Journal of Planning History The Trap of Triage: …In 1965, A. J. Cervantes rode the growing...

Original Article

The Trap of Triage: Lessonsfrom the ‘‘Team Four Plan’’

Patrick Cooper-McCann1

AbstractIn 1975, consultants from Team Four Inc. advised St. Louis planners to pursue a strategy ofneighborhood triage: ‘‘conservation’’ for areas in good health, ‘‘redevelopment’’ for areas just startingto decline, and ‘‘depletion’’ for areas already in severe distress. The firm’s recommended strategyreflected the latest thinking among urban planners, but it provoked outrage among residents of thecity’s predominantly black North Side, who read ‘‘depletion’’ as a promise of benign neglect. In thisarticle, I explain how Team Four justified its advice, and why, four decades later, the controversyover its memo persists.

Keywordsurban triage, urban renewal, community development, CDBG, St. Louis, shrinking cities, race,inequality, uneven development

Introduction

On May 19, 1975, the planning consultants at Team Four Inc. awoke to the following headline in the

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: ‘‘Plan Said to Hurt Black Area in City.’’1 The ‘‘plan’’ in question was one of

the firm’s memos, ‘‘Citywide Implementation Strategies: The Draft Comprehensive Plan,’’ which

Team Four had submitted to the city’s Community Development Commission two months earlier

for its review. The memo advised St. Louis planners to implement the city’s forthcoming master plan

through a strategy of neighborhood triage: ‘‘conservation’’ for areas in good health, ‘‘redevelop-

ment’’ for areas just starting to decline, and gradual ‘‘depletion’’ for areas already in severe distress.2

The firm’s recommended strategy reflected the latest thinking among urban planners, but it pro-

voked outrage among residents of the city’s predominantly black North Side, who read ‘‘depletion’’

as a promise of benign neglect.

In this article, I explain how Team Four justified its advice, and why, four decades later, the con-

troversy over its memo persists, even though neither the memo nor the master plan it addressed was

ever adopted as official policy. This discussion highlights an important moment in the history of

urban planning when neighborhood rehabilitation—always a stated priority for planners but rarely

well funded—eclipsed clearance and redevelopment as the predominant strategy for addressing

1 Urban and Regional Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Corresponding Author:

Patrick Cooper-McCann, Urban and Regional Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.

Email: [email protected]

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urban decline.3 This transition represented a victory for distressed urban communities that had long

fought the upheaval of urban renewal, but it proved hollow for many. While these communities no

longer faced the same threat of forcible displacement, many found that they were still unable to

access resources for improving their neighborhoods. Studies found that the tools of neighborhood

rehabilitation, like code enforcement and minor home repair, were ineffective remedies for areas

that were already substantially abandoned. So planners favored targeting such resources to areas just

starting to decline, where public funds would leverage greater private investment. Yet, in segregated

cities like St. Louis, enacting such a policy would not only leave the most distressed communities

without a pathway to renewal, it would also implicitly favor white residents over minorities, because

racial minorities were concentrated in the most abandoned neighborhoods while neighborhoods in

transition were more often white. The debate over the so-called Team Four Plan brought the hollow-

ness of this bargain and its racial repercussions to light.

From Urban Renewal to Community Development

In 1973, the city of St. Louis began a two-year effort to rewrite its citywide master plan.4 At a time of

rising alarm at the city’s physical and fiscal decline, planners saw the effort as an opportunity to

rethink the city’s long-standing strategic response to blight, which had come under increasing crit-

icism for placing too much emphasis on clearance and redevelopment and not enough on saving

neighborhoods through rehabilitation, despite the city’s verbal commitment to the opposite

priorities.

Since the earliest days of municipal planning in St. Louis, officials predicted an urban crisis

would inevitably grip the city. In 1917, Harland Bartholomew, the city’s first and longest serving

‘‘Engineer’’ of urban planning explained that the city’s inability to annex land—owing to its legal

separation from St. Louis County in 1876—would lead to the gradual loss of its tax base as factories

and wealthy residents relocated to new facilities and housing in the suburbs.5 Bartholomew’s argu-

ment rested on an early iteration of the concept of neighborhood filtering.6 According to this theory,

which social scientists would articulate more fully in the 1930s, private developers built most new

housing at the metropolitan fringe for the middle and upper classes. Initially, the fringe of the region

fell within the central city’s boundaries, but as time went on and the city’s land was built out, most

new development would occur in the suburbs. As new housing was constructed, higher-income fam-

ilies moved outward to fill it, leaving behind aging housing stock in the central city that was

passed down first to white, middle-income families, and then, as the neighborhood declined and

maintenance costs mounted, to landlords who subdivided the properties and rented the units to

lower-income families and people of color. At this stage, further decline became inevitable.7

Bankers interpreted the presence of racial minorities and the poor as a sign that a neighborhood

had reached the final stage in its life cycle. They then denied loans to property owners on this

basis, preventing them from improving their homes and making the prophecy of neighborhood

decline self-fulfilling. Unable to increase profits through renovation, landlords ceased to main-

tain their properties, renting the units at falling prices until they were no longer habitable and

then abandoning them.

By 1936, in the city’s Urban Land Policy, Bartholomew warned that this cycle was already taking

its toll: ‘‘To state the condition in its simplest terms—if adequate measures are not taken, the city is

faced with gradual economic and social collapse. The old central areas of the city are being aban-

doned and this insidious trend will continue until the entire city is engulfed.’’8 As seen in Figure 1,

by 1947, in the Comprehensive Plan, Bartholomew designated more than a third of the city

‘‘blighted’’ or ‘‘obsolete.’’9 These areas formed the historic core of the city, where most residences

were constructed prior to the institution of building codes, and they encompassed the entirety of the

black ghetto.

2 Journal of Planning History



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In response, Bartholomew called for a three-pronged housing program. Obsolete neighborhoods

would require total clearance and redevelopment. In those areas, ‘‘It is necessary to create a new

environment,’’ he wrote. ‘‘This can be accomplished only by large scale operations.’’10 Blighted

neighborhoods, by contrast, could still be rehabilitated through targeted interventions that preserved

most existing housing: ‘‘Obsolete buildings should be removed, some streets should be closed, new

park, playground and recreation areas created, small concentrated shop areas established, and indi-

vidual buildings should be repaired and brought up to a good minimum standard.’’11 The city’s

remaining neighborhoods required protection from encroachment by blight. This could be achieved

through stricter zoning and the formation of strong neighborhood associations.

