Demolition equipment started appearing in St. Louis neighborhoods just days after a tornado ripped through parts of the city on May 16. Since then, houses and commercial properties determined to be beyond salvation have been coming down across the worst-hit neighborhoods, mostly in wards north of Delmar, the city’s historical race and class dividing line.
Among the structures that had to be demolished was 1323 Walton Ave., the house Margaret and Melvin Williams shared in the north St. Louis neighborhood of Fountain Park. The entire back of the brick home collapsed during the storm, and the front of the house was severely weakened. Within days of the tornado, the city slapped a red sticker on the front door, an indication the building — built in 1906 — was not safe to enter.
“It’s going to have to come down,” Margaret Williams told The Midwest Newsroom a few weeks after the storm.
Still, when the demolition actually happened July 17, seeing her home of 48 years crumble to the ground brought up a lot of emotions for Williams.
“It was the memories, loss, the sadness that I felt so much and so often since May 16,” she said. There was also relief.
“We were very concerned about the front of the house, that it might collapse, and how much of it would collapse, fall towards the street, maybe to the sidewalk,” Margaret Williams said. “Of course, that could endanger anyone or anybody’s pet that happened to be there.”
Margaret Williams is a retired teacher who is active in the Fountain Park community. Melvin Williams runs an auto-repair business across the alley from the lot where their house once stood. Now the couple must rebuild their lives elsewhere.
There is no way to know how many St. Louis residents whose homes were damaged or destroyed will contemplate demolishing their houses. The Demolition Dashboard, managed by STL Vacancy Collaborative, shows the overall number of city demolition permits issued between May 31 and Aug. 31 — the period after the storm — is only slightly higher than the same period in 2024.
The dashboard, which uses data from St. Louis city, showed that permit applications from contractors for private demolitions more than doubled in that three-month period from 2024 as of early September.
The city itself accounts for the majority of the demolition permits, not surprising since its Land Reutilization Authority owns more than 10,000 properties, most of them in the same north St. Louis communities hit by the storms.
While the Demolition Dashboard shows information about permits that have been issued, it does not include applications that have been submitted but not processed or pending. A city spokesman said he did not have details on unprocessed applications.
Experts interviewed by The Midwest Newsroom say every house demolished represents one more vacant property added to the north St. Louis landscape and one more family that might consider leaving the city, which is already shrinking in population. The U.S. Census Bureau’s March population estimate showed St. Louis lost an estimated 21,700 residents between 2020 and 2024, dropping to fewer than 300,000 people.
'Tear it down'
The 12th Ward is an oddly shaped swath of the city that encompasses the Vandeventer and The Ville neighborhoods at its southern end and the Mark Twain neighborhood in the north.
As she drove a reporter through the ward’s Kingsway East neighborhood, Alderwoman Sharon Tyus pointed out homes draped in blue tarps and others open to the elements, left just as they were after the tornado. To illustrate the fickle nature of the storm, Tyus drove along her own street, Maffitt Avenue. It was largely untouched, save for a collapsed front porch on one house.
“That’s a tornado for you,” Tyus said.
At the corner of Marcus and Labadie avenues, the Gillespie Village apartments, a housing community for older residents, suffered a few broken windows. Across the street, it looks like the tornado took a giant bite out of Cote Brilliante Presbyterian Church.
“But I’m so thankful,” Tyus said. “I’m not thankful that the church got hit, but I’m thankful that the senior building did not. The senior building was full at the time, and the church was empty.”
The city estimates about 5,000 structures were damaged across the path of the storm. Tyus said many residents will have to face the fact that their homes are beyond repair.
“Tear it down. Don’t leave it here for another 20, 25 years while people talk about saving the brick,” Tyus said, referring to public lamentations over the loss of the area’s historic character. “I believe in historic renovation, but you can’t rehab something that is beyond rehab, and you can’t build back all-brick.”
She’s well aware that even salvageable homes may not get rebuilt because her ward’s residents did not carry homeowners insurance. About a week after the storm, the Missouri Department of Commerce and Insurance issued an estimate that up to 67% of the homes in three north city ZIP codes were likely uninsured. The list included the Greater Ville, the Ville, Vandeventer and Kingsway East communities in the 12th Ward.
