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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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My Great-Aunt Mary rarely left the house. Her sister supported them both financially; Mary stayed home, cooked, cleaned, gardened. In summer, she’d pack a wicker basket with frozen Cokes, ham sandwiches and Snickers bars and lower it from the upstairs porch into the yard where we were playing. She’d had meningitis and breast cancer, lost one eye, was never quite right—but she took such great care of everyone, we barely noticed her strange stubbornness, her fears and flights of fancy. The sudden thought chills me: Without family? I can see Aunt Mary on the street. And it would have swung her into madness.
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“Some people don’t really understand what it’s like to live on the edge,” Broderick says. “How one little thing can create a disaster. If you have family, savings, buffers, things will work. But if you don’t have that, man, it can all fall apart.” Decisions get clouded, hard to understand. For some people, homelessness actually feels freer: nobody pressing in on you, no hopes to be crushed, only the stars overhead.
Al and Laura craved a place to live, though, and when they made some money selling copies of Whats Up Magazine, published by Jay Swoboda as a way to give homeless people “a hand up, not a handout,” they rented a room at the Economy Inn for $50 a night. My brow furrows at the math: $1,500 a month? Surely they could have found an apartment that was cheaper? “Yeah,” Al shrugs, “but you need two months’ rent ahead of time.” Plus furniture, money for utilities …
Alcohol’s easier comfort. If advocates for the homeless could wave one magic wand, they’d close the 7-Eleven at 17th and Pine. Its walls are lined with refrigerated cases: tallboys of Olde English 800 malt liquor and Miller Lite in one, cartons of Boulevard Pale Ale for the loft residents in the next. I watch a young couple buying sandwiches at 10 a.m. The girl strokes the guy’s tattooed shoulder, asking worriedly, “How’d you get those scratches on your back?” Are they homeless? A woman with long, gray, flyaway hair comes in carrying a satchel and a stuffed grocery bag. She’s wearing a coat on this warm, sunny day, and she walks with the slow deliberation of someone trying to prove that she can. Is she homeless? The woman behind the cash register looks me up and down when I ask for a bathroom, then says decisively, “I will take you,” and leads me to a bathroom marked Staff Only.
Drink and drugs eat up people’s lives, their brains, their rent money. According to the 10-year plan, 57.2 percent of St. Louis’ homeless people are leaning hard on some kind of substance. Often they are, in that smug phrase used by people who don’t have to do it, “self-medicating,” because more than a third are mentally ill. They prefer life on the street, with $637 to spend every month, to that sensible Department of Mental Health shelter-plus-care voucher.
More than 40 percent have physical health problems, too. “What they forget is that without a place to live, it’s very hard to be healthy,” notes Dr. Fred Rottnek, a professor at Saint Louis University’s medical school who treated the homeless for years. “Homeless people get raped, beat up, don’t eat well, get diabetes, hypertension, are exposed to the elements, get psychologically numbed. There’s no place to go to relax, feel safe, be yourself.”
For those with serious mental illness, a “shelter” feels more like a 19th-century asylum. “Our folks have a hard time being around a lot of people,” Broderick explains. “They get paranoid, they get anxious, they can’t always follow the rules, some talk to themselves or laugh, and the staff think they’re being smartass.”
Wallensak says people get dropped off from hospitals two or three times a month. “One just had his hospital gown on. Another was wearing hospital booties and open sneakers, laces removed.” A cab had left him at a shelter that wasn’t yet open, so he’d walked in 100-degree heat to the HRC parking lot. There he sat, with $1.50 and six unfilled prescriptions in his pocket and a jagged piece of glass in his hand, slowly and methodically cutting himself.
Not only do hospitals dump, whole counties dump, Siedhoff says: “More than 20 percent of the city’s homeless come from St. Louis County; others from Jefferson, Warren, St. Charles and Metro East. Somehow the city of St. Louis is expected to provide for all the region’s people.” He pauses. “It would be nice,” he adds pointedly, “if there were some cooperation.”
Dana McAuliffe, director of homeless services for St. Louis County, says they’re trying. But calls from county residents to the homeless hotline shot up 12 percent between October 2007 and October 2008. Capacity did not increase. And while the county has four shelters for women, it has none for men. McAuliffe buys a few beds for men from two city agencies.
“We are not as far along in the 10-year plan as we’d like to be,” she admits. “I have money for programs, but not to build permanent supportive housing. Historically, services are concentrated in the city. And treatment has to be comprehensive; homeless people have too many pieces of their lives broken.”
Talking to them, you hear a litany of danger: the man who was beaten to death by two teenagers, ribs crushed and lungs lacerated, because he refused to buy them beer … Al’s friend, who got “stabbed up” at Kiener Plaza, 20 or 30 times in his face and head … John Bell, known as “Radio,” who was stabbed to death near Broadway … The guy who used to walk up and down Chippewa, beaten to death just as Places for People set out to find him.
Since 1986, Peter & Paul Community Services has run an emergency shelter in Soulard focused on exactly the group the 10-year plan now targets: men who’ve been on the street for years. Now Peter & Paul is opening permanent supportive housing, and Burnham expects the residents to be wary, test him a bit. “They’re used to being surrounded by chaos and jolted by adrenaline,” he says. “They don’t know how to go to a restaurant and just sit down and eat; they’re self-conscious shopping, because they’re so used to being told to move on.”
