<\/a>A recent article<\/a> in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that described the way that the small St. Louis County municipality of Pagedale was condemning inhabited, livable houses and levying fines for petty housing code violations. A subsequent editorial<\/a>\u00a0 drew an explicit line between this practice and the over-reliance on revenue generated by traffic violations which was condemned in a recent Department of Justice report. In both cases, poorer citizens bear the brunt of the abuse of municipal power.<\/p>\n With my sincere apologies to those good people who have really tried to bring the lessons of Ferguson home and act upon them, a particular aspect of the misdeeds described seemed emblematic of how many in the St. Louis region have reacted to the issues that have risen in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown and the subsequent protests. This passage among others in the article struck me as jaw-dropping:<\/p>\n At a recent demolition hearing, Mayor Mary Louis Carter told one homeowner after another where they needed to focus their work if they wanted to keep their property: “The first emphasis should be the exterior,” she said repeatedly. One house needed new plumbing, electrical work, a new roof and foundation. Do the outside work first, Carter instructed the homeowner’s lawyer, “it’s a long time before he’s going to be able to use lights or plumbing.”<\/p>\n The mayor explained: “We want to bring our property values up and make our neighborhood look nice.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Fix the outside and we don’t need to worry about what is on the inside. The folks who live in the houses can deal with the lack of plumbing as long as we don’t have to see or hear about it – and God forbid, as long as it can be kept from anyone looking to buy a house in the neighborhood.<\/p>\n Isn’t this emphasis on keeping up appearances what lies behind the bellyaching of those folks who, beginning a few days after Michael Brown’s death, began moaning about how all this negative publicity would “hurt” Ferguson and the St. Louis region in general? I can’t help but think it’s funny how I didn’t hear too much about any of these concerned citizens going out of their way to deal with issues of race and abuse of police power before the protesters who were the genesis of Black Lives Matter made a little noise. Maybe if anybody had been paying attention before, we might never have had had to deal with front page “Ferguson” on the national – and international – stage.<\/p>\n