What is the motivation behind the St. Louis arson fires? Other St. Louis media have ruled out union dissatifaction or the renovation being behind schedule. Chris Goodson, one of the principals of Guilded Age Renovations which is the developer of the Mississippi Place condos, is president of the St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners. Other developers seem to attract fires also. On April 27 on South Grand in St. Louis, the Compton Gates Condominium development burned causing $3 million in damage. Ken Nuernberger and Michele Duffe of WireWorks Lofts LLC are the developers of the Compton Gates condos and Vail Place condos. Further, their WireWorks loft project experienced a $1.5 million fire in 2002, which now hosts Sqwires restaurant and condos.

All of the arsons targeted high-end luxury condos. Each of the Vail place condos was valued at half a million dollars and some as high as $618,000. With increasing luxury developments, some fear St. Louis is losing its affordable housing.

Gentrification() is the process where developers move into blighted, "bad" neighborhoods and renovate housing into high-end luxury condominiums. Rising housing prices, rents, and property taxes soon follow. The result is the displacement of low-income families who cannot afford the rent, or homeowners who lose their houses because they cannot afford the increase in property taxes. African-Americans, who often already face economic hardship and barriers based on race, are hit the hardest. Another result is adults with no children replace lower-income families with children.

Who is fueling gentrification making our neighborhoods unaffordable? Property speculators, housing developers, aldermen, the city and real estate professionals are working together to profiteer off housing and dominate real estate. For years the Land Reutilization Authority (LRA) has collected abandoned properties in blighted neighborhoods. On the southside, Aldermen and their development corporations have been handing housing developers city-owned property at cheap prices without any affordability requirements. Residents of the neighborhood have little opportunity to rehab the properties and cannot afford to purchase the luxury housing. Often federal grant money is doled out for these high income renovations. Speculators and property flippers purchase housing in these up-and-coming areas and sell at double or triple the purchase price while having invested little or nothing into the home. Real estate agents and the realtor associations work to market neighborhoods and collaborate in selling homes at inflated prices.

Pyramid, Beachfront, and Millenium are some of the developers spearheading the rising cost of housing in south St. Louis. Aldermen Ken Ortmann and Craig Schmid and their Benton Park West Development Corporation funnel the city-owned properties to luxury developers. Millenium Restoration and Development focuses on luxury rehabs in excess of $300,000, including 2701 Wyoming and 2647-9 Wyoming. They often receive grant money from Department of Housing and Urban Development and St. Louis' Community Development Agency for these high-end rehabs as was the case for 2647 and 2649 Wyoming, which will be selling for $300,000 and $350,000. Millennium is the developer of an upscale 33-condo project called Fleur De Lis on Jefferson at Arsenal. As evidence of their guilt in spurring gentrification, note that Millennium Restoration took out additional insurance on its high-end developments after the April arson. In the past, neighbors had first chance at rehabbing properties in their neighborhood. Ortmann is introducing a bill to blight the entire Benton Part West neighborhood. Properties with substantial renovation would receive tax abatement. This bill further markets the area to big-time developers who benefit most from blanket blighting and the resulting tax abatement.

Marketing is key to convincing the middle class to purchase in slums that are turned into "historic neighborhoods" almost overnight. The neighborhood formerly known as McReetown had dozens of affordable rental opportunities and an impoverished African-American community. It was razed and turned into middle class housing after the eminent domain corporate land grab by the Missouri Botanical Gardens: it is now named Botanical Heights. In its attempts to market real estate to developers, the City of St. Louis' website boasts over 503 completed and planned development projects representing $4.5 billion.

Some blocks on the southside have witnessed 90% of the homes sell in the last 18 months. In the near southside of St. Louis, neighborhoods such as Fox Park and Benton Park West have witnessed housing prices double or triple in that time, while unscrupulous speculators purchase and sit on properties until they can sell at incredible profit. This happened after Fox Park was named "St. Louis' hottest neighborhood." It's ironic that Benton Park West has some of the highest crime rates in the city.

Can you envision a better way to improve our neighborhoods outside of the corporate model? The real estate developers offer us only two extremes: blighted slums or gentrification, both of which they profit from at the expense of community decision-making and creating housing for everyone. Neighbors around the country have chosen a middle road by starting the process of reclaiming their neighborhoods. They have started community land trusts in over 140 cities that provide permanently affordable housing and remove the profit motive from housing. Neighbors have squatted empty buildings and organized rent strikes to protest high rents. Angry residents can target luxury developers at their offices and at their homes in the suburbs. As interim measures, activists have placed limits on who can develop in their neighborhoods by taking over development corporations.

Anonymous posters on STLIMC have cheered the St. Louis arsons as part of the struggle against gentrification and profiteering off housing. In other parts of the country, arson has been a tactic used to combat gentrification and suburban housing encroaching on natural areas. In 2003, the Earth Liberation Front, with their statement, "If you build it, we will burn it," claimed a $50 million apartment complex arson. Until gentrification is the declared reason behind the St. Louis arsons and until repeated arsons curb gentrification, arson is largely a symbolic action. However, in Berlin, squatters have firebombed the same upscale developments so many times that the developers gave up. Were these St. Louis arsons a disgruntled worker, someone trying to profit off insurance claims, or bored teenagers? Were they a response to racist housing segregation or making a generalized statement against luxury housing and gentrification? With no ELF press release surfacing and since Lafayette Square was lost to gentrification years ago, one can rule out some motivations.

The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) started the Vail, Colorado resort arson fires to protect the habitat of the endangered lynx (a type of cat) that the resort was occupying and to protest "industrial recreation," destructive high speed playgrounds in wild areas. Forest management agencies are increasingly building partnerships with recreation companies to build mechanized recreation areas including skiing and ski lifts, snowmobiles and mountain bikes. Industrial recreation threatens to be more destructive than mining, cattle grazing and logging in the national forests. The ELF press release for the Vail arson stated: "putting profits ahead of Colorado's wildlife will not be tolerated. We will be back if this greedy corporation continues to trespass into wild and roadless areas." The FBI Counterterrorism Division calls the ELF the "most active criminal extremist element in the United States." Within the last year a grand jury indicted four people in the Vail arson.

These indictments are part of the growing Green Scare where federal law enforcement agencies target the Earth Liberation Front, Animal liberation Front, environmentalists and their supporters with harassment, surveillance and draconian jail terms. They have indicted 15 individuals for all the arsons in the Pacific Northwest between 1996 and 2001.

According to the website fbiwitchhunt.com, in their use of grand juries, "the government relies heavily on misinformation and secrecy in its efforts to crush various social and political movements." For example eight activists who did nothing more than attend animal rights speaker Rod Coronado's talk were questioned after an arson in California. Further, law enforcement are indicting the eco-activists under anti-terrorism statutes even though their alleged actions harmed no one. Instead of the median term of 5 years for arson, some of the activists are facing severe sentences such as life imprisonment or life imprisonment plus 335 years!

To learn more, see www.supportchelsea.org, greenanarchy.org, www.greenscare.org, ecoprisoners.org, fbiwitchhunt.com.

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