Of these three housing objectives, Bartholomew considered neighborhood rehabilitation the most

important. ‘‘The rehabilitation of blighted areas is the No Man’s Land of housing,’’ he wrote. ‘‘It is

more important than reconstruction of obsolete areas . . . Without a definite plan for the rehabilita-

tion of the present blighted areas new obsolete areas will develop faster than present areas can be

reconstructed.’’12 But when significant federal funds for urban renewal first became available after

passage of the Housing Act of 1949 and the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, both white and black

political leaders initially agreed on the need to prioritize major clearance and redevelopment

projects.13

The construction of the Pruitt–Igoe public housing complex and the redevelopment of Mill Creek

Valley were emblematic of the era. The Pruitt–Igoe project completely cleared fifty-seven acres on

the near North Side, replacing a dilapidated neighborhood with thirty-three high-rise apartment

buildings designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki.14 The Mill Creek Valley project was even larger

in scale. In 1959, crews began clearing the 454-acre neighborhood that ran along the southern edge

of the central corridor. At the time, the neighborhood was still the working-class heart of black

St. Louis, home to nearly 20,000 residents and hundreds of businesses.15 Yet, the project received

the public backing of civil rights leaders like Ernest Calloway, president of the St. Louis chapter of

the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who saw an opportunity to

improve the dire living conditions of African Americans and to employ out-of-work residents in the

reconstruction of their own neighborhoods.16 These projects and others—including three highway

construction projects in the 1960s—ultimately cleared hundreds of acres in all, primarily in majority

black neighborhoods.17

At the same time, St. Louis began piloting an initiative to stop the spread of blight in the first

place.18 In 1953, the city launched the St. Louis Neighborhood Rehabilitation Program. This locally

funded program applied concentrated code enforcement to neighborhoods in the early stages of

decline, starting with the Cherokee Street area and Hyde Park. The neighborhoods chosen for the

program were typically white, middle income, and home to active residents; black neighborhoods

were also chosen for concentrated enforcement, but only if the racial composition of the neighbor-

hoods was deemed stable, not in transition.19 To complement code enforcement, the city also

invested in neighborhood improvements. Between 1955 and 1958, the city spent US$434,000 on

parks, playgrounds, and other facilities in targeted areas, and residents invested US$1.3 million in

home repair in response to 12,000 code violations.20 The program proved popular, and, after a

1954 revision to the Housing Act made federal funding available for ‘‘conservation’’ programs—

programs, like the one in St. Louis, that sought to rehabilitate neighborhoods through code enforce-

ment, home repair, and small capital improvements—cities across the country started similar

initiatives.21

By the early 1960s, the consensus in favor of clearance and redevelopment began to falter, even

as demand for neighborhood rehabilitation grew citywide. Residents had come to refer to the Mill

Creek Valley project as ‘‘Hiroshima Flats’’ because the cleared land had sat idle so long.22 Black

support turned to opposition when the city failed to uphold its promises to hire black construction

workers and compensate displaced residents.23 Opponents of urban renewal also called out the




growing emphasis on commercial and industrial redevelopment rather than replacement housing.24

Amidst this growing frustration, St. Louis voters twice rejected a 1962 bond issue for urban

renewal.25 Yet, in the same year, voters approved a US$2 million bond issue to expand the St. Louis

Neighborhood Rehabilitation Program. The bond financed new sidewalks, streetlights, parks, and

playgrounds in targeted areas, as well as resurfaced streets and alleys. The city also expanded the

scope of its code enforcement program.26

In 1965, A. J. Cervantes rode the growing backlash against urban renewal to the mayor’s office,

winning crucial support from black voters, in part by promising to expand access to neighborhood

rehabilitation.27 When funding from the new Federally Assisted Code Enforcement (FACE) pro-

gram became available that fall, residents held him to his promise. In October 1965, community

organizers from the West End, a formerly affluent white neighborhood whose black population had

jumped from 1,150 in 1950 to 57,300 in 1960, presented the new mayor with 3,000 signatures threa-

tening a tax strike unless he included the neighborhood in its expanded rehabilitation program.28

Ignoring the advice of federal administrators who wrote that FACE assistance was ‘‘not authorized

for use in the most depressed slum and blighted areas,’’ the mayor agreed.29

However, subsequent evaluations of the St. Louis FACE program found this new need-based tar-

geting strategy to be ineffective.30 Residents in poor neighborhoods proved difficult to organize

partly because they lacked the resources to repair their homes in response to citations. In fact,

St. Louis planners found that targeted code enforcement actually hastened decline by encouraging

landlords to walk away from their properties rather than make costly repairs. Planners in other

cities, including Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia, reached similar conclusions. The only

code enforcement success stories were recorded in more affluent areas, like Chicago’s Hyde Park—

Kenwood district, rather than in areas of high distress.31

By the early 1970s, disappointed by the results of the FACE program, Mayor Cervantes back-

tracked on his earlier targeting strategy, returning the focus to middle-class areas rather than the

most distressed.32 The city was also rethinking its remaining commitment to clearance and redeve-

lopment. After two decades of costly and unpopular urban renewal projects, the city had little prog-

ress to show for it. In 1950, the city’s population stood at 856,796. By 1970, it had fallen by 27

percent to 622,236, even as the metropolitan population grew 12.4 percent to 2,410,884.33 In

1972, St. Louis began demolishing Pruitt–Igoe, its now notorious public housing project built just

fifteen years earlier.34 The city’s finances were in shambles. A RAND report, issued in August of

1973, cemented the dismal mood. The report foresaw three possible futures for the city of St. Louis:

‘‘continued decline; stabilization in a new role as an increasingly black suburb; and return to a for-

mer role as the center of economic activity in the metropolitan area.’’35 Of these, the first, continued

decline, was deemed the most likely, while the second, a new role as ‘‘a large suburb among many

other suburbs,’’ was considered the best case scenario. Even this limited positive outcome would not

be possible without new and significant commitments of external revenue from the federal govern-

ment, the state of Missouri, and the region—all unlikely prospects.36

The 1973 St. Louis Development Program—a fifteen-year, US$1.4 billion redevelopment plan

produced under Mayor Cervantes—reflected this realism.37 Like the 1947 Comprehensive Plan, the

Development Program was premised on a strategy of ‘‘first preserving those neighborhood districts

which are still essentially sound, maintaining and improving districts which are threatened by

encroaching blight, and systematically rebuilding and rehabilitating those districts which are exten-

sively deteriorated.’’38 But this plan accepted the city’s limited resources, noting that many neigh-

borhoods requiring reconstruction could not be feasibly redeveloped within the plan’s fifteen-year

time span. With the exception of designated urban renewal and model cities areas—urban renewal

projects that were already underway in 1972—the plan labeled all areas still requiring clearance and

redevelopment as ‘‘Interim Action Areas’’ (see Figures 2 and 3).39 These areas were to receive

increased community and social services and a program of land banking to gradually prepare for

Cooper-McCann 5



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future redevelopment, but they would not be redeveloped in the foreseeable future, despite their

need. Instead, the city would focus its energies on rehabilitating neighborhoods on the verge of

decline, returning to Harland Bartholomew’s original 1947 plea to put neighborhood restoration

first.

The ‘‘Team Four Plan’’

It was at this moment of transition in city policy that St. Louis began drafting its new master plan.

Looking to further shake up the status quo, the City Plan Commission hired a local planning firm,

Team Four Inc., as consultants to the project.40 Encouraged to work independently from city plan-

ners, the firm was offered a US$38,000 commission to draft twelve technical memos to inform the

planning process from behind the scenes.41

For Team Four Inc., the commission represented a major coup. In 1973, the firm was just five

years old. Its principals—Richard Ward, Jerome Pratter, William Albinson, and Brian Kent—had

met in graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis, where they studied urban law and

design together. All newcomers to St. Louis, they were drawn to the region by the strength of

Washington University’s faculty, which at the time included Charles Leven, Daniel Mandelker,

Roger Montgomery, and Oscar Newman.42 These professors would go on to publish a series of semi-

nal research papers on St. Louis and urban decline.43 Inspired by what they were learning, Ward,

Pratter, Albinson, and Kent decided to put down roots. After graduating in 1968, the twenty-

something upstarts went into business together. As they explained to a reporter in 1969, ‘‘This is

where the action is. We feel St. Louis has turned the corner.’’44

Team Four submitted its first batch of memos to the Community Development Commission in

March 1974. One of these memos, ‘‘City Wide Implementation Strategies for the Draft Comprehen-

sive Plan,’’ would later gain infamy as the so-called ‘‘Team Four Plan.’’45 This memo, which was

resubmitted in final form on March 31, 1975, advised St. Louis planners to apply different treat-

ments to neighborhoods based on their condition and market potential: ‘‘conservation’’ for areas

in good health, ‘‘redevelopment’’ for areas just starting to decline, and gradual ‘‘depletion’’ for areas

already in severe distress. The designations would be based on the age and physical condition of the

building stock, the availability of private financing, levels of public service, and population stability.

