This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated.

ST. LOUIS, Mo. _ St. Louis has been named the 10th most segregated city in the United States, according to 24/7 Wall St. Roughly 39.3% of the city’s African-American families living in predominantly black neighborhoods.

Data provided by 24/7 says one of the most famously disastrous cases of racially segregated government housing happened in St. Louis. The federal government constructed several dozen 11 story middle-class public housing towers, in two projects, that would collectively be called Pruitt-Igoe, in the mid 1950s.

The towers were segregated for a time. Black families lived in Pruitt and white families lived in Igoe.

“After racial discrimination was outlawed and black and white residents were allowed to live together in the combined Pruitt-Igoe, most whites moved out, and a lack of care led the structures to fall into disrepair.”

The 50-year anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, also known as the Fair Housing Act, will take place in 2018. Although the bill prohibited by law long-standing practices of housing segregation based on race by landlords and local governments, housing discrimination never fully disappeared and the effects of decades of discrimination are evident in U.S. cities.

24/7 Wall St.’s “16 Most Segregated Cities in America”

To identify the “16 Most Segregated Cities in America,” 24/7 Wall St. calculated the percentage of metropolitan area black residents who live in predominantly black census tracts — statistical subdivisions with an average of about 4,000 people.

While certain racially homogeneous neighborhoods exist in every large metropolitan area, some cities are far more starkly divided. In several U.S. metropolitan areas, more than one-fourth of the African American population lives in neighborhoods that are at least 80% black.

In two metro areas, more than half of black residents live in a predominately African American neighborhood.

38.627003 -90.199404