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Black St. Louisans say the tornado crushed their homeownership dreams 14%
By Andrea Y. Henderson0%
5/15/2026, 10:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 28 faulty reasoning types, including Pessimism Bias, Loss Aversion, and Appeal to Emotion, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 23.1% saturation with 424 hits. Analysis detected 2,442 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,833 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 30.3% and a BS Rank of 14% (14,577 of 16,813 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 86.70% of the article peer group.
As Christy Jefferson-Bey came up to her white-paneled, two-story home in the Penrose neighborhood last month, she did not immediately walk on the lawn or up to the doorway.
She simply glanced at it from the street.
She rarely comes back to the nearly collapsing, tornado-stricken home and was last here in January.
Seeing it in an unrepairable condition gives Jefferson-Bey great anxiety.
“That was home for almost 20 years,” she said as she pointed to the five-bedroom home.
“We moved here in 2007.”
Jefferson-Bey, a native St.
Louisan, always dreamed of owning a home in the city, but she said buying one was difficult because most Realtors tried to steer her and her late husband to north St.
Louis County instead of north city.
A Realtor finally found a property for them off San Francisco and North Taylor avenues, but Jefferson-Bey immediately thought of the violence that plagued the area in the early ’90s.
Then she laid eyes on the block and fell in love.
The older community kept up its properties and yards, and it was in walking distance to Ashland Elementary and the former Mathews-Dickey Boys’ & Girls’ Club.
“This was our ideal place,” the 52-year-old said.
“We had the land outside for the kids to play.
[My husband] was a truck driver — plus he had his own hobbies — so he had two garages back there to do his work and paint his cars.
We had enough room for the five children to run around in.”
But on May 16 last year, she was awakened from her dream as a deadly EF3 tornado tore through her home, leaving a dismantled roof, a missing garage and shredded sidepaneling.
It was one of the worst days of her life, but at the same time, she was hopeful that she could repair her home.
She lost that hope this past fall.
Like Jefferson-Bey, many north St.
Louis residents whose homes were devoured by the storm have had their dream of homeownership slip away.
Some are renting while they wait for repairs or demolition, and others are toying with the idea of renting forever instead of buying another home — something that could further widen the homeownership gap being Black and white St.
Louisans.
Jefferson-Bey had tried to salvage the home.
Her insurance policy covered some expenses, but it was not enough.
Contractors would not take on her scope of work, which pushed back her repair timeline.
Bank financial advisors said she had exhausted all available resources some time before.
She decided to return the home to the bank.
“A tornado happened, now I got to find somewhere to stay … plus I'm supposed to pay my mortgage,” Jefferson-Bey said.
“I'm overwhelmed, I can't.”
Black homeownership
Even before the tornado, Black homeownership lagged behind white homeownership in St.
Louis.
According to the five-year American Community Survey, the Black homeownership rate in St.
Louis is about 41% compared to white homeownership of about 62% — both are slightly below the national average of about 46% and 75%, respectively.
The Black homeownership rate in the city has barely changed since the Federal Fair Housing Act was approved in 1968, which Realtors in the region say is unacceptable.
Although Black homeownership is slightly increasing on the national level, it is still lower than that of any other racial group.
This is concerning for local wealth and inequality expert Ana Kent.
She worries that Black homeowners in north St.
Louis whose homes were affected by the storm might decide to walk away from homeownership.
“That's going to create space for investors to pick up some of these properties that they might be able to get at fairly low values, and then simply, invest in them,” she said.
“They might be putting in a lot of money, which seems like a good thing on the surface, but it might displace other Black homeowners who maybe were able to or wanted to stay in that area.”
She said that in St.
Louis, there are concerning downstream effects of homeownership disparities for Black residents.
According to the most recent U.S. census records, the median conditional homeowner housing value for white St.
Louisans is $225,000 and for Black St.
Louisans is about $125,000.
That could hurt rebuilding efforts.
“If they are insured, an appraiser might come in and give them, perhaps, a lower appraisal value, and thus less money to help them rebuild … and then, of course, there's denial rates for Black buyers,” she said.
“It's really frustrating, especially when the tornado goes and hits this disproportionately Black area, it's just very likely going to exacerbate those already significant gaps.”
Homeownership offers many African Americans financial and physical stability, and it creates generational wealth.
Black families from the Deep South came to St.
Louis during the first Great Migration, looking for better jobs and housing.
North St.
Louis offered that opportunity.
Black homeownership in the area continued to grow during the early to mid-1900s, despite redlining and racially restrictive covenants, which coded Black residents as hazardous or a great risk to white homeowners.