Of the three treatments, the memo named conservation of strong neighborhoods the highest priority,

targeted redevelopment of in-between neighborhoods the second highest priority, and gradual deple-

tion and redevelopment of deteriorated areas the third priority.46

Conservation areas were defined as areas that continued to attract private investment. These were

healthy areas of the city that already enjoyed abundant public services as well as private business

activity. According to the memo, the success of these areas depended on ‘‘continued high level pub-

lic services.’’47 Any restriction of services could shake the confidence of private actors, leading the

city to lose its most successful neighborhoods. ‘‘If these areas are lost,’’ the memo warns, ‘‘no plan

or program can hope to save the City or renew what is left.’’48 The maintenance of high-quality ser-

vices and infrastructure in these areas would, therefore, need to be a ‘‘top priority’’ for the city. Con-

servation areas were to provide the foundation for the rest of the city’s renewal.49

To ensure the stability of these areas, the memo called for infill development that matched the

character of existing housing; increases in school funding; greater police protection; strict code

enforcement through an occupancy permit-based enforcement program; restrictions on transit-

oriented development; and buffering between neighborhoods and new transit lines. The memo also

encouraged private initiatives to supplement or replace public services. The memo recommended

user fees for trash service and code enforcement, the establishment of additional neighborhood asso-

ciations to fund special services and improvements, the creation of business associations to finance

and manage industrial parks and shopping centers, and the creation of a private–public authority to




manage the central business district and pay for improvements through a special assessment on cen-

tral business district properties.50

Redevelopment areas were referred to as areas ‘‘at the critical point between progress and

decay.’’51 The memo did not geographically identify specific redevelopment areas, but it suggested

that any area suitable for Missouri’s Chapter 353 Tax Abatement program would meet the criteria of

a redevelopment area. Passed in 1945 and still in effect today, the Chapter 353 program grants devel-

opers long-term tax abatements and the power of eminent domain over ‘‘blighted’’ properties.52 The

program was and is used to redevelop individual parcels in areas of potential growth. In 1975, most

properties declared ‘‘blighted’’ under the program were zoned commercial or industrial, and they

were primarily located in the central corridor—either in the central business district (the entirety

of which was declared ‘‘blighted’’ under the program) or Central West End. As of 1975, only a hand-

ful of parcels had been targeted for redevelopment on the North Side.53

The memo recommended pursuing redevelopment strategically. Redevelopment projects would

only be approved if they could be paired with capital improvements and an increase in public ser-

vices, including the onset of strict code enforcement. Along with use of the Chapter 353 program, the

memo also endorsed the use of special assessment districts to make redevelopment self-financing.

Zoning would take the form of planned unit developments, enabling private developers and the city

to negotiate terms. Transit-oriented development would be encouraged, and where applicable, the

city would use Missouri’s Planned Industrial Expansion legislation to spur industrial development

when private financing was not feasible. Each redevelopment district would also have a citizens’

advisory council to ensure the fair treatment of current residents.54

Depletion areas marked the biggest break from past policy, at least rhetorically. These were iden-

tified as ‘‘areas of spotty City services and red lining—where large numbers of the unemployed, the

elderly and the recipients of welfare are left to wait for assistance which does not seem to be forth-

coming.’’55 No depletion areas were identified specifically, but the memo noted that in 1971 there

were 3,200 abandoned buildings in the city, and ‘‘virtually all of these were located in Depletion

Areas.’’56 Then as now, the majority of abandoned buildings in St. Louis were located on the North

Side.57 The memo’s description of depletion areas acknowledged the hardships faced by residents

due to the absence of both private and public investment, but it warned that the need for total recon-

struction and the absence of resources put the city in a bind: ‘‘Simply stated, the City cannot abandon

those trapped in Depletion areas, nor can it ignore the eventual need for complete redevelopment of

these areas.’’58

In depletion areas, the memo recommended continuing basic services but prohibiting scattershot

redevelopment. The memo was insistent that essential services should be continued: ‘‘Police, fire

and sanitation service cannot be curtailed prematurely, as has been the case, according to critics,

in these areas.’’59 However, the memo called for a ‘‘no growth policy until firm market and adequate

public resources are available,’’ requiring any new development in these areas to be planned concur-

rently with capital improvements—investments that would be prioritized first in designated redeve-

lopment areas and only later in depletion areas, when market demand had returned.60 In the

meantime, the city would use its Land Reutilization Authority as a land bank, gathering parcels

through tax foreclosure and holding them indefinitely until market conditions permitted large-

scale redevelopment of the area. The city would not seek to accelerate abandonment, avoiding strict

code enforcement in depletion areas for this reason, but it would also refrain from selling individual

parcels or allowing homesteading.61

The Case for Urban Triage

In 1975, a leading national scholar applied a memorable label to the kind of strategy that Team Four

recommended: ‘‘urban triage.’’62 The term ‘‘triage’’ comes originally from the French trier, meaning

Cooper-McCann 9



to pick or cull. To triage meant to sort goods by quality, usually into three classes: best, middling,

and worst.63 During World War I, triage became associated specifically with the sorting of medical

patients during emergencies.64 Unable to treat everyone, doctors on the battlefield sorted incoming

patients into one of three categories: those with minor injuries who could go without immediate

treatment; those seriously injured who might survive if treated immediately; and those gravely

wounded and unlikely to survive, regardless of treatment. In an effort to save the most lives, doctors

gave priority attention to the second group—those most likely to benefit from treatment—rather

than the third group—those in greatest need. Thus, to triage came to mean not just to sort patients

but to prioritize care according to a utilitarian ethic, saving the greatest number of lives possible in a

crisis, even at the expense of care for the most badly injured.

In the 1970s, this definition of triage was transmuted first to social policy and then to urban pol-

icy. A 1974 essay in Time argued that foreign food aid should be allocated not strictly on the basis of

need but where it could do the most good—countries that had sufficient infrastructure and stability to

distribute the needed aid effectively.65 It called this triage. In 1975, Anthony Downs, a renowned

scholar of urban policy and public administration who was then serving as president of the Real

Estate Research Corporation in Chicago, became the first to apply the metaphor to the urban crisis.66

He likened the city to a battlefield, with dozens of neighborhoods in need of urgent care but with too

few resources available to save them all. In order to save the greatest share of the city as possible, he

argued, policy makers had to strategize, giving priority to those areas experiencing slight decline

over those that were already severely abandoned.

