The problem of loans, mortgages and financing for city property has not changed since the last issue. The problem remains one that, everyone talks about but nobody does anything about. The latest suggestion is that neighborhoods pool their capital and form investment corporations to finance projects.
The thought of Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Citizen having to study high finance in order to maintain their neighborhoods is enough to blow the mind. Why should the citizens have to take up an entirely new profession? If you turn to the Yellow Pages you will see that this metropolitan area includes more than 50 banks and some 40 savings and loan associations. It seems reasonable to assume that loans, mortgages and financing are their business and that they are competent to handle it. Their combined assets make a string of figures too huge to comprehend, and without so much as peeking I’d wager a small sum that not one of them failed to show a profit last year.
What the lending institutions need is not competence, but vision. They can’t seem to see that every time they refuse to lend money because a neighborhood might decline, they make the neighborhood decline. They cannot see that their prophecies along with those of the FHA and the real estate interests, are self-fulfilling and have been for fifteen years. The surprise is not that the city is declining, but that it is holding up so well against so many short sighted prophets of doom.
If their professional niggarliness forbids their risking precious bucks on urban projects, could they get up a little group courage and form a pool of capitol to lend for urban projects, like the ones planned for the DeBaliviere area? If 90 institutions pooled $50,000 to $100,000 apiece, there would be between $5,000,000 and $10,000,000 in credit available.
Conscience funds, mutual investment funds that promise to invest the member’s money only in ecologically or sociologically responsible firms are fashionable. St. Louis lending institutions could use a little social conscience. Let them put their expertise to work instead of sluffing it off on an unsuspecting public.
A more practical suggestion than citizen financial management is the idea that the city government, big businesses and religious bodies investigate the institutions where they bank. These deposits are big enough to have economic clout.
If lending institutions give away all kinds of goodies for additions to individual savings accounts, the loss of a municipal or corporate account might jolt their conscience in the right direction. If the lending institution doesn’t have the vision to support the city which supplies it with cash, municipal, corporate and religious depositors should instantly close their accounts and place them in more far-sighted institutions.
Whether clout or conscience does the job, it had better be done quickly. We can forget our tax money. It looks like Mr. Smith, HUD and the FHA are going to use our taxes to beat us on the head with. If the private and corporate financial resources of the city were directed to its benefit we might be able to fight back.
Originally published in The Paper, December 1971.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1971_12.pdf, printed page 2.
