Photographs by Whitney Curtis

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[Pictured: Bobbie is still homeless, but often comes to the day program at Centenary United Methodist Church.]

St. Louis first noticed homelessness in the early 1980s. Men in ragged clothes clotted downtown alleys, doorways and plazas, and those in suits developed an intense interest in gargoyles and flowerpots—anything that drew their eyes away, let them avoid this sudden, forced intimacy with a stranger’s need.

Tension built.

In 1985, homeless St. Louisans filed an angry lawsuit to force Mayor Vince Schoemehl to respond to their needs. Just five years later, experts across the nation were praising St. Louis’ “continuum of care” as a model blend of public and private resources. We won one government grant after another, and we managed the problem with Biblical simplicity: Feed the hungry and lend them shelter.

But the number of people on the street kept growing.

Cots and soup were too simple, too temporary. And saying you wanted to end homelessness meant you wanted to end—what? Addiction? Mental illness? Domestic violence? Disability? War trauma? Unemployment? Self-hatred? Did you start with women and children or grizzled, incoherent Vietnam vets? Drugged-out couch-surfers with no hope for the future or paranoid shopping-cart ladies who’d practically turned into performance art?

By 2000, the National Alliance to End Homelessness had come up with a 10-year plan that turned everything upside down—the prejudices and the policies. It was titled “A Plan, Not a Dream,” and it focused on the hardest cases: crazy, drunk, stubborn and suspicious folk who’d lived on the streets so long they couldn’t remember how sheets felt. These were the homeless whom even the bleeding hearts had gently written off, handing them sack lunches and blankets because the streets would be their “forever home.”

Not by this new philosophy, which drummed, “Housing First.” “We used to say, ‘Get them gainfully employed, healthy, clean and sober, and then they’ll get housing,’” says Dan Buck, CEO of St. Patrick’s Center. “But once somebody’s housed, their hygiene improves, their health improves, they’re employable. It’s much easier to build a life from an address.”

Even hard-core pragmatists came around, because studies were proving that housing people permanently was cheaper, by the time you added up all the emergency healthcare and policing and economic costs, than leaving them on the street. You could stop people from cycling in and out of hospitals, shelters and prisons if you stabilized them someplace safe, where caseworkers could find them and help was available 24/7.

So federal agencies started releasing huge sums of money to help cities willing to focus on the “chronically homeless,” defined as “unaccompanied individuals” with “a disabling condition” and a consistent pattern of homelessness.

By fall 2004, Mayor Francis G. Slay had convinced St. Louis County (albeit none of the other surrounding counties, most of whose homeless seem to wind up in the city) to join him in a St. Louis version of this plan.

It’s 2009. Are we anywhere close to halfway there?

“Absolutely,” says William Siedhoff, director of the city’s Department of Human Services. “We are absolutely on schedule. I think we’re ahead of schedule.”

Hearing Siedhoff’s optimistic assessment, Francie Broderick murmurs, “Well, that’s his job.” Hers is to direct Places for People, a nonprofit agency based in midtown that focuses on housing people with mental illness, and she’s got a three- to six-month waiting list. She nods to the corner of her office. “You see that blanket over there? If there’s no place else, we let them sleep in the back corner of the lot.”

Karen Wallensak, director of Catholic Charities’ Housing Resource Center downtown, still can’t find beds for 60 percent of the “truly homeless” (living on the street or in conditions unfit for human habitation) who call the HRC hotline, the gateway to both city and county shelter. Between January and October 2008, the hotline received 5,492 calls and turned away 3,042 callers. (People often call the hotline several times a day, but they are counted only once a month.) Siedhoff’s point does hold: Single men in the city, the group that fits most neatly with the new plan, fared best, with only 28 percent of single male callers turned away. But 67 to 69 percent of families had to be turned away.

Siedhoff calls St. Louis’ problem “very manageable”: “We have one of the lowest percentages of homelessness in the country, 0.37 percent of the entire population. Atlanta’s is 1.4 percent. And we’ve reduced homelessness by 30 percent, from 1,870 in 2005 to 1,322 in 2007.”

The problem is, those numbers come from an annual count of people sleeping on the streets or showing up for free meals on a particular night in January. The date is mandated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, on the rationale that people will be so cold, they’ll show up to seek services. The reality is that when it’s that cold, people huddle tight, burrow into the crevices. Census-takers look in the usual haunts, but they can’t possibly count all the people sleeping in cars, abandoned houses on the North and South sides, the underground tunnels and caves that riddle downtown, the shanties along the riverfront (one guy’s been there so long his nickname’s “Down by the River”), under loading docks, viaducts and bridges, and scattered through the 524 square miles of St. Louis County.

But surely there are fewer people sleeping rough now? Downtown looks so much … nicer.

“People who tell you that are bureaucrats who go home at 5 p.m.,” snaps the Rev. Larry Rice, founder of New Life Evangelistic Center. He’s long refused to join the city’s network of homelessness agencies: “We work with them in the respect that they refer people to us,” he says, sarcasm heavy. “But their philosophy is ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ They are more concerned about public perception than about helping human beings.

