In July 2023, The City of St. Louis enacted a new ordinance that will create a city-wide program guaranteeing the civil right to counsel (RTC) for tenants facing the threat of eviction. Tenants’ representation during eviction proceedings is key to helping renters be protected from housing conglomerates that may prey on working-class people.

After several years of organizing and campaigning, in June of 2021, the Medium Security Institution, also known as the Workhouse, was finally closed and those funds were reallocated within the City’s budget. Now that the site is closed, there has been a community-based process to determine what to do with the land and the funds that were used to maintain the site. The Close the Workhouse campaign is now focused on the implementation of that vision.

On multiple occasions, most recently in the spring of 2021, there have been proposals to deploy aerial surveillance technologies (a.k.a. “spy planes”) to monitor St. Louis residents. Grassroots coalitions of concerned St. Louisans successfully defeated that effort in 2021. More recently, a coalition of residents in Gravois Park and other neighborhoods organized to pass legislation aimed at reigning in private drones to serve the same purpose.

In December 2022, after months of advocacy by a coalition of grassroots racial justice organizations, St. Louis City’s Executive Order 75 established the City’s first-ever Commission on Reparations. “The Reparations Commission is a community-driven commission to assess the history of slavery, segregation, and other race-based harms in the City of St. Louis; explore the present-day manifestations of that history; and, ultimately, recommend a proposal to begin repairing the harms that have been inflicted and necessary for the welfare of the City of St. Louis.” Read more about the commission.

For decades, development incentives in St. Louis have been handed out in ways that lack transparency, concentrate resources in areas of economic privilege, and fuel neglect and divestment in some of the poorest areas of St. Louis. In 2023, the St. Louis Development Corporation (SLDC) adopted an equitable development scorecard to improve transparency and incentivize community benefits like affordable housing, historic preservation, and walkability.

We continue to call for an Office of Participatory Budgeting and to have a participatory budgeting process applied to the city’s capital fund. Since the launch of the People’s Plan, we have seen some examples of increased resident participation in spending decisions through processes like the Stimulus Advisory Board and the Rams Settlement Fund Public Engagement. To be clear, this is not the level of participatory budgeting we would like to see for various kinds of spending decisions in St. Louis, in which residents actually get to decide collectively how their tax dollars are spent. But we are hopeful that these small-scale experiments signal a shift to more participatory budgeting processes in the city.