A Micro Look at Failure of Reparations: Since 1999, more than $210 Million Funneled to Blacks in St. Petersburg with No Return on Investment

Just imagine this as a case study in why reparations will fail (and have already been paid) on the macro level. [$200 million later, why are St. Pete's poor black neighborhoods worse off?, Tampa Bay Times, 8-4-17]:

ST. PETERSBURG — The predominantly black, high-poverty neighborhoods south of Central Avenue have long attracted politicians courting voters with plans to turn them around. 

Answer: Because black people, despite the infusion of $210 million, still live there...

Improving the neighborhoods he dubbed Midtown was key to former Mayor Rick Baker's vision in 2001 of a "Seamless City" where persistent racial and economic inequities would melt away. Thirteen years later, newly elected Mayor Rick Kriseman promised to fight poverty across the region "South of Central" Avenue. 

Both mayors won the area by wide margins and now are vying again for its support. 

As Baker, Kriseman and four other mayoral hopefuls head for an Aug. 29 primary, the Tampa Bay Timesset out to assess the region's progress since the turn of the century, analyzing two decades worth of data on income, housing, demographics and crime. 

There wasn't much progress to be found. 

Though the city has helped steer hundreds of millions of dollars into the neighborhoods around Midtown since 1999, they remain stuck in poverty. 

Adjusted for inflation, the average household's income has gone down. 

Property values in the neighborhoods have dropped. Only 43 percent of homes in Midtown and Childs Park are owner-occupied, a rate that's steadily declined since it was 60 percent in 2002. 

Today, almost half of the region's renters spend the majority of their income keeping a roof over their heads — nearly twice as many as in 1999. 

There have been some modest gains. More people have a high school diploma or its equivalent, up from 60 percent in 1999 to about 75 percent today. 

Crime rates have dropped as well, mirroring the trend across the city, state and country. But many of St. Petersburg's most violent neighborhoods remain in Midtown. 

Other symbolic victories have vanished. Midtown's only grocery store, which opened in 2005 and was hailed by city leaders as a major quality of life improvement, closed for the second time in February. A few months earlier, the same thing happened to a soul food restaurant opened on the former site of the area's iconic nightclub.

From 1999 to 2015, St. Petersburg helped steer over $210 million in private and public investments toward trying to improve life in the Midtown area, city documents show. 

Much of spending was taxpayer money for large capital projects, like the reconstruction of Gibbs High School and Perkins Elementary, which cost $51 million and $9.4 million, respectively. 

The federal government also spent $40 million on the Pinellas Job Corps Center, which provides free professional training for low-income young people, adding to the $3.7 million the city spent in assembling the land. 

The largest investments made by the city itself were land purchases started during Baker's administration. The city spent $7.7 million buying up over 50 parcels — many of them homes — in the hopes of presenting a large tract of land to a big employer at a site it now calls Commerce Park. 

The city also spent millions to buy land for and otherwise support Tangerine Plaza, a shopping center designed to bring a grocery store into the neighborhood — one of Baker's primary goals after taking office. 

Neither of those projects panned out. The city failed for seven years to woo a large employer into Commerce Park and now plans to build multiple sites it can lease to smaller businesses. Tangerine Plaza's Sweetbay Supermarket opened in 2005, then closed in 2013 before reopening months later as a Walmart Neighborhood Market. 

Then the Walmart closed in February. There are no plans to reopen. 

When surrounded by blacks, a business can't stay in the black. The Visible Black Hand of Economics is an absolute certainty. 

Isn’t it strange that in a near-homogeneous Black community like this area of St. Petersburg where the city government has steered more than $210 million (largely of taxpayer money) since 1999, there seems to be so little social trust and social capital? Doesn’t this fly in the face of Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam’sfamous study that found diversity was the primary cause for a loss of civic engagement.

Remember the story? Putnam was so embarrassed by his study and investigation that showed the harmful effects of diversity that he suppressed the findings for a number of years.

But in all-black areas of St. Petersburg, the inverse of Putnam’s findings appear to be true. The blacker a community, the fewer people vote, the less they volunteer, the less civility and social trust and the less they work to better the community. They can't even keep a Walmart open, even when the city is subsidizing Tangerine Plaza (truly, reparations). 

There's so little social capital in this nearly all-black community in St. Petersburg, one wonders if it might be the epitome of a low-trust society as the embarrassment of more than $210 million in free money producing an empty strip mall.  

We’ve called this paradox to Putnam's study the Detroit Corollary before. The civilization black people have created in this part of St. Petersburg where $210 million was dedicated to advancing Africans to some semblance of western civilization is just further proof of the Detroit Corollary's existence. 

Even with the city subsidizing a Walmart, blacks couldn't keep it open.