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In recent decades, the United States has experienced an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather.

Just the first six months of 2025 has been the costliest on record for major disasters in the U.S., driven by huge wildfires in California and storms that battered much of the rest of the country, including St.

Louis.

On May 16th, 2025, an EF3 tornado ripped through the St.

Louis metropolitan area.

It traveled over 20 miles with peak winds reaching 152 miles per hour.

3,000 trees in Forest Park were ripped from the ground or damaged.

Five people lost their lives.

Entire neighborhoods on the north side were left uninhabitable, leaving families with little or no means to rebuild.

-So, back here is where the tornado picked the roof up.

-When natural disasters strike, it's traumatic and devastating for everyone impacted.

But in primarily black neighborhoods, residents suffer disproportionate harm due to historical and systemic inequities that leave them more vulnerable and with fewer resources for recovery.

We are like the, for lack of a better term, the lost children of the city.

Mother Nature cracked the corner of the steps here, I mean the porch.

Me being here so long, I could probably walk through here and I can tell who's coming back and who's not coming back.

But there's a good 40% that's probably not.

Jerome Dickerson Sr.

has lived in the Academy neighborhood in North St.

Louis his entire life.

And according to history, his eyeball estimate of losing a large percent of his neighbors due to the May 16th tornado may be right.

Just look down river to New Orleans.

[MUSIC] In August, on a dreary rainy day, survivors gathered at the site of the Industrial Canal levee failure in the Lower Ninth Ward.

to mark 20 years since Hurricane Katrina left most of the Crescent City underwater.

In many parts of New Orleans, the physical scars are healed.

But in the Lower Ninth Ward, a close-knit black community, what was destroyed when the levee broke is undeniable today.

You see this community, the Lower Ninth Ward where the most homeowners was at?

Look how that look 20 years later.

That's the travesty.

In the past it has been said that Katrina was an equal opportunity disaster.

80% of the city flooded.

We had over 100,000 houses that were impacted.

And this was in neighborhoods throughout the city, including, you know, very affluent neighborhoods and lower-income neighborhoods.

But if we look at who was able to come back, it tells a different story in that recovery throughout the 20-year process has been quite uneven.

The food tastes the same.

Yes, we're still second-line and we're still having Mardi Gras.

All of that is taking place.

But returning home, I return home to a different New Orleans.

When I think about it, I always think about it as, you know, New Orleans is your favorite dress.

And you don't take your favorite dress and just throw it anywhere.

You take your dress to the cleaners.

You know, you want to make certain it is pristine.

But it came back to New Orleans and she wasn't pristine.

She didn't look like she used to look.

We came back to economic racism.

Before the storm, the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans was known for having one of the highest rates of Black home ownership in the city.

Generations of families grew up there.

This was a community built through persistence despite decades of segregation, redlining, and underinvestment.

And this is when you came back to see the damage?

- Yes, this is when we initially came back, the very first time that we came back to see the damage during Hurricane Katrina.

- Nikki Napoleon, now a grandmother, was a young mom with school-aged kids in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina forced her and her large extended family to evacuate.

I lived in Lower Ninth Ward all my life.

Homes have not come back.

People have not come back.

There isn't any vibrancy.

The ability to recover, rebuild from Katrina, was due in part to resources people already had.

Sure, higher wealth neighborhoods had households with insurance proceeds and existing savings to help them come back to New Orleans.

But neighborhoods like Lakeview, which was 94% white when it flooded due to a different Katrina levee failure, didn't rise like a phoeNicks from its own ashes just because of individual wealth.

There were other resources at play.

In New Orleans we had, let me say that another way, that the recovery programs deepened the pre-Katrina inequities.

The Road Home Program was an eight billion dollar federal grant to help Louisiana homeowners rebuild following Katrina.

Grants were offered to repair, replace, or buy out homes, but for many families, the process was slow and frustrating.

And in some neighborhoods, especially lower income black communities, recovery funds often fell short of what was needed to truly rebuild.

The formula for how much you would get was based on the pre-Katrina market value of your home.

And it was not based on the costs of rebuilding.