Downs called this strategy ‘‘urban triage’’ and promoted it as a response to the Community

Development Block Grant (CDBG) program.67 The CDBG program had been established the year

prior by title I of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974.68 It consolidated eight

categorical programs—model cities, urban renewal, open space, urban beautification, historic pre-

servation, neighborhood facilities, water, and sewer—into a single block grant, giving cities the

authority to decide which program goals to emphasize and where. The legislation specified that cit-

ies should give ‘‘maximum feasible priority to activities which will benefit low and moderate-

income families or aid in the prevention of slums and blight,’’ but the proportion of funds that had

to be spent on low-income versus moderate-income families was not specified, giving cities consid-

erable flexibility in how they allocated the grants.69

The new law was representative of President Richard Nixon’s ‘‘New Federalism,’’ which

devolved federal authority to local governments and shifted power from the central cities of the

northeast and Midwest to their suburbs and the Sun Belt.70 Previously the main beneficiaries of fed-

eral urban aid, older industrial cities lost funding in the new allocation. This transfer of benefits

occurred despite growing need in older central cities like St. Louis, which in the early 1970s expe-

rienced accelerating population loss and job loss. Unable to address the full scope of the urban crisis

with limited federal aid or their own resources, older central cities were forced to invest strategically

and partner with the private sector to leverage scarce funds.71 Knowing that cities could not rede-

velop every neighborhood in need, Downs advised investing resources in the neighborhoods that

could be saved most efficiently in order to produce the greatest impact.

Following an urban triage strategy would require categorizing the health of neighborhoods just as

doctors categorized the health of patients.72 To determine whether a neighborhood was healthy, ill,

or terminal, Downs developed a classification system based on five indicators of neighborhood

decline: decreasing socioeconomic status; ethnic change from white to minority occupancy; physical

deterioration and decay of housing and infrastructure; increased pessimism about the area’s future

among residents, investors, and public officials; and economic disinvestment, leading to tax foreclo-

sure and abandonment.73 Based on the values of these criteria, neighborhoods could be classified

into one of five stages. Stage 1 neighborhoods were labeled ‘‘healthy.’’ These areas were in good

condition, middle or upper class, and predominately white. Stages 2 and 3 neighborhoods were




labeled ‘‘in-between.’’ These areas were beginning to show signs of neglect but could be restored to

stage 1 status through home repair, code enforcement, and other rehabilitation programs. Stages 4

and 5 neighborhoods were labeled ‘‘deteriorated.’’ These areas were marked by high rates of crime,

high rates of poverty, and widespread vacancy and abandonment. Once a neighborhood had fallen to

stage 4 or stage 5, Downs argued, nothing short of total clearance and redevelopment could return it

to ‘‘healthy’’ stage 1 status.

Downs’s understanding of neighborhood change was essentially the same as Harland Bartholo-

mew’s in 1947, but his strategic advice about how to prioritize spending reflected the new fiscal pol-

itics of the 1970s and the perceived failure of many clearance and redevelopment projects.74 The

most cost-effective strategy, Downs argued, would be to concentrate spending in areas with only

moderate decline, where a minor infusion of resources might lead to significant improvement by

restoring investor confidence and sparking private actors to contribute to the upgrading of their own

neighborhoods. Slum clearance, by contrast, was a costly and risky proposition. It would have to be

preceded by partial or total clearance of blight through demolition. Even then, redevelopment would

only succeed if the blighted area were adjacent to a more stable neighborhood—isolated urban

renewal projects often failed.75 Fiscally constrained cities could therefore ill afford to prioritize

clearance and redevelopment at a time when even the strongest urban neighborhoods were threat-

ened by the encroachment of blight.

Yet, realizing that politicians would be under pressure to spend funds everywhere, Downs devel-

oped spending recommendations for all neighborhood types. Healthy neighborhoods would receive

the least funding; only low-cost, high-visibility projects, like planting trees and providing new street

furniture, would be approved if politically necessary. More funding would be directed to very dete-

riorated areas, but only for demolition and the provision of social welfare. In these areas, gradual

abandonment would continue, but the city would maintain public services and increase social wel-

fare along the lines of the Model Cities program. The greatest share of funds would be targeted to in-

between areas for physical redevelopment, where public spending could not only reduce blight but

also induce further investment from the private sector, thereby maximizing the value of the public’s

investment. Downs called this three-part strategy, balancing the desire for efficiency with political

need, ‘‘modified triage.’’76

The Case against Triage

Anthony Downs and Team Four Inc. both cast their claims in utilitarian terms: a strategy of triage,

they argued, would produce the greatest good for the greatest number. What neither considered in

their proposals was the racial fairness of targeting resources in this way. In fact, none of the St. Louis

plans cited in this article discuss the racial implications of the policies they propose. Of the dozens of

maps that appear within the 1917 Problems of St. Louis, the 1936 Urban Land Policy, the 1947 Com-

prehensive Plan, the 1973 Development Program, and the 1975 Draft Comprehensive Plan, not one

displays the racial composition of the city’s neighborhoods. If such a map had been included, it

would show a city starkly divided by race. As Figure 4 shows, in 1970, the city’s South Side was

almost entirely white. The city’s black population was concentrated on the North Side in a contig-

uous band of census tracts stretching from the central business district to the city’s western limits.

This racially segregated geography was rendered invisible in the city’s plans. But by the mid-1970s,

this long-standing practice of ignoring race as a consideration in planning was becoming politically

untenable, as activists pointed out the biased effects of ostensibly color-blind policies.

Signs of this shift were evident by 1973, when John Poelker won election as mayor. The St. Louis

Development Program, released earlier that year, had been greeted warmly in some quarters. In an

editorial dated January 26, 1973, the conservative St. Louis Globe-Democrat commended the plan-

ning director, Norman Murdoch, for his willingness to put neighborhood conservation first: ‘‘The

Cooper-McCann 11



city can’t do everything at once—it must establish priorities, beginning with areas that are still sava-

ble from decay.’’77 But black activists were wary of any plan that appeared to privilege the rehabi-

litation of the South Side over the more distressed and predominantly black North Side. In

November 1973, the St. Louis Argus, a black-owned newspaper, pushed back against two board bills

that purportedly called for a large-scale program of housing rehabilitation on the South Side and an

equally large program of housing demolition on the North Side.78 When the Poelker administration

released its first CDBG application, black activists protested again, arguing that it failed to target

sufficient funds to North Side wards. They argued that aid should be distributed based on need, not

market demand.79

These early signs of discontent with the city’s planning policies exploded in 1975 after a political

operative leaked details of Team Four’s ‘‘City Wide Implementation Strategies’’ memo to Philip

Sutin, a reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.80 Sutin requested a copy of the memo and the most

recent draft of the Comprehensive Plan from the mayor’s office. Mayor Poelker, who was in an

ongoing spat with the newspaper, refused to provide it. The newspaper then filed a federal Freedom

of Information Act request with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which pro-

vided a copy of the memo to the newspaper. On May 19, 1975, the Post-Dispatch went to press with

the headline, ‘‘Plan Said to Hurt Black Area in City,’’ igniting a popular uproar.81

The Post-Dispatch’s article characterized the ‘‘Team Four Plan’’ as a strategy to reduce services

to the predominantly black North Side in order to depopulate the area. Sutin reported that Team Four

was recommending that ‘‘deteriorating areas on their way to abandonment get only a minimum level

of services.’’ Quoting black community leaders, Sutin reported the plan ‘‘could spell doom’’ for ‘‘an

area generally bounded by Twentieth Street, Delmar Boulevard, Natural Bridge Avenue and the

western city limits’’—an area on the North Side that planners had largely labeled ‘‘obsolete’’ or

‘‘blighted’’ in 1947 and in need of ‘‘reconstruction’’ in 1973 but was, according to a black leader

quoted in the newspaper, still home to roughly 166,000 residents in 1975. Former Alderman C.

