These are hotly contested proposals, which may or may not work for St. Louis and the St. Louis suburbs. But they have the virtue of raising important questions about how best to organize our urban institutions and spaces.

These are the kinds of questions we must grapple with, since changing racial beliefs and attitudes, by itself, won’t change racial injustice.

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Clarissa Hayward is a political scientist on the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis. Her most recent book, How Americans Make Race, is in stock at Subterranean Books on the Delmar Loop and can be purchased from the publisher, Left Bank Books, Powell’s, and other online booksellers. You can follow her on Twitter @ClarissaHayward.