Increasingly, developers pushed Black communities into the least desirable areas of the city while taking the most desirable for their economic benefit.

For example:

• Corporate-driven “redevelopment” projects, supported by local banks and powerful businesses like Anheuser-Busch and McDonald Aircraft, began work on “a metropolitan research corridor with St. Louis City’s Central Corridor as its epicenter” (Lang, 2019, p. 130).

• Saint Louis University acquired “more than twenty acres of land” in midtown for a mere $1 million donation” (Lang, 2019, p. 130).

• A new home for the St. Louis Cardinals baseball franchise soon followed: Busch Stadium. The stadium’s proximity to the highways that had further segregated Black communities allowed predominantly white suburban residents to drive to baseball games while living in county communities that offered up-to-date infrastructure and better public education than could be found in the city (Lang, 2009, 130).

Thompson Fullilove described the “two-fer” actions of the developers that further isolated Black city residents:

Two mechanisms that ultimately worked synergistically to help clear the land: one was urban renewal and the other was the federal highway program. Imagine, then, the triangle of the ghetto diminished by the half circle of downtown completing itself by urban renewal, while highway construction took a juicy slice, generally aimed straight down the middle. (p. 64)

Thompson Fullilove (2016) summarized the root of the situation: “The problem the planners tackled was not how to undo poverty, but how to hide the poor” (p. 197).

In response to these racist policies, community organizers and civil rights leaders came up with a more accurate description of plans for America’s cities: “Urban Renewal is Negro Removal” (p. 61).