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Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
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The Rev. Larry Rice isn’t sticking to the script.
Tonight marks the annual Evening with the Homeless at his downtown shelter, the New Life Evangelistic Center. An ambulance, lights flashing, sits outside the front door, greeting the few visitors who show up on this dreary Friday in September.
While it’s chilly on the street, it’s stifling here in the worship studio. Rice promises to have someone turn on a fan, but no air moves, and the hot TV lights exacerbate the discomfort. This room is made for TV, the front wall adorned with wood paneling and fake plants, an oasis in the dingy building.
Despite the disappointing turnout, the rows of folding chairs are packed. Up front sits the staff, mostly homeless folks who volunteer their labor in exchange for longer-term stays. Behind them are the people who have come for emergency shelter.
A war is coming, and tonight, Rice rallies his troops. His son, Chris, also a pastor at NLEC, has set the tone, playing his guitar and leading the crowd in singing “I’m on the Battlefield for My Lord” and “Be Still, God Will Fight Your Battles.”
Now, Larry delivers his sermon. The man’s a gifted preacher, the sort who makes such impassioned, pithy pronouncements, everyone around feels compelled to call out “Amen!” He speaks at a driving, delirious pace that makes you feel sorry for the poor chap who has to type out the closed captioning for this broadcast on his station, KNLC Channel 24.
His message, titled “The Beloved Community,” centers on how the rich, by neglecting and even showing disdain for the poor, prevent us from truly living together in Christian unity. “The golden rule for these people who are so greedy is that him who’s got the gold makes the rules,” he says. “As a result, the rich get the gold mines, while the poor and the struggling middle class get the shaft, with efforts made to move them out of the community once they end up homeless.”
But every few paragraphs, Larry deviates from the material he prepared to take potshots at his enemies. Neighbors have filed a petition with the city’s Board of Public Service to have NLEC’s hotel license revoked, which would effectively shutter the shelter. They accuse its patrons of wreaking havoc on the streets: urinating and defecating, selling and using drugs, littering and committing lewd acts, fighting and panhandling. Larry, they allege, has failed to discourage such behavior.
He responds by paraphrasing Jesus, saying, “It would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for one of these rich people to get into the Kingdom of God.” By rich people, Jesus might not have been referring specifically to yuppies living in lofts, but that’s semantics.
“Condominium owners move in near a shelter,” Rice says. “They want to buy cheap. But then they want the homeless who were already there gone, so they can say their property values can go up.”
At strategic points throughout the night, Larry brings a few of the shelter’s guests up to the lectern to share their testimony for the cameras.
“If it wasn’t for Larry Rice shelter, I wouldn’t have a place,” one woman says. “While being here, I’m also getting closer to God and experiencing new friends. Larry is more like a papa to us.”
A man explains that he made bad choices, ran with the wrong crowd. When he hit hard times, he came to St. Louis from Springfield, Mo., hoping to receive services, but found the city inhospitable. He used drapes pulled from a dumpster to keep warm on the cold streets. Eventually, he came to NLEC.
“I don’t understand how evil people could choose to shut a place down like this that offers everything that they do for the people out there. They saved my life, because I would have died out on that street,” he says. “There was no place else for me to go.”
A guy sitting next to me leans over and whispers, “That’s a lie.”
Lawrence W. Rice Jr. was born in 1949 in McAllen, Texas, not far from where the Rio Grande empties into the Gulf of Mexico, an area he calls the “Poverty Pocket of the United States.” His father worked for Coca-Cola, and the Rices had a 10-acre farm, where Larry raised livestock to show at local fairs.
When he was 6, his family took a trip to Mexico. On the steps of a church, they came upon a group of children begging. Larry wanted to give them some money, but his father said, “If you give a few of them money, all of them are going to be all over here.” Larry was grieved. Helping all of them sounded like a good idea to him.
He tells that tale and many others in his unpublished and untitled autobiography, a draft of which he shared with SLM.
Even as a kid, Larry received direct and immediate answers to prayer. While turkey hunting, he waited all morning without seeing a single bird. When he heard his father walking up the road to get him, he called out, “Dear God, send out one turkey gobbler!” Sure enough, just then, one came strolling in front of his blind. “What a shame the turkey didn’t pray that morning,” Larry writes, “because I regret to say he didn’t live to see another day.”
After a high-school career spent winning 4-H ribbons and competing on the debate team (a judge once said Larry sounded too much like a preacher), he went to Concordia Junior College (now Concordia University) in Austin, Texas. While volunteering with an organization that assisted the elderly and mentally disabled, Rice “began to understand for the first time that to minister meant to serve.” He decided that “true faith expresses itself in action.”
