The New York Times International - 29.08.2019

6 | T HURSDAY, AUGUST 29, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

world

It took Beriz Nukic about two years after
landing on a new continent as a war ref-
ugee to open his own business.
Mr. Nukic learned English on the fly
and started with a simple concept — a
Turkish coffee roastery for Bosnians,
who drink Turkish coffee as though it
were water. Soon he expanded the busi-
ness into a deli, and then he opened a
restaurant, Berix, working 18-hour days
and carrying a Bosnian-to-English dic-
tionary in his pocket.
He did all that in Bevo Mill, a once-di-
lapidated neighborhood in the southern
part of St. Louis that quickly became the
stuff of American dreams. Where
boarded-up windows had lined the
streets and city development initiatives
had never seemed to get off the ground,
thousands of refugees fleeing brutal eth-
nic cleansing half a world away arrived
in the 1990s with business plans and
home renovations. They learned Eng-
lish, opened cafes and hair salons, and
before long had brought life, color and
the smell of fresh-baked bread to the
area, which came to be known as Little
Bosnia.
Amer Iriskic, 28, remembered mov-
ing to the neighborhood as a 7-year-old
in 1998, three years after the end of the

bloody civil war in Bosnia and Herze- govina. “People were outside all the time, and it was a nice atmosphere,” he said. He and his friends played basketball in the alley behind their house. His father and uncle opened a butcher shop, where they sold the cuts of lamb and veal their Bosnian customers missed and that other residents began to love as well. For St. Louis, a city that had bled population for decades — it had about 400,000 residents in 1990, down from more than 800,000 in the 1950s — the influx of what was estimated to be the largest population of Bosnians outside Bosnia seemed to work magic. For the first time in generations, the urban nar- rative of abandoned houses, stagnant business and vanishing people ap- peared to be changing. But it didn’t last. Today, St. Louis, like some other Mid- western cities, is battling a new round of contraction, with a stagnant economy, challenged schools and one of the high- est murder rates in the country. And over the past few years, the people who fled brutal violence and concentration camps in their homeland and created Little Bosnia have been fleeing again, to the suburbs. A deadly hammer attack in Bevo Mill — in which Zemir Begic, a young Bosni- an man out with his fiancée, was killed by four teenagers — shook the community in 2014. Bosnians marched in the streets, arguing that the police had not done enough to keep the neighborhood safe. Semir Nukic, part of the family that owns Berix, recalled rowdy crowds leav-

ing nearby bars, often causing trouble and fighting; the police would call the restaurant to ask for security camera footage. One night, he said, a man involved in a street fight was thrown through the restaurant’s window. Mounting crime also worried Mr. Iris- kic’s family. “People that we knew, friends and families, they got their houses broken into,” he recalled. His family heard that schools were better in the suburbs, and that he would be able to play there on a good soccer team. One of the pioneers of the Bosnian ex- odus from the city was Beriz Nukic, who moved Berix from Bevo Mill, where it

had become a local landmark, south to a shopping plaza he developed in the St. Louis County suburbs in 2010 — before the worst of the problems unfolded. The Iriskices also moved south, and opened up a suburban location of their butcher shop three years later. Since then, many of Little Bosnia’s flagship businesses have either moved away or closed. Bosna Gold, a large restaurant and event space whose ce- vapi sausages were said to rival those in Sarajevo, shut its doors in 2016. Salons, tailors, butchers and a host of other Bos- nian establishments all joined the move out of the city, along with the Bosnians who frequented them. Similar stories have been playing out

in American cities since the Baby Boom decades of the 20th century, and have proven hard to reverse. After mass flights to the suburbs, even heavy in- vestment in urban centers, with shiny new business districts and rapidly changing downtowns, have often failed to help cities, particularly in the Mid- west, replace the residents they had lost. In St. Louis, the process has been particularly painful, because the people who were fleeing were the very ones who had been seen as saviors. “Unfortunately, this huge opportunity we had with this large population of Bos- nians living in the city, we have not maximized it,” said Antonio French, a former city alderman. “And over the last 20 years, we have lost most of them.” Immigrant communities everywhere have spread to the suburbs. Many Chi- nese immigrants have moved to the San Gabriel Valley from the Chinatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, and Kore- an immigrants in the New York area have moved to the northern New Jersey suburbs and to Long Island. But the urban neighborhoods they were leaving behind were generally healthy or reju- venating. The Iriskices held on to their former home in St. Louis and now rent it out. But they said the neighborhood went into further decline after they left. “Whenever I go pick up rent, it’s not the same,” Mr. Iriskic said. “You don’t see kids walking, playing outside anymore, playing in the back al- leys. There’s basketball hoops you can tell that haven’t had a basketball shot at them for years.”