After 33 years of this work, Burnham knows the paradox: The worse off you are, the tougher it is to believe anything else is possible. Recent studies in neuroscience pinpoint the problem, showing that when primates are under stress, consumed by the need to survive, they stop growing new brain cells. Over time, the stress hormones that put the body on a heightened state of alert can become toxic, attacking the hippocampus and directly affecting our ability to learn and remember.
Depression—which can be either a cause or a consequence of homelessness—has a similar effect, killing brain cells and preventing new ones from being born. We spiral downward because our brain is losing its responsiveness, its very ability to change for the better. The old assumption, never proven, was that antidepressants worked by increasing serotonin; Dr. Ronald Duman at Yale University now believes they work because they stimulate the growth of new brain cells.
For most people who are chronically homeless, problems started back in childhood, when 25 percent were physically or sexually abused, 27 percent were in foster care or institutions, and 21 percent were already homeless (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services statistics). But new studies’ most promising finding is that, in a safe and peaceful environment, even the adult brain, stressed for decades, can heal itself, grow fresh cells, begin to learn again.
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“They say I’m bipolar, with ADHD. I know I have the problems, but deep down I try finding an excuse just so I don’t have to think about it. I just want to help the kids that are my age and on the street. Been there.
Done that.” —Cassandra
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[Pictured: “I really can’t get the concept of how people like to stay homeless,” says Darrell Page, who’s now selling Whats Up and living in his own place. “I don’t like to be without, myself. But I’m seeing more on the street. New faces. Maybe they just fell into the homeless thing.”]
There are successes.
St. Patrick’s recently used federal grant money to turn 45 units in the old Days Inn at Washington and Market, now redeveloped as low-income housing, into a residence where vets struggling with mental illness or addiction can receive shelter, treatment and job training for two years. The first resident, Jeffrey Carl Williams, had been on the street for 18 years. “I woke up, and I was looking out ’cause I liked my view so much, and right below me was the doorway where I used to sleep when it was cold, lying in a, you might say, fetal position in the insanity of crack cocaine,” he says in a rush.
“The pain was all self-inflicted,” he adds, amazed, “and it’s gone now.”
Cassandra, 20, was put in foster care at age 7. “They said something about I was being beat. I had a bunch of bruises,” she says. “But my mom and dad never did hit me. Anyway, that’s when I started becoming my own person, because I got separated from the only thing that I had.” After a disastrous foster placement, she was sent to St. Vincent Home for Children, ran away, got put in lockdown at Edgewood, was returned to her parents, ran away and lived on the streets at 14. “I was carefree; I felt like I ruled. ‘Look at me now, Mom, look at me now.’ I started drinking and smoking and doing things I shouldn’t have done. Things I regret.”
Cassandra slept on the streets for three years, then in a car. At 18, she found her first place to live, through Places for People. A year later, she’s stable, taking meds and paying bills in a small apartment she shares with her fiancé.
Darrell Page wakes up in a clean apartment looking out on the new Lumière Place casino and thinks, “God’s got a whole lot more to do with me, but life’s good.” Before getting shot, paralyzed and, eventually, clean, he ran a flophouse on the North Side for fellow cocaine addicts. “I made it my loyal duty to put something in their stomach,” he says. “They called me Mr. Schnucks ’cause I was the friendliest person in town. But I was a functional addict; I’ve always been a hustler. I don’t see how people slip through the cracks—or jump through them, or fall. OK, so you go to Rev. Rice every morning. Put something else in your program. These are people who have lost their self-esteem. Their get-up-and-go has got up and left.”
Some are too sick to chase it. McAuliffe says, “More and more people are coming into emergency shelters with serious mental health problems. We don’t know if the cuts in Medicaid have anything to do with it or not. But the people are disruptive. They can’t function.”
Wallensak’s seeing the same phenomenon: “We have had more incidents this year than in the past five or six.” It’s bitter proof of success: People who could more easily be housed have been housed, and those who remain homeless have more intractable problems.
Those are precisely the people the 10-year plan was written for, and we’ve sifted our way to them—just in time for the new homeless to take the others’ places.
The private sector has to get involved, Burnham says: “The government, especially now, doesn’t have the money to generate the kind of housing that’s going to solve this. We need truly affordable housing for very-low-income people, and it can’t all be in the 4th and 7th Wards.”
Nobody—except the NIMBY neighbors—is arguing. But just as we realized how to create the right kind of housing, just as we began to make headway on the toughest cases, the economy got pulled out from under everybody’s feet.
Urban Strategies, for example, the nonprofit arm of developer McCormack Baron Salazar, had a huge complex planned for Martin Luther King Drive, with supportive housing gracefully inserted. Now the entire project’s on hold, Burnham says, his voice edged with disappointment.
There has been progress, he concedes—both cosmetic and real. We’re doing a lot more than unfolding cots and stirring soup. We now know exactly what it would take to end homelessness.
“But we’re at the beginning of the 10-year plan.”
Note: This article has been modified slightly since its print publication.
