In the United States’ 2024 presidential election, Missouri showed itself to be even more of a red state than Texas. Donald Trump defeated Democratic nominee Kamala Harris by 14 points in Texas, but he carried Missouri by 18 percentage points.
Missouri’s largest city, St. Louis, was battered by a tornado on May 16, and the northern part of the city was hit especially hard. In an article published on July 30, The New Republic’s Sarah Stankorb details the effect that the Trump administration’s cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) — combined with poverty and a history of redlining — are having in that area of a very red state.
“Dozens of people were injured,” Stankorb explains. “Thousands of buildings were damaged or destroyed, with an estimated $1.6 billion in damage across the city. But in North St. Louis, an act of nature collided with city blocks that have been historically disinvested, redlined, and neglected. For weeks, people have stayed in tents at the front of their properties — bricks still strewn and fallen into the yard, waiting for help, unable to safely live in their homes, their loss made worse by poverty.”
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Stankorb adds, “Some who have spent the past many weeks distributing baby diapers, bottled water, and other basic necessities now worry that their neighborhoods have been left uniquely vulnerable to an another, altogether unnatural sort of disaster: developers…. In the days after the storm, NAACP St. Louis issued a report that tied historic redlining from the 1930s — which designated predominantly Black neighborhoods as ‘hazardous’ investments — to modern insurance bias.”
The floods that ravaged areas of Texas over the 4th of July weekend are also generating discussion over the effect that FEMA cuts are having on areas pounded by natural disasters — especially in light of the escalating dangers of climate change. And the role of FEMA in recovery efforts is also quite relevant to tornado-ravaged North St. Louis.
“In St. Louis,” Stankorb notes, “residents waited to apply for individual aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA — funds that were delayed for weeks until President Donald Trump approved Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe’s request to declare major disasters in response to the tornado. Two thousand staffers short, FEMA announced in April that the agency would be ending door-to-door canvassing after disasters — a move that imperils those who are most vulnerable: the elderly, people with disabilities, those without transportation.”
Stankorb continues, “In the gap, local nonprofits and churches stepped in to help. At the end of June, a coalition of St. Louis groups organized a hub for help making insurance claims, as volunteer canvassers went out with free meals and supplies and to conduct an insurance claims survey.”
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Sarah Stankorb’s full article for The New Republic is available at this link.