As the longest-serving alderperson in the city, Tyus said, she was working to rid her ward of vacant houses and other abandoned buildings long before the May 16 tornado. She wants to see derelict structures and storm-damaged ones replaced by affordable housing that will keep residents in the 12th Ward.
The orange line across the map shows the path of the May 16, 2025, storm through the region. Click the down-drop arrow to see the breakdown of demolition initiators.
“I’ve been writing some legislation about first right of refusal for those who already live in the neighborhood,” Tyus said. “We build housing that is rent with the option to own. And if you do rent-to-own, you don’t have to have a down payment.”
Tyus said a registry would allow housing officials to ensure that real estate speculators and outside landlords don’t snap up new housing before local residents have a chance at it.
There’s no clear timeline for when this kind of affordable housing will start appearing in her ward and others in north St. Louis. In the meantime, Tyus said, she’s making sure other matters still get attention: Grass-cutting and debris removal are two of the biggest concerns from her constituents, she said.
“People want to stay,” she said. “People ask me all the time: ‘Are you staying? If you’re staying, we’re staying.’”
Looking for hope
Ness Sandoval, a demographer who’s been sounding the alarm about the region’s shrinking population since long before the May 16 tornado, said the city doesn’t have much time to convince people to stay in storm-ravaged neighborhoods.
“The city has about a year to keep hope alive,” said Sandoval, a professor at St. Louis University. “And there has to be some evidence of a rebuilding.”
He said the key to hope lies in neighborhood opportunity structure, which is what families consider when choosing where to live.
“They’re looking at housing. They’re looking for recreational activities, job activities for younger people. Is this school providing a good education for my child? Is my child actually safe in the school? So it’s the net of opportunities that are out there,” Sandoval said.
He said the city experienced a demographic shock when people left the city in the immediate aftermath of the storm. The loss could be greater by May 2026.
“If we are here one year from now, and we’re still talking about getting debris cleaned up, then you’re going to see these aftershocks emerge,” Sandoval said, predicting the city could eventually lose up to 8,000 people in the absence of significant reconstruction progress.
“That would represent a significant failure on the part of the city,” he said. “And city leaders are naive if they think those families are going to come back.”
Ness said the 14 hardest-hit census tracts —neighborhoods north of Delmar — represent about 10% of the St. Louis population.
Gail Brown, a real estate broker with clients in north St. Louis, shares Sandoval’s concerns about families, many with generational ties to their neighborhoods, opting to leave the storm-damaged areas.
“There’s still rubble and debris and trash around in these areas,” Brown said. “How long are you going to put up with that if you don’t know or have a schedule of when that is going to transition or that’s going to change?”
In a STLPR report about debris removal, Michael Jones, a business owner who's been donating services to help north city recover, expressed his dismay.
“I own property in New Orleans, Louisiana. If you ride through the Lower Ninth Ward, parts of it still look like Katrina just left," Jones said. “I knew when I was riding down there (north St. Louis) Friday on May 16, that how it looked right then was how it's going to look for years.”
In the same article, resident Gwen Hudgins expressed her frustration about the city's response.
“I thought they would have been moving; they are moving slow as ever. They want us to leave, that's all I can say. They want us to leave,” she said.
Speaking at a town hall meeting presented by Nine PBS on Aug. 18, the city’s chief recovery officer, Julian Nicks, said:
“Our goal is to keep people in their neighborhoods and try to help them restore and rebuild. That is a top-priority objective that was stated by Mayor (Cara) Spencer very early into the tornado and remains a guiding principle tied to recovery on this.”
Brown, who is also a Land Reutilization Authority commissioner, said she is waiting to see real action.
“I have not seen nor heard of an overall plan, but if there is one, I want to be a part of it,” she said.
'Still a gap'
In early June, Missouri legislators approved $100 million in storm relief for St. Louis in response to the tornado. Soon after, the St. Louis Board of Aldermen approved $30 million in interest from the Rams settlement for tornado relief. Of that, $20 million was set aside for immediate debris removal, housing stabilization and repairs.
As the clearinghouse for the city’s federal, state and local housing and development funds, the Community Development Administration is in charge of disbursing the recovery money. Executive Nahuel Fefer said the CDA was deeply engaged in many north St. Louis neighborhoods and had several housing initiatives in the pipeline even before the tornado struck.