B. Broussard, a black Democratic leader in the twenty-sixth ward, asserted that the city had already

adopted Team Four’s policies but would not admit it: ‘‘It’s happening without a doubt.’’ The article

closed with a fateful quote from Alderman Milton F. Svetanics, of the twenty-seventh ward, defend-

ing the plan. He argued, ‘‘We have to make a choice about which areas we want to save. Other areas

will have to suffer benign neglect.’’82

Figure 4. Percentage black population by census tract, city of St. Louis, 1970. Source: Minnesota PopulationCenter. National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 2.0. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota2011. Map by author.




Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then serving in the Nixon administration as counselor to the

president for Urban Affairs, had coined the phrase ‘‘benign neglect’’ in 1970 in a memo to the pres-

ident on the ‘‘Status of Negroes.’’83 In the memo, which was leaked to the New York Times and pub-

lished on March 1, 1970, Moynihan argued that despite an increase in female-headed households and

the high incidence of ‘‘anti-social behavior among young black males,’’ social and economic con-

ditions for blacks were improving overall. ‘‘The time may have come,’’ he concluded, ‘‘when the

issue of race could benefit from a period of ‘benign neglect.’ . . . We may need a period in which

Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades.’’84 Moynihan apparently intended the memo as a

rebuke to Vice President Spiro Agnew, whose racially charged rhetoric was inflaming tensions with

the black community, but instead the memo itself became a symbol of such rhetoric. The memo was

widely denounced; critics accused the Nixon administration of treating the black community’s con-

cerns, in policy and in rhetoric, with ‘‘benign neglect.’’85

Although the term never appeared in the Team Four memo, ‘‘benign neglect’’ quickly became the

rallying cry against it. After the Post-Dispatch published its story, 200 people met at the St. Louis

Urban League offices to protest the plan and form a coalition to organize against it. At the meeting,

civil rights leader Ernest Calloway—now an assistant professor of urban affairs at St. Louis Univer-

sity and a member of the city’s Community Development Commission—said that St. Louis banks

and insurance companies had followed an implicit policy of ‘‘benign neglect’’ of the black commu-

nity for many years, ‘‘and many feel it has been the city policy too.’’86 At a later meeting, Alder-

woman JoAnne Wayne of the first ward warned that the ‘‘Team Four Plan’’ was designed to

displace the black community from St. Louis: ‘‘The Team Four plan is a strategy to get rid of blacks,

and baby, if we don’t get together and really stick together, we’ll be . . . well, not right here in the

city of St. Louis. I don’t know where we’ll be.’’87 The St. Louis Argus, a black newspaper, charac-

terized it as ‘‘the so-called Plan Four proposal designed to lift essential city services and let the near-

North side of St. Louis die.’’88 In July 1975, the Ad-hoc Committee against Team Four Projec-

tions—formed by the Federation of Block Units Inc.; Yeatmen District Community Corp.; and

Jeff-Vander-Lou Inc.—circulated a petition opposing the plan. It stated, ‘‘We are disappointed and

disgusted that we still have policies of benign neglect, and it appears that many neighborhoods will

be destroyed.’’ The petition continued, ‘‘150,000 families are threatened with displacement as part

of the plan.’’89

In point of fact, Team Four’s memo did not specify the size or location of any depletion areas.

The authors were also clear that essential services like police and fire must not be reduced.90 How-

ever, the memo did define depletion areas as neighborhoods with significant housing abandonment.

As Figure 5 shows, in the mid-1970s, the most distressed housing stock in St. Louis was located

almost exclusively in black, North side wards. Likewise, the memo links redevelopment areas to the

Chapter 353 program. In 1975, that program had been used almost exclusively in the central corri-

dor. So, while the memo’s recommendations were color-blind in construction, based on the descrip-

tions of neighborhood types in the memo and the distribution of population and abandonment in

St. Louis, neighborhoods that would qualify for ‘‘depletion’’ would likely be predominantly black

and on the North Side.91 Black leaders who read the memo inferred the racial bias of the recommen-

dations on this basis, linking it to their previous experience of displacement as a consequence of

urban renewal.

The Community Development Commission’s attempts to contain the crisis were not successful.

Initially, it tried to ignore the controversy, refusing to publicly release copies of the memo after the

first Post-Dispatch story went to press. After a week, the commission partially reversed course, pro-

viding copies to four aldermen. It did not permit Team Four Inc. to release the full memo publicly

until February 1976.92 By then, the memo’s reputation as a ‘‘secret plan’’ was firmly set. The com-

mission also tried to mollify critics by tweaking the language of the 1975 ‘‘Interim Comprehensive

Plan.’’ When the Community Development Commission released the third draft of the plan for

Cooper-McCann 13



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public comment in June 1975, it included a prefatory statement that said the commission ‘‘rejects

any plan, draft or strategy which advocates any no-growth philosophy or any form of discrimination

as to race, age, sex or creed.’’93 The commission also modified the plan itself, removing references

to ‘‘abandonment’’ and deleting the map, printed previously in the 1973 Development Program, that

identified areas of the city for either conservation, rehabilitation and reconstruction, or maintenance

and improvement.94 These changes were not sufficient to allay protestors’ concerns. By the time,

Team Four Inc. publicly released the memo with a defense of its recommendations, Mayor Poelker

had abandoned the effort to adopt the ‘‘Interim Comprehensive Plan.’’95

Conclusion

Despite not being adopted, the fallout from the ‘‘Team Four Plan’’ persists. As recently as 2008, US

Representative Maxine Waters held a Congressional field hearing in St. Louis to investigate the

legacy of the ‘‘Team Four Plan.’’96 Barbara A. Geisman, then serving as executive director for Com-

munity Development for the city of St. Louis, testified that the ‘‘Team Four Plan’’ had no influence

over city policy: ‘‘I have never read it and I don’t know anybody else who has ever read it, and it

really isn’t relevant to anything that we have been doing for the past seven years.’’97 Nevertheless,

a series of speakers testified that St. Louis’ development patterns from the 1970s to the 2000s

reflected the spirit of the ‘‘Team Four Plan,’’ if not the letter, noting that St. Louis’ central corridor

had experienced a revival after decades of reinvestment but that the North Side continued to decline.

