Residents of St. Louis neighborhoods have been getting phone calls.
The calls used to be local or sometimes out-of-state, but now, they appear to come from call centers in other countries, said Michelle Witthaus, a resident of south St. Louis.
The callers all have one thing in common: they want to buy up property.
Witthaus works as a policy design and activation lead for a St. Louis-based nonprofit called Invest STL. The group recently piloted a program called “Rooted: Cultivating Black Wealth in Place,” which aims to help long-term Black residents in St. Louis build wealth and stay in the neighborhoods they already live in.
Residents living in the “Rooted” neighborhoods — being West End and Visitation Park — are receiving those calls on a daily basis, too.
The calls are one of many early signs of gentrification, Witthaus said.
“A lot of outside investors come into the neighborhood, they start buying stuff up, and they start flipping properties … They're making pretty decent to extreme profits…” Witthaus said. “Meanwhile, the people who have been there for a long time are not really the ones that are seeing those economic gains, and if people are going to benefit from the neighborhood, we want the people who have been in the neighborhood to be included.”
Dara Eskridge, the chief executive officer of Invest STL who has family roots in the West End and Visitation Park neighborhoods, said she’s always known it as a Black community. While working in the neighborhood, Eskridge described how residents — planted there for generations — feel the neighborhood is changing and “may not be for us anymore.”
“As we've been working in this neighborhood for almost five years now, partnering with residents and community organizations here and hearing their concerns … that's what put us on the path of creating Rooted,” Eskridge said.
Current residents note a changing landscape, too.
David Wingo, who has lived in the neighborhood since he was born in 1970, said what used to be a neighborhood full of homeowners now includes “random people that rent.”
“I can see the decline in the houses. The neighborhood's families are not where they were … What was once a full block of residents, you know, it's like half a block…” Wingo said. “You don't know who you live next to. Back in the day, you would know every person that stayed on your block.”
Early signs of gentrification include an influx of different racial and socioeconomic groups, major development and renovation, and less vacancy, Witthaus said.
Individuals living outside the neighborhoods may buy a home and “wait for the neighborhood to flip,” eventually making a profit, Witthaus said.
However, private equity firms, or investment companies, bought about 44% of flipped single-family homes on the market in 2023, the Washington Times reported.
“To think that a corporation could own that much of the market and then be able to influence rental costs for like the entire city … is insane,” Witthaus said.
Additionally, disparities exist for Black St. Louis residents trying to acquire homes.
Nearly eight times as many home loan originations are available for white residents versus Black residents per capita, according to the St. Louis government’s website. Additionally, banks originate fewer home loans to residents looking to buy and rehabilitate properties in majority-Black neighborhoods.
Disparities in home loan availability, compounded by a grueling history of gentrification, make buying a home even more complicated as housing prices in St. Louis climb.
From 2019 to 2024, the average price of a single-family home in St. Louis rose from about $190,000 to $235,000, according to St. Louis Realtors. For townhomes, the price has risen from just over $160,000 to $210,000.
Owning a home is a crucial way to build wealth.
Monthly mortgage payments can help homeowners build a net worth about 40 times higher than that of a renter, according to a National Association of REALTORS study.
The price of Wingo’s house, which has been in his family for two generations, has climbed to ten times its original value.
“My mom bought this house that I live in now back in 1952; it's paid for by 1962,” Wingo said. “I think they only paid like $13,000 for it. Right now, the value is like $130,000.”
Black homeowners, however, see reduced wealth gains compared to white, Asian and Hispanic homeowners.
After 10 years of owning a home, white homeowners will have gained about $23,000 more than Black homeowners, the study said.
“I think white Americans have a significant head start on property ownership in this country,” Witthaus said, “and having that significant head start has allowed many white families to build equity, so homes and significant profit pass on to future generations … Black Americans were really shut out of the housing market for a very long time.”
To help Black residents build wealth, the Rooted program provided 50 long-term Black households in the West End and Visitation Park neighborhoods with:
- $20,000 that can go toward purchasing or renovating property, starting a business and/or opening an investment account.
- Another $2,000 to pay down debt, pay for immediate expenses or create emergency savings.
- Financial training and planning from local wealth-building advisors.
Invest STL had $1.1 million to invest in the neighborhoods. At the same time, Urban Institute was beginning a study of the Rooted program to determine its effectiveness.
When deciding how many households to include and how much money to give to each household, Witthaus said they had to find a “sweet spot.”
“It really came down to finding the balance between the amount of money we thought would be enough to make a significant difference in someone's life and the number of people that we wanted to help that would still be enough to include in a study,” Witthaus said.
The group took into account the average debt that individuals had in the Rooted neighborhoods — being about $2,200, according to Witthaus — when deciding how much money to give out for that purpose.
“The $2,000 was really provided because we wanted to make sure people were in a decent enough financial position to participate,” Witthaus added.
For the financial planning, each Rooted participant was paired with a volunteer wealth-building advisor from a local firm. These advisors typically work with high-net worth individuals, Witthaus said.
Rather than learning how to stretch their dollars, the Rooted participants are learning how to build wealth by using a method that’s best for them.
Each household also had the opportunity to create a beneficiary deed for their estates. With help from a lawyer, Invest STL created templates to help participants to fill out the deeds and then filed them with the city, making sure the assets stay within families and don’t get stuck in probate court down the line.
While the Rooted project has its hold in the West End, the project is still in its infancy.
Urban Institute recently sent out a survey to participants to see how they’ve used the money and what improvements have been made, but survey results haven’t come back yet.
Rooted funds have been going out to participants since August 2023, and about 70% of funds have reached households so far, Witthaus said.
However, some households are already seeing benefits.
Witthaus gleamed about a Rooted participant who put all $20,000 of the funds they received into an investment account. Witthaus recently checked in on the status of the account, which swelled $4,000 in a few months.
“It was just really exciting to look at how that person was able to make that money work for them,” Witthaus said.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story stated the Central West End instead of the West End. The use of the word Central indicates a different neighborhood. The story now reads the West End to correctly identify the neighborhood.