“We knew that this geography had a housing crisis before the tornado that has been exacerbated by the tornado,” Fefer said. “So we had a lot of contracts already in place with a lot of the organizations that have been on the front lines of response.”
Fefer said the CDA pivoted about $5.4 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds to provide tarp and board services for homeowners and rental properties impacted by the tornado, and allocated $1.2 million in Community Development Block Grant funds to provide hotel vouchers in partnership with the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis. Additional Community Development Block Grant money paid for debris and tree removal and home repairs.
“We’ve worked with all of our grantees to accelerate the deployment of funds to support tornado recovery efforts,” he said.
Critics have said the patchwork of city programs is insufficient. Efforts have been shored up by volunteers, churches, community activists and advocacy groups who have distributed supplies, cleared debris and matched people in need with temporary housing. The People’s Response, an initiative spearheaded by Action St. Louis and For the Culture STL, was among the first to mobilize after the storm struck on a Friday afternoon.
“We sort of assumed The People’s Response was going to be a weekend effort to stand in the gap, and that gap continued for weeks and months, and there is still a gap,” said Kayla Reed, executive director of Action St. Louis, during the Nine PBS town hall meeting.
At that meeting, Spencer said the Federal Emergency Management Agency, “while not making people whole,” has supplied about $30 million in relief funding.
On Sept. 4, she provided an update about how the balance of the interest from the Rams settlement not already earmarked would be allocated:
- $5.35 million for dumpsters to aid in debris removal
- $5 million to repair public and nonprofit vacant housing units
- $1.65 million to pay of staffing and consulting at the city's Office of Recovery
Weeks earlier, at the August town hall meeting, Spencer said debris removal carries a high price tag.
“We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars to do the work we need to do just to get the debris out of our communities,” the mayor said. In July, she asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to aid in debris removal.
In an email dated Sept. 4, city spokesman Rasmus Jorgensen told The Midwest Newsroom that of the $100 million from the state of Missouri, “much of it will have to go to debris removal in some form, but much depends on what happens with our request for assistance from the Army Corps of Engineers. There is no finalized answer on these dollars yet."
At a Sept. 4 Board of Alderman meeting, Nicks outlined a three-phase timeline for recovery:
- Phase 1: Respond (May to July 2025), which involved meeting immediate needs
- Phase 2: Restore (2025-2027), which involves debris removal, housing repair and infrastructure repair
- Phase 3: Reimagining (2027-2025), which will involve long-term housing solutions and business corridor planning and development.
Afterward, during the public comment portion of the session, Melanie Marie of The People's Response was critical of the timeline.
"Families cannot live on vague promises. They need to know when they will have shelter."Melanie Marie, The People's Response
"Between May 2025 and May 2027, it’s just not enough," she said, reading from a statement. "Phase two of recovery cannot mean delay, denial or any more confusion. It must mean direct support now. It must mean an accountable housing plan with measurable deadlines and it must mean transparency, so that we the people most impacted can see with our own eyes how recovery is being delivered.
Several residents — many wearing The People's Response T-shirts — called for the city to allocate all of Rams settlement money — more than $290 million — toward rebuilding north St. Louis.
Julia Allen, cofounder of the neighborhood nonprofit 4TheVille, was among them.
"Now is the time for you, as our elected officials, to act, and vote to give all of the Rams money for the rebuilding of our North Star, North St. Louis," Allen said. "We realize it will take billions of dollars and time to rebuild North City, but the Rams money — all of it — is a good start."
Eyeing the exit
Cicely Hunter and her husband were already thinking about leaving the city of St. Louis before the tornado struck. The couple and their twin 1-year-old toddlers lived in a rented West End loft apartment near the intersection of Union and Delmar, a neighborhood that still bears the scars of the May 16 storm.
“I would prefer to be in the city, but it just didn’t pan out that way for us,” Hunter said. “And it’s just gotten harder with the tornado, because things are flying off the market very quickly. Especially houses that were move-in ready and in our price range.”
The Hunter family falls into the demographic group that Sandoval said St. Louis needs in order to stabilize the population and grow. She is a historian at the Missouri Historical Society and is close to completing a doctorate at Saint Louis University.
