Broker power: real estate brokers in the St. Louis Model Cities program, 1966–1975

Evaluations of Model Cities have focused on whether federal officials and local planners lived up to the programme’s rhetoric of citizen empowerment. However, as this case study of St. Louis will demonstrate, more attention is needed to the ways that the local real estate sector influenced and frustrated government officials and community activists alike. Policies of disinvestment in mid-twentieth century cities produced a small but powerful group of landlords and real estate brokers in St. Louis, whose near-monopoly control of the housing market hindered grassroots rehabilitation efforts. In 1967, a Black-led community group known as Jeff-Vander-Lou, Inc. (JVL), found that the ‘slumlords’ who dominated their neighbourhood were too powerful to be compelled by municipal tools such as code enforcement. Realizing they could not defeat the landlords, they reluctantly joined them, and crafted a Model Cities demonstration programme that they hoped could improve housing conditions and attenuate the strangle-hold of landlords on their neighbourhood. As this article will detail, this momentary alliance allowed landlords to influence the St. Louis housing policy for Model Cities and beyond.