urbanSTL

And how did the STL region do? Federal cuts are leaving states and locals to pick up weather and flood monitoring responsibilities - are we OK with that?
https://balancedweather.substack.com/p/federal-cuts-are-leaving-states-and

https://www.stlpr.org/government-politi ... ery-delays

I’ve said this last week on LinkedIn

The interactive map is nice. Actually kind of impressed how clean the streets, sidewalks, and lots are. 

dbInSouthCity wrote: ↑

4:07 PM - 17 days ago

https://www.stlpr.org/government-politi ... ery-delays

I’ve said this last week on LinkedIn

This is super interesting and frustrating.  

Is it not possible (illegal?) to use some of that very money to hire a third-party expert to admin its usage?

So Cara now extends the long line of inept mayors. Awesome. I was wrong, she sucks.

Not to absolve Mayor Spencer, but I'm convinced a resurrected Mayor Raymond J. Tucker in partnership with Jesus Christ Himself couldn't have done much better. At every level of government and across multiple bureaus within each you find an inability to carry out core public services. Federal, state, and local, we've had 40+ years of disinvestment, defunding, and privatization explicitly intended to shrink the size and capacity of government to the point of irrelevance. 

The obvious difference between StL and the local munis mentioned in the NPR article should be obvious but of course is never mentioned: those places get effective public services, including disaster relief, because their citizens have the means and the will to fund them and staff them with competent people. North City is stricken with multigenerational poverty driven by capitalist and government disinvestment, and the rest of the city, central corridor excluded, isn't much better off. In other words, programs for poor people become poor programs, with the added benefit for developers that once the surplus population is fully displaced they'll be able to snatch up large tracts of land for a song, achieving by natural disaster what Paul McKee failed to do the old fashioned way, via long-term investment mixed with legal subterfuge and public corruption.

There is nothing new here. It’s gone exactly as expected with someone who is indecisive and impulsive.

dbInSouthCity wrote: ↑

2:21 AM - 17 days ago

There is nothing new here. It’s gone exactly as expected with someone who is indecisive and impulsive.

I will have to disagree. You should go see DeBaliviere Place where there are numerous buildings with little to no action since May 16, 2025. It is all due to insurance adjusters who are not budging and taking their own sweet little time. It was not due to lack of money or not due to lack of expertise to run a comprehensive and urgent recovery.

We have been trying to find attorneys who would deal with HOA, reconstruction delays and insurance companies, not single attorney was interested in St. Louis. Why is that?

Recovery takes time. a long time
The demographic of the area hit by the tornado is of owners who were not insured or under insured
Ask Floridians/ Californians/N Carolinian's regarding reconstruction from a natural disaster

Everyone knows the Saw VI was right about insurance companies. People will look you dead in the eye and act like what they do isn't violent lmao.

Sent from my SM-S936U using Tapatalk

BarryGlick wrote: ↑

3:39 AM - 17 days ago

Recovery takes time. a long time
The demographic of the area hit by the tornado is of owners who were not insured or under insured
Ask Floridians/ Californians/N Carolinian's regarding reconstruction from a natural disaster

DeBaliviere Place owners were adequately insured and yet there has been little to no progress.

State Farm is the community villain. Chubb insurance was the best and most expensive, others have been OK. Travelers has a decent rep as well. 

Homeowners have had to act as their own project managers to keep things on track. Seeing this so much where households have little to no knowledge of construction and are being taken advantage of. From cost estimates to timelines... It exacerbates the divide

I am curious if there is any sort of documented evidence of how they performed tornado recovery from the last big city Tornado, the 1959 event. Is there data on how long recovery took...what resources they used...etc etc. Is it possible to look at both events to compare/contrast meaningfully.

I hate to be an AI bro but after reviewing the STL Recovers page and dashboards, I just know someone is wasting a ton of time doing something that a Claude could do in 15 minutes. 2,400 request "awaiting scope prioritization". 

That's the building division in a nutshell. two employees working the carbon copy receipts table, one rolling up physical blueprints for storage... etc etc. 

May 16th marks 1 year since we got displaced from our DeBaliviere Place condo. There has been no progress in the repairs and yet we have to pay HOA. 

Surprisingly I was not able to find any attorney who was willing to fight a case for me.

Updated assessment from NWS. At 1.8 miles wide, the EF3 is in the top ten widest tornados on record. Peak winds of 152mph.

President was in China, that took all the air

stlgasm wrote: ↑

4:12 PM - 10 days ago

It's baffling that there has hardly been ANY national coverage of the tornado aftermath.  I feel like if this disaster happened in just about any other US city, we'd be hearing more about it. Especially since there's so many angles to this ongoing story - the race factor, city/suburb dichotomy, local, state and federal political implications, FEMA's inaction, and so much more. I would think the major national news outlets would be paying closer attention. 

Maybe local officials should speak up more on this hold feet to the fire. Basically shame the officials into doing something.

The insurance industry sends signals when a market is in trouble. You just have to know how to read them.

Here is one: the loss ratio. It measures how much of every dollar in premiums gets paid back out in claims. When that number climbs toward 100 percent, something is wrong. When it crosses 100 percent, insurers are losing money in that market. And when insurers lose money in a market, they do what any business does: they raise prices or they leave.

In the four North St. Louis ZIP codes at the center of this story, the loss ratio went from 67.9 percent in 2021 to 88.5 percent in 2022 to 101.4 percent in 2023. The state's own data showed that crossing happening in real time.

https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/local ... 85ce8fb69f

This is a BIG TIME article. It gets to the crux of the issue regarding non-insured homes. The state knew that those 4 zip codes had many homes non-insured. Is the state at fault for not enforcing?

Or, are the residents at fault for trying to get by without homeowners insurance?

Great article.

whitherSTL wrote: ↑

3:21 PM - 1 day ago

This is a BIG TIME article. It gets to the crux of the issue regarding non-insured homes. The state knew that those 4 zip codes had many homes non-insured. Is the state at fault for not enforcing?

Or, are the residents at fault for trying to get by without homeowners insurance?

Great article.

What would there have been for the state to enforce? Home insurance isn’t a requirement.

I hear you. Although it is a requirement to get a mortgage or refinance.

Right, and many of these houses were passed down through poverty-stricken conditions with the owners themselves, not to mention decreasing home values/divestment all around them. The state could've intervened, even on a small scale, if they gave half a you know what