Black leaders also linked specific policy decisions—in particular, Mayor James Conway’s decision

in 1979 to close Homer G. Phillips, a well-regarded public hospital on the North Side that was con-

sidered ‘‘the crown jewel of the entire black community’’—to the enduring influence of Team

Four.98 The hearing ultimately concluded that St. Louis officials had not, in fact, adopted the ‘‘Team

Four Plan,’’ openly or secretly, but journalists and activists continue to invoke it as a symbol of insti-

tutional indifference to the impoverished black communities of the North Side.99

Scholars are also revisiting this once forgotten story as a case study in strategic geographic invest-

ment.100 In chronically shrinking cities like St. Louis, plans today often proceed from the same

assumptions that undergirded the ‘‘Team Four Plan’’: the need for public investment is widespread,

but funding is scarce and most effective when targeted. That last assumption has been bolstered by a

series of recent studies that confirm the intuitive logic of targeting: when public investments are suf-

ficiently concentrated and sustained, private actors invest as well.101 Yet, even for those who still

find the case for triage compelling, the history of ‘‘Team Four Plan’’ should hold two cautionary

lessons. The first is a familiar but significant one: ‘‘color-blind’’ policies are not necessarily race

neutral in effect. In cities like St. Louis, where race corresponds with neighborhood condition, pol-

icies to geographically target investment cannot rest on neighborhood condition alone. Planners

must also consider racial equity as a factor in investment. As critics of the ‘‘Team Four Plan’’ made

clear, to do otherwise risks excluding minority populations from the opportunity to rehabilitate their

neighborhoods.

The second lesson, which hindsight reveals, is that triage is not a logically complete approach to

planning. The ‘‘Team Four Plan’’ rationalized the exclusion of some neighborhoods from physical

redevelopment, but it offered no alternative path to revitalization. It still assumed that market

demand would ultimately return, and when it did, ‘‘depletion’’ areas would need to be cleared in

order to be redeveloped. This logic would consign ‘‘depletion’’ areas to a perpetual holding pattern,

denying residents the agency and the resources to make their neighborhoods livable in the interim.

Forty years later, with St. Louis and cities like it still in decline, it’s not clear that market demand

ever will return to all distressed neighborhoods. This makes it all the more important to reimagine

what a livable future might look like for these neighborhoods and the residents who remain, even if

that future looks nothing like the past.

Cooper-McCann 15



Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/

or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or

publication of this article: Rackham Graduate Student Research Grant (University of Michigan).

Notes

1. Philip Sutin, ‘‘Plan Said to Hurt Black Area in City,’’ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 19, 1975.

2. Team Four Inc., Citywide Implementation Strategies: The Draft Comprehensive Plan (St. Louis, MO:

Team Four Inc., 1975).

3. Many histories overlook conservation planning and neighborhood rehabilitation as significant com-

ponents of the urban renewal agenda. Notable exceptions to this rule include Jon C. Teaford, The

Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940–1985 (Baltimore, MD: The

John Hopkins University Press, 1990); June Manning Thomas, Redevelopment and Race: Planning

a Finer City in Postwar Detroit (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997);

Amanda I. Seligman, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Suleiman Osman, The Invention of Brownstone

Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York (New York, NY:

Oxford University Press, 2011).

4. Philip Sutin, ‘‘Commission to Draft Plan for Downtown,’’ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 12, 1973.

5. Harland Bartholomew, Problems of St. Louis: Being a Description, from the City Planning Stand-

point, of Past and Present Tendencies of Growth with General Suggestions for Impending Issues

and Necessary Future Improvements (St. Louis, MO: Nixon-Jones Printing Company, 1917),

xviii–xix.

6. For a history of the concept, see William C. Baer and Christopher B. Williamson, ‘‘The Filtering of House-

holds and Housing Units,’’ Journal of Planning Literature 3, no. 2 (1988): 127–52.

7. For an incisive explanation of redlining, see Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and

Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 43–44.

8. St. Louis City Plan Commission, Urban Land Policy (St. Louis, MO: St. Louis City Plan Commission,

1936), 7.

9. St. Louis City Plan Commission, Comprehensive City Plan: St. Louis, Missouri (St. Louis, MO: St. Louis

City Plan Commission, 1947), Plate 13. For a fuller discussion of the 1947 plan, see Mark Abbott, ‘‘The

1947 Comprehensive City Plan and Harland Bartholomew’s St. Louis,’’ in St. Louis Plans: The Ideal and

Real St. Louis, ed. Mark Tranel (St. Louis, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 109–149.

10. St. Louis City Plan Commission, Comprehensive City Plan, 1947, 28.

11. Ibid., 32.

12. Ibid.

13. Clarence Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936–

75 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 139; Nancy Christopher, Lee Lawless, and Jerry

Simon, ‘‘Urban Redevelopment and the Fiscal Crisis of the Central City,’’ St. Louis University Law Journal

21 (1978): 820–81; Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Phila-

delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 167–71.

14. Joseph Heathcott, ‘‘The City Remade: Public Housing and the Urban Landscape in St. Louis, 1900–1960’’

(PhD diss., Indiana University Bloomington, 2002).

15. Gordon, Mapping Decline, 167–68; St. Louis City Plan Commission, St. Louis Development Program (St.

Louis, MO: St. Louis City Plan Commission, 1973), 20–22.




16. Ernest Calloway, ‘‘In Support of the Mill Creek Valley Massive Slum Clearance Program,’’ Statement

before the Housing and Land Clearance Committee of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen, Kiel Auditorium,

St. Louis, MO, March 17, 1958, St. Louis Virtual City Project, accessed July 18, 2015, http://www.umsl.

edu/virtualstl/.

17. For histories of urban renewal in St. Louis, see Gordon, Mapping Decline, 2008; Heathcott, ‘‘The City

Remade,’’ 2002; Joseph Heathcott, ‘‘The City Quietly Remade: National Programs and Local Agendas

in the Movement to Clear the Slums, 1942–1952,’’ Journal of Urban History 34, no. 2 (2008): 221–42;

Joseph Heathcott and Malre Agnes Murphy, ‘‘Corridors of Flight, Zones of Renewal: Industry, Planning,

and Policy in the Making of Metropolitan St. Louis, 1940–1980,’’ Journal of Urban History 31, no. 2

(2005): 155–66.

18. Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance, 113–19.

19. Michael A. Quinn, ‘‘Urban Triage and Municipal Housing Code Enforcement: An Analysis of the St. Louis

Case,’’ in Administrative Discretion and Public Policy Implementation, ed. Douglas H. Shumavon and H.

Kenneth Hibbeln (New York, NY: Praeger, 1986), 134.

20. Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance, 114.

21. Ibid., 113–19.

22. Ibid., 157.

23. Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 139–40.

24. Heathcott and Murphy, ‘‘Corridors of Flight, Zones of Renewal,’’ 163.

25. Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance, 160.

26. Ibid., 152.

27. Tim O’Neil, ‘‘A Look Back: In 1965, St. Louis Mayor Raymond Tucker Seeks 4th Term, Falls to Challen-

ger,’’ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 3, 2013; Heathcott and Murphy, ‘‘Corridors of Flight, Zones of

Renewal,’’ 163–64; Lana Stein, St. Louis Politics: The Triumph of Tradition (St. Louis: Missouri Historical

Society Press, 2002), 114–16, 141–44.

28. Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 140; Donald S. Elliott Jr. and Michael A. Quinn, ‘‘Concentrated Housing

Code Enforcement in St Louis,’’ American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association Journal 11, no. 3

(1983): 352–53.

29. Elliott and Quinn, ‘‘Concentrated Housing Code Enforcement,’’ 352.

30. Quinn, ‘‘Urban Triage and Municipal Housing Code Enforcement,’’ 138–39.

31. Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance, 116–19.