“It’s hitting a bubble of water with a hammer,” he concludes. “The change is that there used to be a concentration in downtown, and now they’re dispersed. Everywhere.”
 

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Reporting on homelessness, I start wondering what it would be like, spending day after day hunting down bathrooms and places I can rest for an hour without being prodded along. I imagine my hair getting greasier, more tangled, my clothes rank. And how would I talk to my friends? No cellphone, no computer, no money. I could maybe write letters, scare up a stamp … but where would they send an answer?

I can only think like this for a while before my head spins loose, and I have to breathe deeply and remind myself I’m safe at home.

But the first thing I do when we learn that my husband might get laid off is beg him to sell our stock—at a loss—and pay off the house.
 

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[Pictured: Jeffrey Carl Williams, a vet with a history of substance abuse and mental illness, sits in his newly renovated apartment—after 18 years on the street. “When we told him, he didn’t believe it,” recalls St. Patrick’s Center CEO Dan Buck. “We had to show him the apartment!”]

Serious progress has been made in the past four years: The new ACT (Assertive Community Treatment) teams do better triage, services are less fragmented and we are indeed learning to put housing first, and to not just dump people in it but help them stabilize their lives. “We now have 1,032 units of permanent, supportive housing in the city,” Siedhoff says, “with another 218 coming, plus 633 units for veterans.”

Advocates still grit their teeth, though, for three main reasons:

First, while that permanent, supportive housing slowly comes online for the chronically homeless, the new homeless are hitting the streets or crowding into relatives’ apartments—and the 10-year plan doesn’t focus on them. Often they are families; often their only disability is unemployment; many don’t have a pattern of homelessness, but they got evicted and lost their security deposit when their landlord defaulted on a mortgage.

Second, while the shelters turn people away (or, as is usually the case, give them the number to Larry Rice’s shelter), beds sit empty in the two-year “transitional housing” programs. It’s a matching game: A bed in a program for men with addiction disorders won’t be made available to a single mother with two kids or an elderly woman with schizophrenia. Then there are the hoops: Some programs want people to have money in a savings account before they enroll, Wallensak says, “and in 90 days in a shelter, that’s difficult. Some want 100 percent sobriety—that’s difficult too. And some are scattered-site apartments where the person has to pay utilities, so if there’s been an unpaid utility bill in the past, that’s a major obstacle.”

Third, at the issue’s core: The St. Louis area has less and less truly affordable housing. Last year, 15 percent of the people staying in shelters had jobs, Wallensak says—but the full-timers were making only $1,066 a month, on average. Those with disabilities that prevent them from working receive a monthly SSI (Supplemental Security Income) check for $637.

Fair-market rent in St. Louis for an efficiency apartment is $547; for a one-bedroom, $593; for a two-bedroom apartment (say, for a single parent and two kids), $711 (HUD statistics for fiscal year 2009).

There used to be other options. That tall, skinny building by Soldiers Memorial downtown? It was the Ford Apartments—single rooms with cheap rent. Then it was sold to a private developer who emptied the building to build custom lofts. He went belly-up, and now the building’s boarded up and vacant, all that single-room-occupancy (SRO) housing lost. The 60 or so boarding houses that once dotted the south end of downtown? Gone. The 19 hotels with weekly and monthly rates? Shamed out of existence. “Conservatively, we have lost 2,500 units of SRO,” says Thomas Burnham, director of shelter services at Peter & Paul Community Services in Soulard. “There’s no profit in it.”

For families, there’s Section 8 housing—but this fall, the only open waiting lists were for housing for the elderly and people with disabilities. A waiting list for family housing—the first in months—opened in early August and filled within a few days.

“‘Housing First’ sounded great,” one advocate says wryly. “If only we had the housing.”

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“Some people say you got to have a spot that’s your own, a cubby, but I never had one. I was afraid, so I would always try to find a doorway or someplace that it was light. One morning I woke up on a bench at Hobo Park and it was like a wilderness, still dark, nobody around, and I thought, ‘How did I get here?’”    —Jeffrey Carl Williams
 

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At 7:30 a.m., a young woman walks her dog to Lucas Park, just east of New Life Evangelistic Center on Locust. A young man shows up with his dog, and the pups wrestle while Chris Ware, roughly their age, with wire-rimmed glasses, a shaven head and a gentle voice, walks slowly through the enclosed play area with a trash bag. “There are dogs, there’s litter from people at the nightclubs and they blame the homeless,” he says. “So Larry’s filming us picking up dog crap.”

A former Marine discharged because he was depressed and suicidal, Ware’s been staying at Rice’s shelter for 2½ months. He worked for a while as a chicken dropper (plunking the chicken into batter) at Moonlight Restaurant in Alton. He smoked more and more pot; finally he left his hometown of Kane, Ill., got sober and went to St. Patrick’s, which referred him to Rice for shelter.

