As she emerged from the basement, Tracey Dickerson felt certain her home had been destroyed.

It was May 16, 2025, and an EF3 tornado had, in minutes, torn a nearly 23-mile path through St. Louis, causing the most damage in north St. Louis’ predominantly Black neighborhoods.

Dickerson and her husband, Harvey, had spent years renovating the long-vacant building next door to her in-laws’ family home on Cabanne Avenue in the Academy neighborhood.

But that afternoon, it was clear her husband’s childhood home next door had taken the brunt of the damage.

“I can’t even explain the way that it looked,” Dickerson said months after the storm. “It ripped through that house.”

The tornado damaged more than 5,000 homes. At least 1,000 are so badly wrecked that they will need to be torn down.

Dickerson’s mother-in-law’s home is among those the City of St. Louis says it plans to demolish over the next few years.

“It’s hard because we want to hold on to our legacy,” she said. “A lot of these homes are generational homes.”

In many ways, north St. Louis was the worst place in the city that the tornado could have hit. Long before the twister, the city’s historic, Black communities had weathered different types of storms that are making it nearly impossible to fully recover from the damage that occurred last May.

Homes were undervalued and expensive to insure for residents who had faced decades of redlining, local government disinvestment and white flight. North city has emptied out from its peak in the early to mid-1900s.

Then the tornado touched down, accelerating the area’s vacancy problem, destroying or severely damaging homes and ripping up trees and sidewalks. Now, residents fear their neighborhoods might never be the same — and they don’t see help coming fast enough.

“We want our neighborhood cleaned up,” Dickerson said. “People are still working, people still have lives, kids are still in school — they have to walk and get the bus. … It’s a lot.”

Vacancy uncertainties

It is estimated that a total of 5,000 homes, buildings and other structures were hit by the May tornado. Roughly a fifth of those buildings will need to be demolished. Among them, St. Louis officials estimate about 600 were vacant before the storm hit the area. However, the tornado sharply increased that number: Officials inspecting after the storm found more than 1,400 homes to be vacant.

Mayor Cara Spencer’s administration hoped that any storm-damaged home, vacant or not, would be demolished by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. However, FEMA officials recently told the city that the agency would not cover demolition costs for homes condemned or vacant before the storm.

Empty, tornado-damaged homes slated for demolition have changed the character of many streets in north city, residents told St. Louis Public Radio.

Dickerson is frustrated that her grandchildren cannot play in the yard or go for walks in the neighborhood without seeing a home that’s barely standing. She said she is frustrated by the rate at which the city and state have moved to clean up the area. As of early May, the city had demolished only 90 homes. More than 120 others are slated for demolition and will be paid for with money provided by Missouri, according to a Monday announcement from the city.

“You walk past this house on the corner here, it’s still bricks falling down,” she said. “We want our neighborhood cleaned up.”

According to the nonprofit St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative, there are more than 8,600 unoccupied buildings and over 12,700 parcels of vacant land across the city — a problem that has been prevalent in St. Louis for decades and especially in north St. Louis.

Many of the tornado-damaged vacant properties were severely compromised during the storm. Some residents of the Kingsway East and Academy neighborhoods told STLPR that they complained to the city that those damaged vacant properties crumbled onto their homes, causing more destruction than the storm did.

The tornado has made St. Louis’ vacancy problem worse, but it has been festering for decades in the areas hit hardest — especially in Jeff-Vander-Lou, Walnut Park East, Hyde Park, Wells-Goodfellow, Hamilton Heights, Fairgrounds, the Ville and the Greater Ville. These predominantly Black neighborhoods contain nearly half of all the vacant properties in the city, said Paul Sorenson, co-director of the University of Missouri-St. Louis’ Community Innovation and Action Center.

“You’re going to see an acceleration of vacancy on top of all of these challenges of redlining and spatial racism and out-of-state ownership — and a city that does not have the means, and did not have the means before the tornado, to properly address it,” he said.

How vacancies became a problem

Many Black families in north St. Louis saw vacancies increase in their neighborhoods as an exodus of residents over the past 75 years left the city with abandoned homes, businesses, factories and schools.

“It was already very complicated and a problem — the tornado made it worse,” Sorenson said. “You certainly can talk about the redlining and racism that went into north city looking like it does today. I think vacancy and expanding vacancy is absolutely a part of that.”

St. Louis had a well-established Black population in the early 1900s, particularly in the Ville neighborhood. There were notable churches, lucrative businesses, Sumner High School and Homer G. Phillips Hospital. Many rural Southern Black families moved to the Ville during the first wave of the Great Migration and laid down roots. Black families who moved out of the Deep South to places like St. Louis were fleeing systemic oppression and draconian segregation laws, hoping to find factory jobs.

