One City, Two Plans: Compare and Contrast of 2001 Lafayette Square & JeffVanderLou Plans

Both the Lafayette Square and the JeffVanderLou “Neighborhood Plans” were adopted by the City of St. Louis in 2001, and as such it makes sense to compare and contrast these two considerably divergent documents.

Without question, the issues affecting Lafayette Square and JeffVanderLou are extraordinarily different. For starters, the demographics are 99.2% African-American/Black for JVL, yet 28.1% for LS. The median income in JVL is just over $18,000; in LS it’s more than $45,000. This is about as stark a contrast between poor black and (more) affluent (mostly) white as one can get in the city limits. Within JVL, segregation and urban poverty issues are front and center, both on a day to day basis and within the plan; for LS, not so much.

In the JVL plan, social/community issues are given heavy weighting. The JeffVanderLou Neighborhood Plan is ‘triple bottom line’ planning document designed to tackle all of the issues affecting the neighborhood. Land use and economic planning are addressed alongside issues like education/training, child care, and crime/safety. The LS plan, by contrast, addresses form and function far and above any social issues. Amenity and preservation of the built form are the focus here. Any social problems that may be prevalent in the area are not given much consideration in the plan. Succinctly – the JVL plan is more about ‘People’, where the LS plan is almost exclusively about ‘Place’.