“I’ve only got 12 days left in the 90-day program,” Ware says, anxiety creeping into his voice. “Then, I don’t know what. When I first got here, I slept there.” He points to a bench on the other side of the park. A few yards away, two guys are sleeping on pieces of cardboard on the ground, ball caps over their eyes.

Suddenly Ware checks the time, hands his trash bag to another vet and does a half turn, almost jaunty, to show off his backpack. “I’m going to school over at St. Pat’s,” he says, and heads away from what’s become known as Hobo Park.

For Rice, this patch of grass is a back yard; for Siedhoff, it’s a battleground. Church groups used to do drive-by feedings here, raising the prospect of rats, trash and contamination, and people congregated here early every morning, when New Life shooed them out. They were, quite literally, pissing all over the dream homes of downtown’s new residents. The city instituted rules and curfews.

Hobo Park was one of the more effective cleanups, unlike the scandalous police sweep in July 2005 that hauled people off the streets to pretty up downtown for Fair St. Louis. (That one ended in a lawsuit—and the homeless won.) The shift started in November 2005, when the city asked Centenary United Methodist Church to open its doors to the homeless, offering meals, centralized services and a safe place to be during the day, well away from the tense triangle of Hobo Park, the St. Louis Public Library and the new Washington Avenue loft district. Then, in July 2007, the city opened a “safe haven” drop-in center called Horizon Club at 23rd and Pine. It, too, was strategically located: a walkable but significant distance from the triangle.

“When we opened the doors, we got inundated,” says lead club host Candace Ulrich, a woman with the cheerful concern and wry wit of Alice on The Brady Bunch. Now, Horizon Club’s open 24/7, but at night it’s restricted to members with disabilities. There aren’t any beds here anyway; people happily sleep in chairs. “It’s like being at home,” Ulrich says, her brisk voice softening. “People are settling in, bantering, taking care of each other.”

During the day, Ulrich and other staff members scan the crowd for people with mental retardation or developmental disabilities, “people who don’t know they don’t have to be homeless.” Usually they’re embarrassed to admit they went to special ed in school; now maybe their parents have died, they’re on their own and they don’t realize they qualify for assistance. “We got one guy into his own place, and the change!” Ulrich exclaims. “He’s cleaner, he carries himself differently, he’s not tired anymore—homeless people are tired all the time, always carrying around everything they own. He’s sociable, smiling and laughing. You never see somebody homeless smiling.”

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“On Mondays, this white guy used to drive through in his van—we called him Fat Man—and pass out big bag lunches. And when we were sleeping on the courthouse steps, there was a guy who used to come early in the morning while we were sleeping and leave some juice, a bag of sandwiches, some kind of sweets. There it’d be, lying beside you when you woke up. That was nice.”    —Al
 

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[Pictured: The Rev. Kathleen Wilder is pastor of Centenary United Methodist, where the homeless gather. “One pastor wanted to bring his youth group to show them what alcohol leads to,” she says. “To make the people here like they are in a zoo. I wasn’t sure I wanted his help.”]

Is the main motive behind Horizon Club and Centenary cosmetic, so the homeless don’t mar development prospects? “If you want a cynical answer, yeah,” says the Rev. Kathleen Wilder, pastor at Centenary. Before seminary, she was a business executive; she has few illusions. “But,” she continues quickly, “I have two downtown developers on my board, and they are willing to invest in a real solution, not just sweep homelessness under the carpet. Somebody over at Blu”—a high-rise whose gleaming condos overlook Centenary’s huddled masses—“said, ‘Yeah, it’s not the easiest sale for us, but what you’re doing is important, and it can’t stop.’”

Does Wilder ever worry that, as one formerly homeless man told me, the free meals and services “make it just comfortable enough”?

“The person saying that probably hadn’t been homeless long, had a stronger skill set and didn’t have a mental illness,” she blazes. “There are some people whose scenario is so hopeless, it takes a long time for them to have confidence that they can change it.”

Her voice warms as she talks about the noncosmetic services she’s added: connecting people with medical care and legal services, helping people get IDs and straighten out paperwork, providing a mailing address so they can receive disability assistance or Social Security checks.

Not everybody shows up, though. Al and his fiancée, Laura, have been homeless off and on for years. They’ve slept on church and courthouse steps, in Kiener Plaza and in a frozen tent in an alley, because the shelters are either men-only or women-only, and they want to be together. “Now they are making everybody go to the Centenary church for meals,” Al says. “There’s so much drugs and violence up there, I choose not to go. There’s too much fighting. I don’t even cross that part of
town anymore.”

When she hears his comment, Wilder gives a dry chuckle. “Two years ago, that probably was a fair statement. We now have metal-detector wands, and the corporate manager of security at Purina walked our building with us and gave us ideas. I don’t even let people cuss here.

“I personally believe we can end homelessness,” she says suddenly. “It took me months before I could speak that. When I did, my staff would say, ‘We can’t do that.’ Then I got, ‘Jesus said that the poor will always be with us.’ I said, ‘He didn’t say anything about housing.’”

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