FERGUSON • Long before the nation rested its collective conscience on the protests along West Florissant Avenue, there was a different mobilization going on.
Hundreds of people were moving out of their urban neighborhoods to this north St. Louis County suburb seeking a safe and affordable place to live.
They found it in an isolated corner of Ferguson that was flush with sprawling apartment complexes. Far from Ferguson’s leafy residential streets and quaint downtown, many people didn’t even know the apartments were part of the city until young Michael Brown was shot and killed there Aug. 9.
But not the police. They knew.
After decades of relative calm and stability, the apartments have become a tinderbox for crime. Canfield Green Apartments and the nearby Oakmont and Northwinds complexes are a study of the slow encroachment of poverty and social distress into what had been suburban escapes.
Angela Shaver has witnessed that sea change since she moved into Canfield Green Apartments 20 years ago. The state employee said she raised a prom queen there and sent her off to college.
There used to be a swimming pool. Now, there’s a bullet hole in the door below her.
That shooting, and many others, happened long before all the vigil candles melted in the middle of the street for Brown.
Even as Shaver explained the frequency of gunfire, she was cut off by a sudden blast coming from Northwinds Apartments, a hulking spread with more than 400 low-income units.
Boom!
Shaver paused to listen. No screams. No more shots. She picked up the interview where she’d left off.
“I hate to say I got used to them,” she said of the gunshots.
Ferguson’s crime and poverty rate is lower than some of the other North County municipalities. But the small southeast corner of the city where the apartments are glows bright red on crime maps.
That area along West Florissant Avenue and just east of it accounted for 18 percent of all serious crimes reported between 2010 and August 2012, according to a Post-Dispatch analysis of crime data provided by St. Louis County.
The area accounted for 28 percent of all burglaries, 28 percent of all aggravated assaults, 30 percent of all motor vehicle thefts and 40 percent of all robberies reported in the city of 21,000 people.
It’s a cluster of densely populated complexes that stand apart from the predominantly single-family streets of Ferguson.
On a map, the area sticks out like an appendage, one that was added to Ferguson by annexation. Many of the children who live there aren’t even part of the Ferguson-Florissant school system.
Adding to that isolation, police have blocked off nearly all access roads to the apartments with concrete barriers, fences and gates.
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