Although St. Louis was booming for Black families at the time, white developers and Realtors in the city saw the influx as negative for white families in St. Louis, said Colin Gordon, a history professor at the University of Iowa whose book “Mapping Decline” examines the forces that have fueled St. Louis’ urban decay.

“The worry there was with the Great Migration, with the infusion of African Americans from the South, that the neighborhood would grow,” he said. “So what the Realtors were trying to do was basically create a boundary around that neighborhood [the Ville] with these restrictions, so that all of the new migrants had to cram into just that neighborhood, and they couldn’t spread the boundaries.”

Realtor groups created a discriminatory circle shaped like a doughnut around the Ville, and developers began placing racially restrictive covenants on homes that legally kept Black families from moving outside that particular area of north St. Louis, Gordon said.

In 1910, there were about 44,000 African Americans living in St. Louis. A decade later there were nearly 70,000. By 1940, there were more than 100,000 Black people residing in St. Louis. The Black population in north city began to increase toward the mid-1900s, according to the Missouri Historical Society.

At the time, St. Louis was known for its diverse employment base in the Black community, which attracted people to the area.

“When you have a large and vibrant African American community, there’s a lot of economic wealth there — you have African American doctors and dentists and undertakers and barbers,” said Gordon.

As Black families moved into north St. Louis, white families left for St. Louis County in droves from about 1918 until 1930, Gordon said. White flight died down for about a decade due to the Great Depression but picked up again in 1939 at the start of World War II.

At that time, Gordon said, there was a dramatic increase of white families leaving the area after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that racially restrictive housing covenants were illegal under the landmark Shelley v. Kraemer case.

“African American occupancy really spreads across north St. Louis, and African American homeownership increases pretty dramatically,” he said.

On paper, historians say, the 1948 housing discrimination case was a win for Black Americans, but it created more segregated communities because white families left the neighborhoods for new subdivisions in St. Louis County and newly developed municipalities.

“It remained this split labor market, and because whites would not live in north St. Louis, the property values were not very stable,” Gordan said. “So while African Americans could increase their homeownership, they did not get the returns on homeownership that white families were getting — like passing wealth on to the next generation and having a property that increases in value.”

As white families left the area, they took their businesses and economic base with them, spurring Black middle-class families to begin leaving north St. Louis for better housing, jobs and schools.

Population loss catapults the destruction of communities of color, which creates uneven access to opportunities in the city for families, said Ness Sandoval, a demographer at St. Louis University.

“After the tornado, I suggested you are probably going to lose more people because of the aftermath, the aftershock of the city failing to respond,” he said.

According to the Census Bureau’s 2024 American Community Survey, St. Louis has more than 113,000 Black residents, with many of them residing in north city. But the slow cleanup means that they may lose hope and leave north St. Louis. History shows that delayed recovery from natural disasters that hit communities of color the hardest — like after Hurricane Katrina in 2006 in New Orleans and the Eaton wildfire in January 2025 near Los Angeles — leaves them less likely to recover and vulnerable to more vacancies, Sandoval said.

Some families Sandoval spoke with in Fountain Park say their homes that were passed down to them through generations are still vacant because they are struggling to get permits that meet historic preservation standards imposed by the city.

He is concerned about what displacement from north St. Louis could mean long term for the city’s already dipping population. According to 2024 American Community Survey estimates, there are more than 113,000 Black people in St. Louis, a decrease of more than 35,000 from 2014. Sandoval said Black population loss is now becoming a statewide issue. Missouri lost nearly 58,000 Black or African American residents between 2014 and 2024, the latest year of available statewide census data.

“There was this larger trend of African Americans not feeling comfortable, young African Americans not feeling comfortable in the state of Missouri,” Sandoval said.

The NAACP warned Black families in 2017 to consider their safety while traveling in Missouri. The advisory said Missouri was dangerous for them because, at the time, Black motorists were 75% more likely to be pulled over and arrested by law enforcement than white drivers.

Losing generational homes

Three miles away from Dickerson’s home, behind a few boarded-up windows and underneath a slightly leaking roof, sits Jackie DuPree.

The inside of her home in the Penrose neighborhood is quiet, but her bubbly personality fills the room with laughter fueled by jokes with her son. Humor is their way of handling the everyday struggle of piecing their lives back together after the tornado severely damaged the home that has brought stability and wealth to the DuPree family through generations.

