I’ve been going on a lot of walks lately. Usually I take a left onto Geyer and keep going straight until I get to Kirkwood Park of take a right on Woodbine and weave my way towards downtown. One day last week though, I hooked a right on Big Bend for whatever reason and ended up in Meacham Park and stayed for a while. And I got to thinking about the place and the park and its history and the Turner School, but mostly I kept thinking about highway that hummed in the background and the virus that lingers in the foreground of everything we do. Then I got really worried.
The Problem
Perhaps some consider COVID-19 a waning threat. A bullet dodged or a tragedy depending on where you live and who you know but nonetheless a fate that has already been determined. I think that’s wrong, that new hotspots will continue to pop up, especially into next fall and winter and, most importantly to us, that Meacham Park remains tremendously vulnerable to the threat. I have no data and I haven’t heard any reports, and I may end up sounding like someone running around, yelling that “the sky is falling.” But until then, I am simply connecting dots. Which dots? Well let’s take a look
Premises:
- Coronavirus effects people with pre-existing conditions more severely.
- Those pre-existing conditions are much more common in places with higher levels of air-pollution.
- Proximity to highways/freeways/interstates are the single most important determining factor in levels of air pollution
- Meacham Park is surrounded by Interstate 44
- Coronavirus has been the most detrimental in black and brown communities for a variety of reasons in addition to air pollution including reliance on public transportation and higher propensity to be essential workers
- Mecaham Park is home to the highest concentration of black people in Kirkwood
- Data is being used by local authorities to direct aid
- Meacham Park’s data is hidden inside the larger entity that is Kirkwood
Conclusion:
Meacham Park is more vulnerable to coronavirus (with the notable exception of nursing homes) than any other community in Kirkwood.
Highways and Coronavirus Briefly Explained:
An excellent article from the LA Times discussing the connection between proximity to freeways and negative health outcomes advises: “Avoid sites within 500 feet — where California air quality regulators warn against building — or even 1,000 feet. That’s where traffic pollution is generally highest, along with rates of asthma, cancer, heart attacks, strokes, reduced lung function, pre-term births and a growing list of other health problems.”
If we take a look at a map of Meacham Park, you can start to see why I’m worried. The majority of the neighborhood falls in this range. The picture only gets worse when you account for the fact that the densest part of the neighborhood, the Townhomes at Stone Crest, lie in closest proximity to Interstate 44. Furthermore the negative health outcomes mentioned above align almost perfectly with the pre-existing conditions that generate the most dangerous coronavirus cases.
Solutions Needed
We need to have a larger discussion about the effects of air pollution and its detrimental effect on the health and cognitive function of residents of Meacham Park (day by day, they are becoming dumber because of the air they breathe and we should all be very very angry about it) at some point very soon. Right now, however, we need to concern ourselves with what this all means for the outbreak respiratory disease that has effected black and brown people multiple degrees worse than their white counterparts. Here are some of the things we need to start working on to prevent a tragedy in the boarders of Kirkwood.
Data Collection
St. Louis County COVID-19 data is currently broken down by zip codes. While this gives us some idea of where the virus is most prevalent, this division also could hide very localized outbreaks. Because Meacham accounts for a relatively small percentage of Kirkwood’s population, a very high, very concentrated rate of infection there may get watered down by the largely white, low-risk population that also call Kirkwood home. Meacham’s outbreak would thus fail to register at a zip code-wide scale. To account for this possibility, Kirkwood must push for Meacham-specific data. Otherwise we run the risk of facing a North-County style crisis in our backyard with none of the public health interventions that are being targeted at the hardest hit areas of our region. At a higher level, we need to measure how much air pollution as actually present in Meacham Park so its residents can make informed decisions about continuing to live there.
