Word: localness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...seamy Mississippi River city of East St. Louis, Ill., the grim local joke is that the crime rate is finally starting to level off because there's not much left to steal. Block after city block is boarded up or burned out. Many buildings have been reduced to rubble as thieves cart away everything of value: bricks, aluminum siding, copper wire, even heavy cast-iron manhole covers from the potholed streets to be sold for scrap. The housing authority complains that aluminum downspouts are swiped from its buildings within hours of installation. Trash-strewn vacant lots along the river stand...
...biggest employer left is the local school district, which pays no taxes, is $11 million in debt and plans to lay off a quarter of its teachers for the next academic year. The tax base has eroded from $175 million in 1965 to less than $50 million. Property values are so low that the town's tallest structure, the vacant twelve-story Spivey Building, was sold for $25,000. The number of retail businesses is less than 200 and steadily declining. The population, once 80,000, has shrunk to 55,000, 97% black and two-thirds on welfare...
...financial stress worsened dramatically in April last year when city assets were temporarily frozen after East St. Louis failed to begin payment on a $3.4 million judgment arising from the beating of one local jail inmate by another in 1984. The city is now beset with dozens of lawsuits. Firemen have sued successfully to collect three years of back uniform allowances, only to be told that the award left no money in the till to pay their salaries. A bill making its way through the state legislature will erase the deficit in the current budget and finally...
State police, moved in to supplement the understaffed local force, are concentrating on drug arrests and housing-project security. Selling crack has become the city's biggest business, and is so widespread that peddlers sometimes flag down motorists on nearby I-70 to hawk crack packets at $20 a pop. Traffic backups on city streets often turn out to be buyers lined up at drive-through crack houses...
Other unions involved in the rally included the AFL-CIO and Local 26, the Harvard dining hall workers' union. Representatives of both those groups and HUCTW said their organizations would continue to lend support to efforts against Stone...