So if you lived in a higher-valued neighborhood, you know, your grant would be larger.

Pre-Katrina, the Lower Ninth Ward was home to more than 14,000 residents.

Almost 100% of them were Black.

20 years later, the Lower Nine has lost 65% of its population.

It's now home to just 5,000 people.

There are families that want to come back home, and they did not have the financial means to return home.

The Road Home Program's policies tied recovery money to an historically unequal housing market.

No matter the neighborhood, the cost to rebuild a home destroyed by a hurricane costs the same.

Pre-Katrina inequity decided who didn't get to come home.

When the tornado hit, you can see where it's pushed that wall out all along here.

In present day North St.

Louis, residents are experiencing similar effects from pre-tornado inequities.

North St.

Louis has faced decades of private disinvestment and discriminatory housing policies.

There were no laws like they were in the Deep South, but St.

Louis was just as segregated as any city in the Deep South.

Banks gave the loans, but the government would back those loans and would guarantee them, but they would not guarantee loans in those areas that were rated red.

In the mid-1930s, the Homeowners' Loan Corporation deemed Black-owned homes in a neighborhood hazardous and labeled them red.

Redlining was one of several housing practices and policies which limited mortgage access to Black families, depreciated property values, and created patterns of residential segregation that exist today.

Many economists, many sociologists trace the wealth gap to this particular problem because Blacks were not able to buy houses because that's the number one way people build wealth.

And if you do not have a house, it makes it very hard to build wealth because you can't pass that on.

Black families who could often bought homes directly from sellers on high-interest, high-risk, no-equity contracts.

We're in the 5200 block of Enright.

Started with my grandmother and grandfather in 1952, I think it was, that they moved from Clarksdale, Mississippi to St.

Louis to this house.

Yvonne Meeks and her niece, Keesha Glover, both grew up in this house in the Academy neighborhood.

Academy is similar to New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward in that it's a black middle-class community with many owner-occupied residences.

It's nestled between Union Avenue to the west, Kings Highway to the east, Martin Luther King to the north, and Del Mar Boulevard to the south.

All of us can come together, you know, to support one another.

Their neighbor, Larry Powell, is a retired St.

Louis firefighter and Vietnam vet.

He's lived in Academy for 16 years.

This neighborhood was on the upswing.

We're on the Enright.

Just about all of these houses were rehabbed.

Take Kensington.

We were all rehabbing our houses there.

It was a very quiet, pleasant neighborhood.

At the time of the storm, Keesha Glover was living here with her family and her mother.

The tornado did not spare their home.

Whew, quite a bit.

It was a lot.

It was a lot of damage.

Bricks.

We had no, we don't have, we still don't have a roof yet, but it was no roof.

We lost the whole back end from the back end on the left hand side all the way around to the right hand side.

I mean, bricks was everywhere.

Just lost everything.

What's your plan?

To rebuild.

How come?

Because, I mean, I don't want to.

This is more than a home to Keesha and Yvonne.

It's their family's story, their history, their legacy.

It's generational wealth that began with Keesha's great-grandparents.

Like Katrina, this tornado tore through homes of the rich and the poor, through white and black neighborhoods.

And the recovery?

It's just as uneven.

Residential segregation here isn't separated by a canal.

It's separated by Delmar Boulevard, the Delmar Divide.

And no matter which side you live on, the need to rebuild your home, the desire to reclaim your neighborhood is equally as great.

This street divides whose homes have financial value and whose do not.

And I love these old fireplaces.

It's a bad situation.

Now we have houses here that have been destroyed, devastated, and simply put, most people here do not have the means to remove all the debris, as you can see around you, nor the means to repair their homes.

Larry's house sustained a tremendous amount of damage from the storm.

And as you can see here where that wall was pushed out, you know, compromising the structural integrity of the house.

Fortunately, Larry has insurance.

But the effect of those residential segregation policies from almost 100 years ago still linger.

Property values north of Delmar are lower than those south of Delmar.

What does that mean for Larry?

The value of his house isn't worth the cost of repair.

Did you think this wasn't repairable?

Were you told by your insurance company it wasn't repairable?