Testing
Speaking of data, it is well established that the key to getting the country back on track is more testing. Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Romer seems to have by far the most feasible pathway to return to normalcy and you should really read about his modeling and plan but for our purposes what you need to know about his argument is that it requires massive amounts of testing of asymptomatic people and little else, (even contact tracing after positive tests is not super necessary in the opinion of his model). The implications for us are that we desperately need to test in Meacham Park as frequently as possible. Either a mobile testing center needs to roll up, tests administered and free masks handed out or a temporary testing site needs to be set up in the old Turner School office building to do the same thing. An initiative like this likely falls most directly within the purview of the St. Louis County government, but having our own city council advocate for such a program probably couldn’t hurt to catch their attention.
Centralized Quarantine
Once someone has tested positive, they are supposed to go into quarantine, presumably in their homes. This becomes problematic when other members of the family do not have the virus but have to live with someone who does as intra-family spreading became the most common sources of new cases in both Italy and New York. The easiest solution to this issue is to implement the sort of centralized quarantine that southeast Asian countries came to master. Under this system, anyone who tested positive would be offered stay in what essentially amounts to a hotel (which are very underutilized right now anyway) or some sort of other temporary living facility dedicated exclusively to COVID cases. Food, basic amenities and regular check-ups to monitor recovery are provided. Our centralized quarantine would be optional rather than required like those in Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan but I have no doubt that numerous people would take up the offer rather than running the risk of infecting their families. For our purposes the best (only?) option within the boarders of Kirkwood is the Best Western Kirkwood Inn. New York City set-up this exact sort of program a week or so ago, we, at the very least, can start working through the logistics of how to set up something similar should we need it.
Transportation
In addition to the health burden Meacham Park has to bear, it is simultaneously facing an outsized economic crisis. The neighborhood relies on public transportation to a greater extent than the rest of Kirkwood, a service that has simultaneously been made less frequent and less safe as a result of the virus. The only ways to make this particular situation any better is to 1) bring services (testing, food, etc) to Meacham and 2) to hand out masks (now required by Metro) to ensure that public transportation can be used as needed and used safely.
Food & Economic Aid
A partnership between the Meacham Park Neighborhood Improvement Association and Amigos Cantina (which is now open Tuesday-Saturdays and from which you should really order takeout & black cadillac margaritas) has helped shoulder some of the burden. That program provides free meals to families in the neighborhood and runs through June 13th, which is awesome since the economic fallout from this pandemic will last long past May 18th reopening. But this initiative is also not enough. For one, the meal program is now completely full with new families added to a waiting list (you can donate to that program here and help them get to their funding goal). But systematic broader economic aid also needs to be targeted towards the neighborhood, especially once the expanded unemployment insurance, the extra $600 a month that has been especially helpful to low income workers, expires on July 31st.
Conclusion
The February before last a Kirkwood High School student named Ethan Peter wrote an excellent recent history of Meacham Park for the Kirkwood Call entitled “Sectored Off“. Read it. It documents Kirkwood’s annexation of the community in 1991, its prompt demolition of 2/3rds of the homes there and its construction of a big box store strip mall that would not have gotten built anywhere else in city limits. Most strikingly, however, the article also documents a house-for-a-house program that was offered to residents who sold their homes for demolition. Under the program, owners could receive a new home to replace the one the city wanted. On the surface this program seemed like a good one. And it might have been if not for the strings attached. Harriet Patton, president of the MNIA, explains:
“The house-for-a-house was with restrictions, and the restrictions were you could have a house-for-a-house if it was built in [Meacham Park], not if it was in Kirkwood proper. A person that owned a house in Meacham Park could not be awarded a house on Adams Street in Kirkwood, even though the annexation would [mean Meacham is in] Kirkwood.”
A city-sponsored program that keeps Meacham residents in Meacham and out of “Kirkwood,” after any legal distinction between the two ceases to exist, is explicit segregation. This is “separate but equal” rationale re-constituted as recently as 29 years ago. Kirkwood perpetuated the ghettoization of black and brown people intentionally. They, likely unintentionally, did so under the most polluted air in town. There is no argument to be had. This is our Original Sin and now we must do everything we can to not add to its legacy with the writing so clearly on the wall.