The racist practices that Black St.
Louisans endured over the decades make owning and keeping a home that much more special to them.
However, Kent said the tornado caused so much damage to north St.
Louis’ housing stock that many repairs may be out of reach for residents, which will force them to sell or leave their properties.
This creates an opening to shift homes from owner-occupancy to rental.
“If that happens at scale, it would further reduce Black homeownership and deepen long-standing disparities in wealth and housing stability in St.
Louis,” Kent said.
Losing homes
Jefferson-Bey was also trying to see if she could get her home back with her own funds or with some of the insurance payout after the bank foreclosed on it in the fall.
However, her mortgage company is holding on to the rest of her insurance settlement until her the home is sold.
She has been watching it on the auction market to see if it sells.
As of this week, it is listed for about $10,000.
Jefferson-Bey purchased the home, which was built in 1900, for $75,000 in February 2007.
She put significant work into the home, including renovating her entire basement in March last year.
She loves the idea of one day owning another home.
But she said if the opportunity presented itself for her to stay in the Penrose area or rebuy the home, she would not be able to afford it anymore.
“The insurance company sent me a bill [in January] for what my new premium would have been — it would have been over $40,000 a year,” she said.
“I don't care who you are in working-class America — to pay another bill for 3,000 a month — who's able to do that and where am I supposed to get it from?”
Right now, since the insurance company has zoned her former home as a tornado risk, she said she is focusing on making her rental in the Baden neighborhood feel like home.
It is in the same neighborhood that she grew up in and down the street from her parents’ home, but she says she worries about not being able to pass it on to her children.
Jefferson-Bey saw her home as refuge for her children to come to if they fell on hard times.
“I somewhat kind of feel disappointed, like I failed them, but … their mindset is a little bit different, they're not really interested,” she said.
Moving forward
Down the street from Jefferson-Bey’s house sits another boarded-up home and a flapping tarp without its owner living inside.
Deborah DuPree has not seen the inside of her two-story, red-brick home since the storm.
On a bitter cold morning in early March, she walks up her shifting porch to check her mail and chat with her sister next door.
She is tired of seeing her home crumbling apart.
She wants St.
Louis officials to move quicker and demolish it, so she can move on with her life.
“I hate to see it being torn down, but it's got to come down,” the St.
Louis native said.
“I would like to come back, but you know, if they don't tear it down, I won’t be coming back.”
Over the past few months, she bounced around the city in several rental properties that her insurance paid for.
She has been living in a south St.
Louis rental home since October.
She said it is a change from north St.
Louis, but she is making due.
However, her entire life is on the north side.
Even some of her personal belongings and furniture that she salvaged are at her sister’s home until she can find a permanent location.
DuPree grew up in north St.
Louis, and she purchased her home with her late husband in 2005 — it is right next to her childhood home, which is now her sister’s place.
“My daughter, my grandkids grew up there,” she said.
“I was getting ready to start on my great-grandchild.
He got maybe a year in because he was born in 2024.”
DuPree grieved her house for the first few months after the storm, but a year later and with no progress on the home, her disposition has changed.
She applied for the city’s Private Property Assistance Program last winter, and the city assessed her home on Jan.
2.
This week, city officials released a statement saying they have moved more than 120 homes, including Jefferson-Bey’s former home, into the demolition pipeline.
However, it is unclear if DuPree’s home will be in this round of demolitions.
“My main thing: Tear my house down.
Take the sore site off the block,” DuPree said.
“Maybe the block can look a little better without this house with the roof missing on it.”
In DuPree’s downtime, she searches Zillow for homes to rent or purchase.
So far she has not had much luck.
“I really haven’t found anything in north [St.
Louis],” she said.
“Now, south, you can find plenty, but south is so expensive.”
DuPree’s insurance company had paid her for the Penrose home.
She said the longer the city takes to demolish her home, the more she is inclined to give up on the idea of homeownership.
“I got to thinking, ‘I’m 74 years old, Why do I want a home again?’”
she said.
“Let me go to an apartment.”
She does dream of one day putting a container home on her plot of land, but that is in the unforeseeable future now, just like for many other Black St.
Louisans, including Jefferson-Bey, whose homes were destroyed by the tornado.
“I saw myself being the 75-year-old grandma sitting on the porch fussing at the grandkids and great-grandkids,” Jefferson-Bey said with sadness.
“I saw home.
A piece of me was in there.
Blood, sweat and tears went in there.”
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