32. Quinn, ‘‘Urban Triage and Municipal Housing Code Enforcement,’’ 138–39.

33. St. Louis City Plan Commission, St. Louis Development Program, 30.

34. Heathcott, ‘‘The City Remade,’’ 2002.

35. Barbara R. Williams, St. Louis: A City and Its Suburbs (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1973), v.

36. Ibid., vii.


38. This description of the Development Program comes from the ‘‘Interim Comprehensive Plan’’ that fol-

lowed it: St. Louis Community Development Commission, Interim Comprehensive Plan: Draft III (St.

Louis, MO: St. Louis Community Development Commission, 1975), 1.


40. Sutin, ‘‘Commission to Draft Plan for Downtown,’’ 1973; S. Jerome Pratter, ‘‘Strategies for City

Investment,’’ in How Cities Can Grow Old Gracefully, prepared for Committee on Banking Finance,

and Urban Affairs, Subcommittee on the City, 95th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC: US Govern-

ment Printing Office, 1977), 79; Richard Ward, interview by author, tape recording, St. Louis,

MO, March 7, 2013.

41. Philip Sutin, ‘‘Commission to Draft Plan for Downtown,’’ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 12, 1973; Team

Four Inc., ‘‘Preface,’’ in Citywide Implementation Strategies: The Draft Comprehensive Plan (St. Louis,

MO: Team Four Inc., 1976), i.

Cooper-McCann 17


http://www.umsl.edu/virtualstl/

http://www.umsl.edu/virtualstl/


42. Correspondence with Richard Ward and Jerome Pratter, July 2015; Shirley Althoff, ‘‘Team Four Inc.:

They’re Partners in Urban Planning,’’ St. Louis Globe-Democrat, November 16, 1969; Laura Kennedy,

‘‘Planning for a New St. Louis,’’ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 20, 1978.

43. Notable publications from this period include Oscar Newman, Defensible Space (New York, NY:

Macmillan, 1972); Charles L. Leven et al., Urban Decay in St. Louis (Springfield, VA: National

Technical Information Service, No. PB-209-947, 1972); James T. Little et al., The Contemporary

Neighborhood Success Process: Lessons in the Dynamic of Decay from the St. Louis Perspective

(St. Louis, MO: Institute for Urban and Regional Studies, Washington University, 1975); Charles

L. Leven et al., Neighborhood Change: Lessons in the Dynamics of Urban Decay (New York, NY:

Praeger, 1976); Charles L. Leven, ed., The Mature Metropolis (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books,

1978). Newman discusses the St. Louis origins of his work in Oscar Newman, ‘‘Creating Defensible

Space,’’ US Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Policy Development and

Research, April 1996, 9–14.

44. Shirley Althoff, ‘‘Team Four Inc.: They’re Partners in Urban Planning,’’ St. Louis Globe-Democrat,

November 16, 1969.

45. Team Four Inc., Citywide Implementation Strategies, 1976, front matter, i.

46. Ibid., 49–51.

47. Ibid., 3.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid., 4.

50. Ibid., 4–6.

51. Ibid., 7.

52. Gordon, Mapping Decline, 162.

53. Ibid., 164–65.

54. Team Four Inc., Citywide Implementation Strategies, 1975, 7–14.

55. Ibid., 15.

56. Ibid., 17.

57. For a map of housing quality in 1967, see St. Louis City Plan Commission, St. Louis Development Pro-

gram, Graphics 3–9. For a more contemporary map, see ‘‘Map I.4. Vacant and Abandoned Properties,

St. Louis (2003),’’ Gordon, Mapping Decline, 7.

58. Ibid., 15.

59. Ibid., 16.

60. Ibid., 15.

61. Ibid., 15–30.

62. Anthony Downs, ‘‘Using the Lessons of Experience to Allocate Resources in the Community Devel-

opment Program,’’ in Recommendations for Community Development Planning: Proceedings of the

HUD/RERC Workshops on Local Urban Renewal and Neighborhood Preservation, ed. Real Estate

Research Corporation (Chicago, IL: Real Estate Research Corporation, 1975), 1–28. The first refer-

ence to link the ‘‘Team Four Plan’’ to Anthony Downs appears to be Ernest Calloway, ‘‘Stratagem

for Containment: ‘Depletion’ Designation Would Perpetuate City’s Racial Segregation,’’ St. Louis

Post-Dispatch, September 21, 1975.

63. ‘‘Triage,’’ The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1989).

64. Downs, ‘‘Using the Lessons of Experience,’’ 18.

65. ‘‘What to Do: Costly Choices,’’ Time 104, no. 20 (1974): 76–80.

66. Downs, ‘‘Using the Lessons of Experience,’’ 18–19.

67. Ibid., 1.

68. For a full discussion of the Community Development Block Grant program, see Richard P. Nathan et al.,

Block Grants for Community Development (Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban

Development, 1977), 16–74.




69. Nathan et al., Block Grants for Community Development, 302.

70. Roger Biles, The Fate of Cities: Urban America and the Federal Government, 1945–2000 (Lawrence: Uni-

versity Press of Kansas, 2011), 160.

71. Thomas, Redevelopment and Race, 138–39; Anthony Downs, ‘‘A Basic Perspective Concerning the

Community Development Program,’’ in Recommendations for Community Development Planning:

Proceedings of the HUD/RERC Workshops on Local Urban Renewal and Neighborhood Preserva-

tion, ed. Real Estate Research Corporation (Chicago, IL: Real Estate Research Corporation,

1976), 14–19.

72. Downs, ‘‘Using the Lessons of Experience,’’ 1975; Anthony Downs, ‘‘The Role of Neighborhoods in the

Mature Metropolis,’’ in The Mature Metropolis, ed. Charles L. Leven (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books,

1978), 214–16.


74. Downs, ‘‘A Basic Perspective,’’ 2–4. For a disputed critique of Downs’s formulation of the neighbor-

hood life cycle theory and Downs’s rebuttal, see John T. Metzger, ‘‘Planned Abandonment: The

Neighborhood Life-cycle Theory and National Urban Policy,’’ Housing Policy Debate 11, no. 1

(2000): 7–40; Anthony Downs, ‘‘Comment on John T. Metzger’s ‘Planned Abandonment: The Neigh-

borhood Life-cycle Theory and National Urban Policy,’’’ Housing Policy Debate 11, no. 1 (2000):

41–54.


76. Ibid., 18.

77. ‘‘Save Unblighted Areas First,’’ St. Louis Globe-Democrat, January 26, 1973.

78. Board Bills 19 and 20 of 1973 are referenced in the following sources, but I was not able to locate copies

of the bills in the aldermanic records at the St. Louis Public Library to confirm their content. ‘‘Blight in

City Bill Proposed by Aldermen,’’ St. Louis Argus, November 8, 1973, 16A; Clay Clairborne Jr., ‘‘A

Summary: Team Four Inc.’s City-wide Implementation Element: The Interim Comprehensive Plan,’’

unpublished manuscript, ‘‘The Research Committee,’’ St. Louis, MO, September 6, 1975, 1; Jamala

Rogers, ‘‘Statement of Jamala Rogers, Chairperson, Organization for Black Struggle,’’ prepared for The

Use of Federal Housing and Economic Development Funds in St. Louis: From ‘‘Team 4’’ into the Future,

Field Hearing before the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity of the Committee On

Financial Services, 110th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office,

2008), 24.

