Dezmion Barrow grew up with his grandmother in Holiday Acres, a subdivision of low-slung, primarily Section 8 rental houses in Scotlandville. No one in his family went to college, and in high school he wasn’t interested in higher education.
A trip with a friend to orientation at Southeastern Louisiana University—including a look at all the pretty girls on campus and the thrice-daily buffets in the dining hall—changed his mind. He majored in finance, hoping to transcend his own financial circumstances. Instead, he got a crash course in student loan debt, and after a couple years at SLU and a short stint at Southern University, he dropped out.
In the new Business Report cover story, “The Great Divide,” the 26-year-old—who works night jobs at Sam’s Club and a group home to finance his lawn care and party rental businesses—took the magazine on drive through his neighborhood.
“This is what an average individual would see,” Barrow says while driving south on Scotland Avenue. “Blighted properties over there. You’ve got a rundown car wash right here. … Another closed-down business. See the conditions of those houses over there? Waking up in something like that does something to your psyche.”
Barrow knows firsthand that living in uninspiring circumstances leads to more than a negative impression of your own neighborhood. It creates “a hopeless mentality” about what’s possible in your own life, he says.
But Barrow isn’t hopeless. He is part of a growing and increasingly noisy contingent of north Baton Rouge residents asking such questions about their communities. While Barrow acknowledges that many of his neighbors have trouble articulating precisely what’s wrong or what should change, he says that doesn’t invalidate their mounting frustration with the lack of economic development in their communities.
“When they come to town hall meetings or council meetings, it comes off as anger,” Barrow says. “But it’s really them trying to say passionately that we are suffocating.”
Downtown Baton Rouge, through public and private investment, has been transformed from a ghost town to one of the region’s most inviting places to live, work and play in little more than a decade. In more recent years, Mid City has also seen stirrings of a renaissance.
North Baton Rouge, loosely defined as everything inside the city limits north of Florida Boulevard, hasn’t yet received the same kind of targeted attention from city-parish leaders, but that may be starting to change.
It has a number of assets, but no one has yet figured out how to leverage those assets to boost investment and give engaged, industrious young people like Barrow more reasons to stick around.
“I’ve decided to plant my stake here,” says Barrow, who has a daughter due in April. “But it’s hard to convince my peers.”
Baton Rouge is not unusual in having wide income disparity along geographic lines. While not isolated to north Baton Rouge, much of the city’s concentrated poverty is found north of Florida Boulevard. Areas with poor economic prospects often get caught in a self-reinforcing cycle that’s hard to reverse. When blight and crime are prevalent, people with means tend to move. Those left behind are less able to improve their own circumstances and have less spending power to attract businesses and quality housing.
The cycle also works in the opposite direction. Money follows money, and in Baton Rouge, a lot of money has been heading south for quite some time now.
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