At its peak in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Bosnian population, includ- ing American-born Bosnians, reached about 70,000 in the city of St. Louis and the surrounding county, according to the International Institute of St. Louis, a charitable agency that sponsors many of the region’s refugees. Now, with some Bosnians having left the state entirely, the agency estimates that the figure is fewer than 50,000. And while it’s hard to say exactly how many remain within the city limits, Anna Crosslin, the director of the institute, said, “I would not be surprised to know that it’s in the hundreds, not the thousands.” To some extent, the dispersal of a once tight-knit refugee community is part of a normal process. Many Bosnians moved into Bevo Mill and other South City neighborhoods to be near the Interna- tional Institute. They took English classes at the institute, relied on public transit to get around, and in the early going often lacked the money to buy a house with a yard. With time, though, many became upwardly mobile, and the suburbs became attainable and attrac- tive to them. Arina Galic, a seamstress trained in Bosnia who owns Arina’s Alterations, said the daily inconveniences of limited parking and crowded streets were what drove her to move to Mehlville, a sub- urb. Her customers appreciate her new location near a mall and two major high- ways, she said: “When I came here, ev- erybody was so happy, because you’ve got better parking lots, you’ve got a good entrance.”

Many of the suburban transplants say Little Bosnia has not disappeared; it has merely shifted. The shopping center where Berix is now located is also in Mehlville. Mr. Nu- kic rents space in the center to two other Bosnian-owned businesses. “We have a community together,” he said. Two doors down is Lemay Meat, where the Iriskic family opened up the second location of their popular butcher shop and grocery store. A Bosnian insurance agent’s office is in the same center. Across the street, a bank caters to Bosnian customers, and there is a Bosnian mosque down the road. “When you want to step outside to take a breath, you see people sitting outside having coffee and stuff — it's really cool,” said Mr. Iriskic, who is now mar- ried with a son of his own. St. Louis is now looking for new ways to make the South City area an attrac- tive place to live for new residents, wherever they come from. “I’m sorry that many of the Bosnians have moved on,” said Carol Howard, the alderwoman for the area that includes Bevo Mill. But she said she was not worried about the future of the neighborhood. She said she had noticed a new generation of young St. Louisians moving in who do not share their parents’ attrac- tion to the suburbs. “They want something they can walk to,” she said of the new residents. “If they want to go have a beer, they can walk, and they can push the baby in the carriage.” Perhaps they will stay.

Clockwise from left: Patrons gathered for coffee at Beriz Nukic’s restaurant, Berix, a landmark for Bosnians in the St. Louis area; the Bevo Mill neighborhood, where many Bosnian refugees settled after fleeing the war in the Balkans; and Mr. Nukic at Berix.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CAROLINA HIDALGO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Bosnian flight stalls a revival in St. Louis

ST. LOUIS

Influx of refugees gave city

a big boost; now they are

leaving for the suburbs

BY MELINA DELKIC

“This huge opportunity we had with this large population of Bosnians living in the city, we have not maximized it.”

On the shimmering waters of Grand
Lake, a popular vacation spot in north-
eastern Oklahoma, families have spent
the summer splashing around in boats,
fishing for the lake’s famous bass and
enjoying weekend getaways at upscale
waterfront homes.
But drive just a few dozen miles north,
and the festivity dissolves into fear over
flooding in Miami (pronounced My-am-
uh), a city of 13,000 where one in four
people lives in poverty. For years, the
town has fought a losing battle against
the wealthy community at the lake,
where high water makes for better boat-
ing but leaves little room for overflow
when it rains. With heavy rains this year,
the city of Miami and local Native Amer-
ican tribes say they were again left to
pay the price when floodwater up-
stream damaged their homes, busi-
nesses and ceremonial grounds.
Now, this backyard battle has spread
to the halls of Congress, after one of the
lake’s residents, Senator James M. In-
hofe, got involved.
After decades of debate, local leaders
had pinned their hopes on a rare chance
to ask a federal agency to help stop the
flooding. But Mr. Inhofe — a top Republi-
can who is known to swim and fly planes
around the lake, where his family owns a
vacation home — quietly introduced leg-
islation in June that would hamstring
that agency.
He added the protections in an
amendment to the National Defense Au-
thorization Act, a military funding bill
that is up for consideration before Con-
gress.
As chairman of the Senate Armed
Services Committee, Mr. Inhofe has

wide latitude over provisions included in the 1,700-page bill. What might be considered typical power politics in Washington came as a shock in Miami, where the mayor said he learned about the legislation only after a reporter for a trade publication called to ask ques- tions. Many in town saw the move as a sign of overreach by a powerful law- maker. Now, a coalition of city leaders, tribal chiefs and lawyers is scrambling to oppose the proposal by Mr. Inhofe, a former mayor of Tulsa and United States representative who has held elected office in Oklahoma for decades. Mayor Rudy Schultz, whose full-time job is running a furniture store company, said he felt like he was in a fight to save his town. “Your amendment is a direct threat to the health and safety of thousands of your constituents,” Mr. Schultz wrote in a letter to Mr. Inhofe last month. “The fact that you own a home on Grand Lake,” he added, “makes your in- volvement even more inappropriate.” Mr. Inhofe, who has the support of many on the lake, has long argued for higher water levels to “make the lake a better place for recreation and com- merce.” In a statement, he said his proposal would streamline oversight and was “just good policy.” “Kay and I have been going to our place at Grand Lake since we built it in 1962,” Mr. Inhofe said, referring to his wife. “We know nearly everyone in the community and everywhere we go we hear about the need to maintain the lake for its primary purposes of flood control, power generation and recreation.”