79. Sutin, ‘‘Plan Said to Hurt Black Area in City,’’ 1975.

80. Richard Ward, interview with author.

81. Richard Ward, interview with author; Sutin, ‘‘Plan Said to Hurt Black Area in City,’’ 1975.

82. Sutin, ‘‘Plan Said to Hurt Black Area in City,’’ 1975.

83. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ‘‘Text of the Moynihan Memorandum on the Status of Negroes,’’ New York

Times, March 1, 1970, 69.

84. Ibid.

85. Douglas Schoen, Pat: A Biography of Daniel Patrick Moynihan (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1979),

165–68.

86. Marsha Canfield, ‘‘N. St. Louis Gets Ready to Fight Neglect,’’ St. Louis Globe-Democrat, June 28, 1975.

87. ‘‘Opposition to City Growth Plan Urged,’’ St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 21, 1975.

88. ‘‘Block Units Strongly Oppose Plan Four,’’ St. Louis Argus, June 19, 1975, 16B.

89. ‘‘Housing Policies Will Be Protested,’’ St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 22, 1975.

90. Team Four Inc., Citywide Implementation Strategies, 1975; Pratter, ‘‘Strategies for City Investment,’’ 88;

Richard Ward, interview by author.

91. Pratter, ‘‘Strategies for City Investment,’’ 88–89.

92. ‘‘Aldermen to Get Peek at Secret Plans,’’ St. Louis Globe-Democrat, June 10, 1975; Team Four Inc., City-

wide Implementation Strategies, 1976.

Cooper-McCann 19



93. St. Louis Community Development Commission, ‘‘Interim Comprehensive Plan,’’ 1975; ‘‘No-growth

Policy Not Feasible, Group Says,’’ St. Louis Globe-Democrat, June 20, 1975.

94. Philip Sutin, ‘‘Political Changes in Third City Planning Draft,’’ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 22, 1975, 1-A.

95. Team Four Inc., Citywide Implementation Strategies, 1976.

96. Michael R. Allen, ‘‘Congressional Hearing Spotlights Moving from ‘Team Four’ to North Side Develop-

ment,’’ St. Louis American, March 12, 2008, accessed July 18, 2015, http://www.stlamerican.com/news/

local_news/article_5b91c991-77fa-53f0-8bfa-b2b4ad5e64e2.html. The hearing was held at the request of

the US Representative from St. Louis, William Lacy Clay Jr. In her opening remarks, Waters noted that

despite being a St. Louis native, she was not familiar with the ‘‘Team Four Plan’’ herself: ‘‘I can tell you

that even though I hail from here, I confess to not knowing a lot about the Team 4 plan before Mr. Clay

approached me about holding this hearing.’’ In The Use of Federal Housing and Economic Development

Funds in St. Louis: From ‘‘Team 4’’ into the Future, 3.

97. Barbara A. Geisman, ‘‘Statement of Barbara A. Geisman, executive director for Community Develop-

ment, City of St. Louis, Missouri,’’ prepared for The Use of Federal Housing and Economic Development

Funds in St. Louis: From ‘‘Team 4’’ into the Future, Field Hearing before the Subcommittee on Housing

and Community Opportunity of the Committee On Financial Services, 110th Congress, 2nd Session

(Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2008), 8.

98. Daniel J. Monti, Race, Redevelopment, and the New Company Town (Albany: State University of New

York Press, 1990), 33; Jamala Rogers, ‘‘Prepared Statement,’’ prepared for The Use of Federal Housing

and Economic Development Funds in St. Louis: From ‘‘Team 4’’ into the Future, Field Hearing before the

Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity of the Committee on Financial Services, 110th

Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2008), 79.

99. For examples, see Antonio D. French, ‘‘Quiet Conspiracy: The Team Four Plan and the Plot to Kill

North St. Louis,’’ Public Defender, October 3, 2002, accessed July 18, 2015, http://www.pubdef.net/

2002/quiet_conspiracy.html; Jamala Rogers, ‘‘Team Four Sucka-Punch,’’ The St. Louis American,

March 12, 2008, accessed July 18, 2015, http://www.stlamerican.com/news/columnists/article_

4df19988-85de-533c-a9f1-1fe0496259bb.html; Steve Patterson, ‘‘The History of Problems in North

St. Louis,’’ UrbanReviewSTL, May 26, 2009, accessed July 18, 2015, http://www.urbanreviewstl.

com/2009/05/the-history-of-problems-in-north-st-louis/; Tim Logan, ‘‘St. Louis Turns to Data to Guide

Development,’’ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 29, 2014, accessed July 15, 2015, http://www.stlto-

day.com/business/local/st-louis-turns-to-data-to-guide-development/article_88e96f4f-7f8f-5f31-b4a3-

50f73df0b28d.html.

100. For recent scholarly references to the ‘‘Team Four Plan’’ specifically and ‘‘urban triage’’ more generally,

see Deanna H. Schmidt, ‘‘Urban Triage: Saving the Savable Neighbourhoods in Milwaukee,’’ Planning

Perspectives 26, no. 4 (2011): 569–89; Patrick Cooper-McCann, ‘‘Urban Triage in Cleveland and

St. Louis’’ (Master’s thesis, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2013); L. Owen Kirkpatrick, ‘‘Urban

Triage, City Systems, and the Remnants of Community: Some ‘Sticky’ Complications in the Greening

of Detroit,’’ Journal of Urban History 41, no. 2 (2015): 261–78; J. Rosie Tighe and Joanna P. Ganning,

‘‘The Divergent City: Unequal and Uneven Development in St. Louis,’’ Urban Geography 36, no. 5

(2015): 654–73, doi:10.1080/02723638.2015.1014673.

101. For contemporary research on strategic geographic targeting, see George Galster, Peter Tatian, and John

Accordino, ‘‘Targeting Investments for Neighborhood Revitalization,’’ Journal of the American Plan-

ning Association 72, no. 4 (2006): 457–74; Dale Thomson, ‘‘Strategic, Geographic Targeting of Hous-

ing and Community Development Resources: A Conceptual Framework and a Critical Review,’’ Urban

Affairs Review 43, no. 5 (2008): 629–62; Dale Thomson, ‘‘Strategic Geographic Targeting in Commu-

nity Development: Examining the Congruence of Political, Institutional, and Technical Factors,’’

Urban Affairs Review 47, no. 4 (2011): 564–94; Robert Beauregard, ‘‘Strategic Thinking for Distressed

Neighborhoods,’’ in The City after Abandonment, ed. Margaret Dewar and June Manning Thomas

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 268–88; Dale Thomson, ‘‘Targeting



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http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/st-louis-turns-to-data-to-guide-development/article_88e96f4f-7f8f-5f31-b4a3-50f73df0b28d.html





Neighborhoods, Stimulating Markets: The Role of Political, Institutional and Technical Factors in

Three Cities,’’ in The City after Abandonment, ed. Margaret Dewar and June Manning Thomas

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 104–32; John Accordino and Fabrizio Fas-

ulo, ‘‘Fusing Technical and Political Rationality in Community Development: A Prescriptive Model

of Efficiency-based Strategic Geographic Targeting,’’ Housing Policy Debate 23, no. 4 (2013):

615–42.

Author Biography

Patrick Cooper-McCann is a PhD candidate in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan.

He studies plans and policies to revitalize distressed cities. His dissertation concerns the remaking of local gov-

ernance in Detroit.

Cooper-McCann 21



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