Cities Have Lost as Rams Prosper

St. Louisans couldn't forget the Rams if they wanted to, and many of them want to. They're playing in the Super Bowl. Dick Vermeil, who won a Super Bowl as head coach of the St. Louis Rams, was elected to the NFL Hall of Fame last week, per NBC Sports. American Underdog—"the inspiring story" of Brenda and Kurt Warner, the St. Louis quarterback for that Super Bowl, per the Los Angeles Times—is playing in movie theaters. Also, there's that vacant stadium downtown. "They were here," a man walking by the Dome at America's Center told the Washington Post last week. "They were playing in this beautiful building right here, and it's empty now,” said Governor Hill, 66, adding, "It hurts, you know."

The Rams are top of the world at the moment. For a column in the Washington Post, Candace Buckner visited St. Louis, her hometown, and Inglewood, where the Rams now live, to see how some of their financial success has come at the expense of communities. In Inglewood, she starts with the Rams' new stadium, a startling contrast to the $985 million one St. Louis planned to keep the team from moving away. "It looks as though an alien space craft has landed in Yolanda Davidson's neighborhood," Buckner writes. Davidson finds it bizarre. "It's like Alice in Wonderland/Gotham City mixed together," she said, adding, "There’s never been a time where they came and built something that was $5.5 billion in the neighborhood where people actually live."

That doesn't work for everybody. A lot of money has come to town, and some residents have profited. But others, especially renters, have been driven out as prices rise. One resident said for his low-income neighbors, "It's challenging for them to live in a city that's getting more expensive every day." The owner of the award-winning Bourbon Street Fish, a restaurant across from SoFi Stadium, had his lease pulled after more than 20 years. He had welcomed the stadium. "Real good for Inglewood," he told Buckner, but "it wasn't good for all the small minority business owners." A soul food restaurant in the neighborhood for 30 years had to move when the monthly rent was upped to $14,000. Every time something like that happens, Buckner writes, "a community loses a bit of its identity." You can read the full piece here. (More Los Angeles Rams stories.)