There's cities all over America that were devastated by white flight, including my neighbor across the river, East Saint Louis. If you go to downtown ESL, the b

There's cities all over America that were devastated by white flight, including my neighbor across the river, East Saint Louis. If you go to downtown ESL, the base architecture and infrastructure is really cool. It has these wide boulevards and all these old style 40's and 50's architecture you don't see too much in St Louis proper. ESL High used to be an all white school, which explains the strange mix of black kids and old white people at the football games. Integration happened and the whole thing started to fall apart. However, things really didn't start getting bad until all the BLACK people with money started leaving too. The whites moved out to St. Charles and the blacks moved out to the Illinois suburbs. Commerce (and Busch Stadium, let's be real) kept gangs from totally taking over St Louis during crack fever era, but the same did not happen in ESL. Now it's basically unfixable. The corruption, schools, and law enforcement is too awful to have anyone consider moving back there. At least in St Louis if you have some money you can send your kids to private schools (and you would, the public school system is atrocious) in the city. Old North City has even sprung back to life with some redevelopment, and this was one of the most run down marginal neighborhoods in town a decade ago. (If you've ever been to the world famous Crown Candy Kitchen, that's the neighborhood it's in.) I live in Lafayette Square, formerly known as Slum D, which was one of the most violent neighborhoods in the US 40 years ago. My old doctor grew up there and vividly remembers what that neighborhood was like a few dozen years back. The difference between these two things and places like ESL and Detroit is the proximity of services. Even when Lafayette Square was at its worst, if you could solve the crime, downtown and Soulard were only blocks away. Detroit and ESL are essentially urban deserts. You can live in the desert because you grew up there, but you're going to have a hard time convincing new people it's the place to be.