<em>A taxicab, its side windows shattered, sat in the middle of the street with the driver&#8217;s bullet-riddled body still inside.</em></p><p><em>Thirty feet away, Merlon Ragland stood on the front porch of the home day care she operates on East 60th Street and greeted parents as they dropped off their children.</em></p><p><em>Pushing strollers or carrying little ones on their hips, they negotiated a maze of police crime scene tape to reach her.</em></p><p><em>The scene was nothing new to Ragland and her mother, longtime residents of 64130 &#8212; the ZIP code that has the most killers in Missouri prisons.</em></p><p><em>Five men, including one of Ragland&#8217;s relatives, were shot to death in the 1990s in three incidents on the same block. The taxi driver&#8217;s killing was the latest in a more recent string of violent crimes.</em></p><p><em>&#8220;It&#8217;s just getting ridiculous,&#8221; said Ragland&#8217;s mother, Esther Ragland. &#8220;You don&#8217;t want to open your door to anyone.&#8221;</em></p><p><em>Merlon Ragland needed few words to sum up her neighborhood&#8217;s history.</em></p><p><em>&#8220;White flight, black flight and then you&#8217;re left with urban blight,&#8221; said Ragland, who is black.</em></p><p><em>It wasn&#8217;t always this way.</em></p><p><strong><span class="subhead">A history of decay</span></strong></p><p>Built mostly in the 1920s and 1930s, the area&#8217;s once-tidy homes were populated by blue-collar white families and surrounded by bustling business districts along Prospect Avenue and other major arteries.</p><p>In the 1960s, those families began moving to newer suburban neighborhoods. Black working and middle-class families filtered in. By 1970, the ZIP code was 50 percent black.</p><p>Then, fueled by a federal program to help poor people buy homes, and assisted by real estate speculators who steered them to the area, the transformation became a rush &#8212; one that increasingly lured the poor.</p><p>That 1970s program subsidized mortgage payments, bringing in families with no home ownership history. Many lacked money to maintain their homes and yards. Houses gradually fell into disrepair.</p><p>A government report described the area&#8217;s &#8220;rampaging deterioration and abandonment of housing&#8221; as a serious problem that would drag down the entire city.</p><p>It was written in 1975.</p><p>Today, that now-entrenched deterioration has plagued families for two to three generations in a ZIP code that has become 94 percent black.</p><p>According to the 2000 census, more than one in 10 of the ZIP code&#8217;s 11,000 housing units were vacant. Area residents say the problem has worsened since then.</p><p>On one block today, 12 of 29 homes sit vacant.</p><p><strong><span class="subhead">The plague of crack</span></strong></p><p>Though poverty and its related social problems alone do not lead to crime, it is what one criminologist calls &#8220;the garden in which this stuff flourishes.&#8221;</p><p>And in 64130, crime has flourished for decades.</p><p>Even in the 1970s, news coverage showed a public demand that something be done about crime in this part of town.</p><p>Then in the 1980s, things grew worse.</p><p>A core of highly concentrated poverty became fertile ground for the influx of crack cocaine and related gang activity that tore families and neighborhoods apart.</p><p>&#8220;It turned a lot of people into monsters,&#8221; said inmate Kevin Hurley, who is serving a life sentence for killing a shopkeeper during a robbery. &#8220;You smoke it and you just stop caring.&#8221;</p><p>Several pioneering crack dealers based their operations in the heart of 64130.</p><p>One recruited a large influx of Jamaican criminals in the mid-1980s who dominated the local crack trade, according to investigators.</p><p>Another prolific crack kingpin operated out of an East 62nd Street headquarters where someone shot a Jamaican to death in 1986.