Residents of Ferguson need to take a trip to see their future.
Via STL Today
It didn’t take long for Virginia Savage to realize she needed to leave.
The single mother moved her two children and nephew to an apartment on Greer Avenue in the Greater Ville neighborhood in late 2013. The block was half-empty, and her apartment stood among decaying, boarded-up buildings. It was what Savage, 48, could afford as a home health care aide, and it was close to where her kids went to school.
“That was not good for us,” Savage explained later. “We moved two doors down from where the prostitutes stayed. Drug dealers. Drug users.” There was nightly gunfire, and her children often didn’t want to come home after school.
The day before they moved late last year, a man was shot and killed a block away.
Now she lives just a mile east, still on Greer Avenue and still in the Fourth Ward. But she said it feels like a different city: Fewer vacant buildings. Less gunfire. More long-term residents. Block parties. A block captain. Neighborhood patrols at night.
A little distance can mean a big difference when it comes to St. Louis crime. Although murders were up 33 percent in 2014 over the year before, a Post-Dispatch analysis of police data shows that 102 of the 159 were slain in just eight of the city’s 28 wards.
The Fourth Ward, in the heart of north St. Louis, is a good place to get a feel for that violence. It had 15 murders last year, second-highest of all the wards.[…]
The Rev. Charles Shelton, 45, a Baptist minister, runs a foster home on Evans Avenue in the Fourth Ward. Tension between groups is high in some communities, he said, and there are limits on what police can do. “They can’t tell these boys what to do.
“Distrust of police is high,” he added, “but a lot of it is distrust of themselves.”
Shelton said it takes an intense, one-on-one approach to try to get troubled young people to change bad attitudes. He recently started a mentor program at Vashon High School, and is working to get more young men involved in trade unions.
Crime is rooted in poverty, Shelton said, and to improve it, “We need to get as many young guys together and give them something to do.”