Trump Weakened FEMA, and a Black St. Louis Neighborhood Is Paying the Price

ST. LOUIS — The tapping sound drew Jeffrey Bingham to his front window.

Outside, the world was folding in on itself. Trees bent sideways. Power lines snapped. Across the street, a two-story brick house crumbled and disappeared instantly.

Then his windows blew and the front door ripped open. He ran for the basement as pressure filled his ears and the air rushed in hard enough to feel like it might crack his skull.

There were no tornado sirens and no emergency alerts pinged his phone. When Bingham, 64, emerged, Cates Avenue looked, in his words, “like Beirut.” Cars buried in splintered wood, dust plumes lifted from homes reduced to piles, and electrical fires sparked along the street. 

Today, nearly a year later, his North St. Louis block doesn’t look that different.

The once‑storied heart of Black St. Louis is now a cluster of vacant lots, gutted homes, and buildings the city says are too dangerous to stand but cannot afford to tear down. What remains exposes not only the violence of a single storm, but a growing nationwide pattern of Black communities left unwarned when disaster strikes and alone to pick up the pieces afterward.

That May 16, 2025, tornado system was the most destructive tornado to carve through an American city in over a decade. It damaged more than 10,000 properties, killing and injuring residents along its path and leveling entire blocks holding generations of Black history. Outside the city, it barely registered as news.

“We saw what national attention could look like,” said Kayla Reed, executive director of Action St. Louis.

Just months earlier, in the foothills above Los Angeles, the Eaton Fire ravaged the historically Black and middle‑class enclave of Altadena, leaving roughly the same number of properties damaged. That fire dominated national headlines for much of 2025.

“[The Federal Emergency Management Agency] response [and] the national attention to St. Louis was unprecedentedly lackluster,” Reed said.

That lack of attention landed on top of President Donald Trump’s repeated calls for FEMA to be “weaned” off federal responsibility. He has cut funding for key resilience and mitigation programs. Billions in already‑approved disaster aid and hazard‑mitigation grants now languish in limbo.

It has translated into slower and stingier disaster declarations and explicit efforts to declare fewer disasters at all — changes that all but guarantee that poorer communities of color, without strong tax bases or political clout, will face rebuilding without federal help. 

Or as Reed put it: “be left to watch their neighborhoods and city die.” 

On blocks like Bingham’s, that retreat looks like families living in homes without electricity, with peeled back roofs and boarded up windows.

“A year later, people are still inside of the immediate recovery phase — living in hotels or homeless,” Reed said. “People are still navigating FEMA and arguing with their insurance.”

City and FEMA officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Bingham spent the year after the storm fighting through rain pouring into his roofless home, thieves stripping his abandoned house, a fire that destroyed his storage trailer and tools, and a maze of insurance claims and city inspections. 

“You look around and some homes look untouched, and some are gone,” he said. “It makes you search yourself and wonder what you could’ve done to deserve having to go through this. It also makes you realize who cares, and who doesn’t.”

Into that gap stepped neighborhood organizations that were never designed to run disaster response.

Reed’s Action St. Louis, an advocacy group born from the Ferguson uprising after the police killing of Michael Brown, has spent the past year stretching far beyond its original mission. Since the tornado, the organization has trained people in skills to weatherize homes without windows or walls, opened a community market when government aid dried up, canvassed neighborhoods when FEMA refused to, and fed people when no one else would. 

Across the neighborhood, at a weekly distribution site on Cates Avenue, another organization — 314Oasis — hands out food, clothing, rent assistance, and even acupuncture to hundreds of residents still living without heat and water.

“I see death. I feel death,” said the Rev. Bobbie Blunt, who volunteers at the 314Oasis distributions. “And for me, it’s heartbreaking, straight up.”

She looked around at a group of young children running across an empty lot turned community garden.

“We at least try to let them know that we love them. It may not be a whole lot, but it’s something to say we still love you. The storm has dissipated, but the wounds are still here.”

FEMA cuts and North St. Louis’ long emergency

On a warm spring afternoon, Antigone Chambers drove slowly up Delmar Boulevard, narrating what used to be there. 

“Mainly people,” she said. 

As she drove, whole stretches of homes slid past with more tarps than roofs. A church sat with a hole in its wall the size of a truck, and a playground had cracked bricks thrown around where grass once was.

Chambers pointed out the meaning behind this ghost map: The nursing home where the roof caved in on her great-grandmother’s room, the hospital her great‑grandmother and grandmother could no longer easily reach, and the stretch of Forest Park where the trees that used to hide the art museum have been destroyed. 

“It’s disorienting,” the 23‑year‑old said. 

The city she remembered from childhood had already disappeared in less than a generation. The city her mother, Dail, knew had been gone even longer.

St. Louis was built into national prominence by Black workers who arrived in the early 20th century seeking industrial jobs and refuge from Southern racial terror. Quickly, it had a thriving Black middle class by midcentury, anchored in neighborhoods north of Delmar Boulevard. But decades of redlining, disinvestment, urban renewal, and suburbanization steadily hollowed out those communities. 

The city once boasted a population of 850,000. Now, fewer than 300,000 people live there. 