DECADES OF FLOODING Miami sits just off the interstate about 90 miles from Tulsa, in a rural corner of the state where hayfields, cattle ranches and pickup trucks dot the landscape. A

billboard welcoming visitors to town features the local football hero Steve Owens, who won the Heisman Trophy in

It is a small symbol of hometown
pride from a bygone era, when the city
bustled with middle-class families and
there were plenty of jobs at a B.F. Good-
rich tire plant.
Today, the county — home to nine Na-
tive American tribes, whose members
make up about 20 percent of the popula-
tion — mostly gets by with factory work
and tribal casinos.
But local residents say that flooding
has exacerbated the area’s decline.
Since the early 1990s, Miami has
flooded more than two dozen times, Mr.
Schultz said. About 150 houses have
been torn down, and many more aban-
doned.
As recently as May, when storms

slammed the Midwest, the water did more than just seep into homes. It swal- lowed up entire roads and lay like a heavy blanket over town. Nearby, the Eastern Shawnee Tribe said its ceremonial grounds flooded in three feet of water. The tribe evacuated 30 families and had to navigate danger- ous roads that stayed impassable for weeks, Chief Glenna Wallace said. “We have mold everywhere,” she said. “We have insects everywhere.” No one disputes that these communities have flooded again and again. But a debate over whether operations at the lake contribute has played out in reams of federal filings and years of lawsuits involving hundreds of residents. At issue is whether the Pensacola Dam, which was built in 1940 and created the lake, causes a “backwater effect,”

a phenomenon that can occur when free-flowing water hits a dam and piles up. “If you keep the lake levels high,” Neil Grigg, a civil engineering professor at Colorado State University, said, speak- ing generally, “you don’t have as much storage space available when a flood comes, so that is going to make the flooding upstream worse.” The City of Miami argues that it would not flood so severely if not for the dam. The nonprofit state agency that over- sees the dam, the Grand River Dam Au- thority, disputes that a backwater effect exists and denies causing flooding upstream. As heavy rainstorms become more common with climate change, residents fear that the threat is getting worse. “I was born and raised here,” said Ethel Cook, 68, chief of the Ottawa Tribe, which had to cancel lunches for tribal elders during the flooding this spring. “I’ve never seen it as bad as it was this year.” But this year after the most recent flood, local officials saw an opportunity to rectify the crisis: The dam, which generates hydroelectric power, was due for a new license from the Federal Ener- gy Regulatory Commission for the first time in nearly 30 years.

The officials planned to ask the commission to instruct the Grand River Dam Authority to buy up flooded land, or at least lower the lake before big storms.

A SENATOR STEPS IN Since he was elected to the Senate in 1994, Mr. Inhofe has fought for less gov- ernment regulation and is well known for denying global warming. (He once brought a snowball to the Senate floor to try to undermine the validity of climate science.) He has also taken a keen interest in Grand Lake, where records show that about $1 million in waterfront property belongs to a company in his wife’s name. “For the better part of my career in the United States Senate I have been working to maintain higher lake levels on Grand,” Mr. Inhofe wrote in a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Com- mission in 2016, adding that he was con- cerned about injuries from boat ground- ings and access to “coves, marinas, and docks.” His amendment would limit the commission’s authority over lake levels and flood control. It also says that federal land “shall not be considered to be a res- ervation,” a move that tribes say would gut their rights. In statements, Mr. Inhofe and the Grand River Dam Authority said that the legislation would clear up confusion about who was in charge of flood control and empower one federal agency — the Army Corps of Engineers — to balance water flow in the region. The legislation is pending, and Senate and House representatives plan to nego- tiate a final bill in the coming weeks.

Senator takes a hand in a dispute over his vacation spot

MIAMI, OKLA.

BY SARAH MERVOSH

Mike Baker contributed reporting from Seattle, and Carl Hulse from Washing- ton.

Top right, Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma added an amendment to a military funding bill to keep water levels high at Grand Lake, above, a popular vacation spot.

SEPTEMBER DAWN BOTTOMS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

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The New York Times International - 29.08.2019

Bosnian flight stalls a revival in St. Louis

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