Yes, yes it was totaled.

And you were going to go?

Yes.

We see what New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward looks like 20 years after Katrina, when restricted resources prevented black residents from coming home.

Limited resources in North St.

Louis could force residents like Larry and Keesha's family to walk away from their home, their neighborhood, leaving entire blocks vacant and a population decline of a community this city can't afford to lose.

St.

Louis City is number one in the country today from 2020 in terms of population loss among large U.S.

cities surpassing San Francisco.

In fact, the city of St.

Louis has lost more than half its population since 1970, but the black population has declined even faster in the last two decades.

The historically redlined and lower-valued properties in North St.

Louis neighborhoods are trapped under the systemic trend of disinvestment, forcing many residents, families, to leave and build their lives elsewhere.

And now this.

At other times, it's fairly large.

But now you have this intersection between neighborhoods that had historic population loss and that momentum is interacted with this extreme event.

But I think the concern is the long-term impact of what happens here as we start to see how the city's responding or not responding, how other institutions are responding, not responding, and what happens to this collective efficacy if people get tired and they lose interest or just feel like they they've been defeated.

Not feeling supported or even wanted by their city is something black New Orleanians experienced shortly after the storm.

In addition to receiving an inequitable amount of FEMA dollars, then New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin began a rebuilding planning process while most people were still evacuated.

It was this discussion to say, "Hey, New Orleans had been losing population for decades before the storm."

And, you know, talk about, "Hey, maybe we shouldn't allow everywhere to rebuild."

In January 2006, just four months after the levees broke, the Times-Picayune published the city's desired rebuilding plan on its front page, what would be known as the Green Dot Map.

Large green circles marked neighborhoods that planners said might be turned into open spaces, areas too damaged they claim to rebuild, suggesting a moratorium on building permits there.

And the idea was to see if neighborhoods could prove their viability before building permits would be issued to allow people to rebuild.

The green dots were put in areas that were very heavily damaged and there was a big green dot in the Lower Ninth Ward but there wasn't a green dot in Lakeview, right?

To the people of the Lower Ninth Ward scattered across the country, those green dots meant something else.

That their communities, their homes, their history might be erased.

- After Hurricane Katrina, they didn't want black faces.

After Hurricane Katrina, they didn't want poor working people back.

After Hurricane Katrina, there was never an intention to rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward.

Humanity.

Humanity, value our humanity.

Respect that you have families that have been greatly impacted by Hurricane Katrina and you had, you know, your billionaires and your millionaire clubs who are basically saying, "What can we do with this land?

How can we put casinos here?

How can we put hotels here?"

Then you had other groups who were saying, "No, it should be green space."

But they didn't ask the people.

No one discussed that with the people.

So you had all of these closed-door discussions centered around what we should do with the land that did not belong to them.

Under pressure, Mayor Ray Nagin quickly backed away from the plan, but the damage was done.

The Green Dot map became a symbol of mistrust, a reminder that recovery for many was not just about rebuilding houses, it was about fighting for the right to come home.

But for survivors of natural disasters, coming home is more than just rebuilding a house.

It's rebuilding everything.

Things you can see and things you can't.

Resilient is a word that has been overused.

It is a word that we utilize to cover up the pain.

It's a word that we have been so intentional about saying just to say, "I'm okay," when we're actually not.

Mental health isn't just the levees broke and I'm going to therapy.

Mental health is the levees broke.

How do I handle everything that's happening, it's shifting in my body.

It's making certain that when families come back, they're coming back to safe communities.

It means when families are returning, they're returning to a school system that it isn't disruptive or dysfunctional.

That's what mental health means.

It isn't just a one-time fix.

Mental health means stability.

(laughing) - That was so funny.

- Let's go, Bubbles, run!

- Nikki returned to New Orleans and she lives near the Lower Nine in New Orleans East.

But since Katrina, her large extended family has scattered, an aftershock disrupting a whole community of close-knit families.

Psychologists describe this as the loss of the secure base, the feeling that there is a safe, stable place and people to return to.

Big Mama, everyone spent time by Big Mama's house.