It has meant that some of the homes damaged by the tornado were emptied out long before the storm as whole blocks slipped so far in value that some houses struggle to fetch even a few thousand dollars at auction, with many essentially worth less than the price of a used car.

Now, Chambers can finally see the stereotypes people always used against the north side — vacant, broken, and unsafe. Only this time, the storm and the thin recovery made it that way. 

In the year since the tornado, her family’s life has been rearranged around those absences.

After Chambers’ great-grandmother was displaced, her health declined. She died after what her doctors described as a sudden cascade of stress and complications.

Chambers’ mother’s career was put on the back burner as she was left to manage damage and flooding in her own home, and round‑the‑clock caregiving for the elders in her life.

Chambers herself, who had built her own life in Florida, was pulled back to St. Louis, because she simply “had to,” she said. She traded her own goals for part-time serving shifts and three visits a week to care for her grandmother, who is sicker, more anxious, and, she admits, “a completely different person” than before the tornado. 

“I hate it,” she said, half‑joking, half not.

The federal government’s internal turmoil has deepened this reality. In the months after the tornado, the Trump administration moved to slash FEMA’s disaster workforce, cutting thousands of on-call responders and hollowing out the regional offices that usually anchor long-term recovery. Former officials and watchdogs say that meant fewer inspectors on the ground, slower casework, and stalled demolition projects in places like North St. Louis, especially as the stripped‑down staff were pulled away to new fires and floods.

City Hall tried to fill the vacuum, at least at first. In the tornado’s immediate aftermath, Mayor Cara Spencer opened disaster assistance centers with FEMA and pushed through hundreds of permits for repairs in the impact zone. The city worked with philanthropic partners to launch the Northside Resilience Fund, offering $3,000 in direct cash assistance to what it deemed the most severely damaged homes. By late summer 2025, more than 1,300 North St. Louis households had been approved, and millions in emergency aid had gone out.

But those efforts quickly revealed the limits of local government in the face of federal withdrawal. Application deadlines were extended again and again as residents struggled to pull together documents after the storm scattered their lives. A Private Property Assistance Program stalled in “review and prioritization” for months. As of this spring, fewer than 200 of the thousands of damaged properties had been stabilized, demolished, or repaired. Federal officials have agreed to demolish only a fraction of the dilapidated buildings, leaving blocks stuck in a decaying state.

On Mynique Stewart Sr.’s block, one house gleams with fresh siding while the one next door still wears plastic sheeting where the windows should be, its porch half‑collapsed and mailbox hanging open.

Stewart, 66, quickly received $770 after inspectors assessed tornado damage to his uninsured home, though the payout fell short of what he actually needed to fix his windows. Just blocks away, Joseph Smith, 72, has been stuck in a prolonged fight with both his insurer and FEMA, navigating appeals while his home remains damaged. He believes claims in the predominantly Black north side are scrutinized more harshly, a disparity reflected in research showing lower payouts and higher denial rates in Black communities. As he looks across his neighborhood, Smith doubts recovery efforts will restore a place he said was already neglected long before the storm.

Now, with a new Homeland Security secretary in place and both an active hurricane season and the 2026 men’s World Cup looming, the federal government is racing to rebuild what it tore down by rehiring disaster responders and renewing once-expired contracts. 

“Being reinstated doesn’t erase the fact that we were on administrative leave for eight months. Over eight months we couldn’t work, couldn’t help disaster survivors,” Abby Mcllraith, an emergency management specialist, told The Washington Post.

“Everyone who pays taxes in this country should be mad about this.”

Inside North St. Louis’ response to the disaster 

When Reed, the co-founder and executive director of Action St. Louis, looks across the street from her office at a series of abandoned homes, she understands the gaping holes in her community did not happen as a result of the 26-minute-long tornado system. 

“The tornado was a climate disaster for sure,” Reed said, “but it was meeting a systemic one.” It swept across a foundation already weak from disinvestment and neglect — a century of deliberate choices to ensure that “when money was invested in the city, it would not go north.”

“The children of Ferguson are now leading the organizations responding to the recovery,” Reed said. They call it the People’s Response because they wanted everyday people to see themselves — not a charity model where all the recipients are “Black and all the volunteers are white retirees.”

“If you need two meals, you get two meals,” she said. “If you need two sizes of diapers, you get both. People are feeling witnessed.”

What happened in St. Louis will happen again. Tornado and hurricane seasons are here. Communities across the Midwest and South and along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts are in the path.

The question isn’t whether the next disaster will come, residents said. It’s whether anyone will care when it does.

Blunt, watching neighbors line up for food, clothing, and care in April, said the support is proof that when the “government abandons” Black communities, those communities don’t disappear; they take care of their own.

A year after the storm, Bingham stands at his front window again. He just moved back in — 11 months and 29 days after he ran for the basement.

Through the glass, he can see where his neighbor’s house used to be.

His wife wasn’t in a hurry to come back. They were fortunate. She had settled into his sister’s place — home-cooked meals every day and soap operas in the afternoon. But Bingham bought her new furniture. That helped.

“Ain’t no place like home,” he said, even if you’re the only one left on the block. 

“If you live long enough, you’re going to experience something, some storm coming for you,” he said. “It can’t rain forever.”

But lately, it’s raining a lot harder.

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