“If your professional class is being impacted like this, you can imagine what’s happening with working-class families,” Sandoval said. “In terms of the magnitude of loss, it’s going to come from those families who are taking children with them. And the city is naive to believe that these families are going to come back there.”
Hunter and her husband are house-hunting in Ferguson. She repeated her regret about leaving the city and said she hopes other families rooted in the north St. Louis community will be able to stay.
“I do get the sense that the community wants to stay, and I think that they’re gonna do what they can to make sure that they are able to stay, because they understand not only the history, but the fork in the road that we’re at right now,” Hunter said.
Sandoval is worried that St. Louis officials don’t see that fork in the road.
“I’m not sure that the city really truly understands the importance of these 14 neighborhoods,” Sandoval said, referring to the hardest-hit communities. “That energy to rebuild, the resilience after a disaster? People want to rebuild, and so you have to capitalize on that collective efficacy and go with it and build. And it doesn’t last forever.”
'A lot of vacant ground'
The Demolition Dashboard shows a range of costs for bringing down a structure in St. Louis.
A six-family apartment building on Aubert Avenue in Fountain Park (built in 1919) cost $75,000 to demolish. A single-family home on Natural Bridge Avenue in the Greater Ville (built in 1905) cost $6,000 to demolish.
Margaret and Melvin Williams paid $9,500 out-of-pocket to demolish their home — money they might not get back because FEMA generally does not cover demolition on private property. As reported by The Midwest Newsroom in June, the couple is among hundreds of homeowners affected by the tornado who did not have homeowners insurance. They could not afford to rebuild.
With the increase in privately initiated demolition permits issued after the storm, many families could be in the same position as the Williams: No money to rebuild. Just enough to tear down their home.
Brown wants to know what the future holds for neighborhoods filled with empty lots.
“I’m looking desperately to see if the city is going to try to pull these lots together, call for proposals from developers,” she said. “A lot more houses are going to be demolished, so you’re going to have a lot of vacant ground.”
She's worried about people who want to stay.
“People have held on to this property for so long, but I just see that slipping away,” Brown said. “To keep people here and keep that hope going, they’ve got to have something to believe in.”
Margaret Williams said she and her husband are not sure what they’ll do with their empty lot yet. In the meantime, they have found a house in The Gate District — a neighborhood in Ward 7 that abuts Lafayette Park and Compton Heights — where Melvin Williams grew up. They were able to secure financing for the modest home, built in the early 2000s. A GoFundMe campaign started by their daughter is helping the couple settle into their new life.
“We had to look to St. Louis County as a possible choice,” Margaret Williams said. “But we wanted to stay in the city and we were just blessed to actually be able to do that.”
The Midwest Newsroom is an investigative and enterprise journalism collaboration that includes St. Louis Public Radio, Iowa Public Radio, KCUR, Nebraska Public Media and NPR. There are many ways you can contact us with story ideas and leads, and you can find that information here. The Midwest Newsroom is a partner of The Trust Project. We invite you to review our ethics and practices here.
METHODOLOGY
To report this story, Holly Edgell consulted demolition permit application data from the city of St. Louis. Using the Demolition Dashboard, data journalist Daniel Wheaton analyzed the data to show how and where permit applications increased after the May 16, 2025, tornado that struck St. Louis.
Edgell conducted an interview with Margaret Williams, whose story Edgell told in a previous article that discussed homeowners insurance in the wake of the May 16 tornado. In the first half of August, Edgell visited, logged and photographed sites of properties where demolition took place. She interviewed a realtor, a demographics expert and a senior St. Louis official charged with leading development and rebuilding efforts for the city. On Aug. 18, Edgell attended a town hall meeting hosted by Nine PBS where she heard accounts of tornado survivors and responses from elected officials, including the St. Louis mayor. She also interviewed an alderwoman who represents one of the wards hardest hit by the storm.
REFERENCES
St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative Demolition Dashboard
St. Louis Public Radio tornado coverage
St. Louis Address and Property Search
St. Louis Board of Aldermen: Budget & Public Employees Meeting (Sept. 4, 2025)
TYPE OF ARTICLE
News — Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