“My neighbor called me and said, ‘You need to get home.’ And somebody else called me, and I could tell in their voice something was wrong, but they didn’t want to tell me,” DuPree said. “When I got home and saw my house, I was devastated.”

The 64-year-old St. Louis native wept as she stood in front of her home on May 16. The storm had torn up her chimney, heavily damaged the roof, blown out windows and scattered a few bricks across the lawn.

“I was at a loss, and [I’m] still at a loss,” DuPree said nearly a year after the tornado.

DuPree moved into the spacious three-bedroom house off San Francisco Avenue between North Taylor and North Newstead avenues in August 1965 when she was 3 years old. A white couple lived there before her family of five moved in.

The north St. Louis home was a dream come true for her family. She said the area was quiet, but the people were neighborly. Some white families still lived in the area, but many had moved to other parts of St. Louis and St. Louis County, making room for a new generation of Black families to acquire land and build wealth through homeownership.

Most of the families who were living there over 60 years ago are still there, and as the block captain, DuPree knows them all.

“The lady across the street is still the original member — Pam,” she said while pointing to the location of her home. “Let me see, Joanne, Debbie … Maxine and Albert, they live farther down. Mrs. Lily, down the street, she was here when we moved here.”

Up until May 2025, the multigenerational homes on her block were a symbol of stability in the neighborhood, and many Black homeowners purchased other homes on the block for their children or other family members.

“[My] house got messed up. Next door got messed up. Every house across the street, the back of their house got messed up,” DuPree said.

Some families on the street had home insurance, so they were able to report claims to get home repairs started, but others did not, including DuPree. She had become the owner of her family home after her mother died eight years ago. It was to be passed down to her older siblings first, but they already had homes, so she retrieved a quitclaim deed and assumed the property rights in 2018.

Around March 2025, she had to let her homeowners insurance go because the monthly bills of about $560 became unaffordable, which many families in north St. Louis have done. Last year, the Missouri Department of Commerce and Insurance estimated that up to 67% of homes in three north city ZIP codes could be uninsured, which included the Penrose neighborhood. Families without insurance had to rely on federal, state and local recovery assistance.

“I was able to get help through the Salvation Army and FEMA,” she said. “In the meantime, I filled out every little application I could. I just received information at the end of February saying that I was able to get part of the Rams money to do the roof and windows, and they just came through last week to do the electrical work.”

St. Louis ended applications for its private property debris cleanup program at the end of February. However, that same month, officials in the city’s Recovery Office told the Board of Aldermen at a committee meeting that it was on track to run out of money to repair tornado-damaged homes by April or May. The program received a nearly $4 million boost from American Rescue Plan Act funding, but many of the homes are in the same condition as they were last year. This forced community organizations and neighborhood associations to continue hosting their own neighborhood debris cleanup drives, which some have done almost weekly in the year since the storm.

Mission: St. Louis’ Healthy Home Repair Program awarded DuPree $40,770 to install new storm windows, repair the chimney and replace gutters, siding and the roof. Contractors will also install a new front porch and bathroom lights, ceiling fans and kitchen fixtures.

DuPree is grateful for her home makeover, but she worries for those who cannot repair their properties. She consistently asks herself if the street will ever return to what it was prior to the storm, or if it will have multiple vacant homes like many other blocks across north St. Louis.

This concerns NAACP St. Louis leaders as well.

Last summer, they called out the state’s Department of Commerce and Insurance asking for better oversight on insurance providers and premiums, because they said the overwhelming number of uninsured and underinsured homeowners in north St. Louis is a systemic failure.

Determined to stay

DuPree said she wants to stay in north St. Louis — she only left her distressed home for a few days after the tornado. She said she felt like the storm took a piece of the soul of her Penrose neighborhood away but left a stronger community.

“We all pitched in on Saturday [May 17], the whole neighborhood came out,” DuPree said. “I had stuff all in front of my yard … my neighbor next door had recruited some of her co-workers, and they had everything off my front [yard].”

She hopes her intended home repairs will help revive the area that is now filled with tarped roofs, broken windows, tree stumps and lingering debris. As captain of the 4400 block of San Francisco Avenue, she even persuaded some neighbors to move back to the community and not give up on their homes.

It is time for city officials to make north St. Louis whole again, she said.

“People are over here fighting insurance companies to get back to where we were,” DuPree said. “Everybody else got their houses fixed up, and we are still sitting up here with tarps on our roofs and our windows boarded up.”

St. Louis Public Radio’s Hiba Ahmad contributed to this report.