She's the one who cooking up red beans, succotash, gumbo.

And so you can go over by your mama house, you know, by your grandparents' house.

You can go over there and you see your family members, your cousins, and you're all close.

And your cousins knew your cousins.

You know, everybody knew one another.

But now, one of the biggest things that have happened is that massive rip that can't be sewn back together is that family unit.

[Music] I don't think tomorrow.

You got school tomorrow.

No, I get three-day weekend.

Oh, three-day weekend.

North St.

Louis residents affected by the May 16th tornado are also at risk of fractured family support systems.

The Dickersons are another multi-generational family living in Academy.

Coming to my grandma's house with my sister as a kid after school, coming to get, you know, snacks.

Grandma definitely fed us snacks, had an ice cream, gave us a little dinner before we go home and get dinner.

Jerome Jr.

's three young children hope to be the fifth Dickerson generation growing up here in Academy.

The family was renovating grandma's house for Jerome and his wife to raise their family just around the corner from their grandparents.

We had a lot of roof damage, water damage, got into the interior of the housing.

So a lot of walls gotta be gut, flooring, just a full gut just to get it back livable.

(gentle music) - Even before May 16th, experts believed families like the Dickersons living and raising children in the city of St.

Louis were essential to fostering the city's population growth and stabilizing neighborhoods.

But aftershocks from the tornado could include a greater exodus of families from the city.

The aftershock is a year, 18 months later, where people leave, not because of the tornado, but because of the lack of response to fix the neighborhoods and to show hope that these neighborhoods will be rebuilt.

And so if we're here in a year from now and we're still talking about neighborhoods that need to be cleaned up from debris, you're going to lose that collective efficacy.

People are going to give up and saying why am I working this hard when the city itself is not investing at the same level of energy.

Well without further ado, Mayor Spencer.

Julian Nicks is the newly appointed Chief Recovery Officer for the City of St.

Louis.

St.

Louis Mayor Cara Spencer created Nicks' role to ensure there was a person in her office thinking about recovery day in and day out.

The most important issue is we have over 4,500 households that were impacted by the tornado that are in dwellings that at the time where FEMA came in are labeled uninhabitable.

So first and foremost, our goal is right now is just to make sure people have safe housing by winter.

That is a pretty explicit focus of our team.

It's natural to be thinking about, well, where do we need to be doing five or ten years from now, but we're focused immediately on the public safety and people threat impact of the tornado that's here immediately.

Nicks has his work cut out for him.

Often the hope city government must provide doesn't or can't work at the same speed that's needed by those left in the rubble after a natural disaster.

Are you feeling that support from community and from your city government to rebuild?

No, I feel that from certain people.

From certain people.

Not the city, not the government, no.

Certain people that don't even stay over here.

Those are the ones that's been helping us.

Those are the ones that's given us hope.

Those are the ones.

-Keesha is referring to a grassroots volunteer effort of neighbors helping neighbors.

It's happening in communities all over North St.

Louis.

-So, today, we're cleaning brick, and this is all brick that fell from this home here.

So, we are scraping off old mortar, you know, old debris that's left on the brick so that our masonry team can get it on even faster, and they're not doing that work.

-Residents from opposite sides of Ward 10, divided by Delmar, have united to support each other as they navigate the messy process of cleanup, organize weekly volunteer efforts, raise funds to do work insurance companies didn't deem worth doing.

I thought I had to raise my house.

And they came by with their experts and I'm in a position now where I'm going to rehab it.

There's legacy and history here that I feel like needs to be preserved, both in the buildings but also in the families that live here.

With help from neighbors, volunteers, and trusted contractors, the hope that residents need to see the progress that must take place to prevent reverse migration from this shrinking city can be found at Keesha's.

Keesha's family home now has a new roof, bricks were saved, and the back of the house has been rebuilt, put back together.

Never underestimate the power of one.

Just look downriver to New Orleans.

And I remember it's the Blevins family.

And when those two individuals rebuilt, there was another home that came back.

And so when we talk about rebuilding, we look at it from a point of, I don't wanna be this only person here.

But that one person on that block brings back hope.

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