Rice also fell in love with a woman named Penny Bean. “After I learned that I flunked my Latin final exam,” Rice writes, “a kiss from Penny quickly erased my frustration.” After two years in Austin, it was on to Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne, Ind.
Rice was on the path toward becoming a Lutheran pastor. But slowly, he was growing disillusioned with the denomination. As he writes, “I was beginning to see this theology as a dry, dead, do nothing religion that damned its followers to a lifestyle that was ineffective and unproductive.” Rice wanted to follow a living “Christ of the present” who could help bring justice to minorities and the homeless.
While working at a hospital, he met a janitor named Jerry Officer, whose evangelical belief was “truly contagious.” One day, Rice knelt down in a bathroom and gave his life to Jesus. “Suddenly, a language came forth I had not heard before,” he writes. Larry was speaking in tongues.
One dark night, as he drove home on an icy road, his car started to spin out of control. He tried to steer out of it with no luck. He screamed, “Dear God, if you deliver me from this and save my car from crashing, I will read your word every day.” His car stabilized. “It was like a dozen angels had grabbed the car and stopped it from spinning.”
Larry married Penny, then came to St. Louis to attend Concordia Seminary, though after just a few weeks, he dropped out. “Each day, I prayed frequently, asking God what He wanted to do with the rest of my life,” Larry writes. He went on to be ordained at Calvary Temple Church, an evangelical congregation in Fort Wayne whose theology more closely aligned with his own.
In 1972, Larry and Penny founded the New Life Evangelistic Center in a 50-foot trailer in Wellston. Soon after, the ministry moved into an old mansion in Lafayette Square, at the time a dangerous neighborhood. Larry would regularly bring people he met on the street back to their house for the night. He was also regularly on the verge of going broke, only to miraculously find provision. “On more than one occasion, we would set the table and pray,” he writes. “As we were praying around the table, the doorbell would ring. When we would run down to answer the door, a bag of food would be there.”
In 1975, Rice paid $50,000 for the former YWCA building at 1411 Locust, holding a grand opening the following spring. The five-story building would serve as the headquarters of the Christian TV station that Rice was planning to start, while also providing “shelter and other direct assistance to the poor and homeless throughout mid-America,” he writes.
But NLEC would be a church first, a shelter second, he adds. “Evangelism was and continues to remain the heart of the work of New Life Evangelistic Center.”
After his sermon, Larry takes a 30-minute break in his cluttered office, before heading back out to lead a telethon. The needs are always great, especially with the upcoming hearings putting a strain on his legal defense fund.
Despite Rice’s never-ending fundraising pitch, NLEC is far from broke. A federal filing a decade ago indicated that the organization had a net worth of more than $40 million. Since then, Rice says NLEC has sold off or given away some property, and the value of its media holdings has plummeted. Its 2012 year-end financial report indicated that the organization ran a deficit for the year, but still had more than $2 million in various funds, plus millions more in assets.
Rice says the people who criticize the management of his shelter don’t understand what NLEC is. True, he doesn’t have professional security guards, but homeless men and women in his two-year leadership program keep the place safe. Yes, there aren’t professional social workers or nurses on staff to address addiction or mental-health issues, but the pastors, Larry, Chris, and the Rev. Ray Redlich, offer case management. Outside social workers visit the shelter on a volunteer basis.
This is a church, not a professional service organization. People aren’t clients; they’re guests. Shelter is simply a function of worship. “We have a totally different structure,” Larry says. “We try to have an open faith community.”
As he sits behind his desk munching on cookies, it’s easy to understand how Larry could dismiss the current allegations against him as trivial. The walls in here are plastered with plaques, framed certificates, and awards. For four decades, he’s been St. Louis’ most prominent advocate for the homeless. In NLEC’s early years, he provided the area’s only major shelter.
From humble beginnings in the ’70s, Rice has built an empire of homeless services, with shelters across Missouri and in surrounding states. He’s even had outposts in Africa, Haiti, and India. He’s paid countless heating bills for folks who couldn’t afford them during bitter winters, distributed countless fans during heat waves, bought countless bus tickets for stranded travelers. He gives away turkeys on Thanksgiving and toys on Christmas. Even after cancer took Penny’s life in 2007, a devastating blow to the shelter and to Larry, he’s soldiered on. How many people has he helped? How many has he brought to Christ?
“It’s infinite,” he answers.
And now they want to shut him down over a few guys urinating outside? He’s tried to put porta-potties behind his building, but the Street Department denied his applications. As proof, he tosses a rejection letter across his desk. Of course, the department’s director, Todd Waelterman, sits on the Board of Public Service, which will be deciding whether Larry loses his hotel license.
“It’s almost like they play politics in such a way in order to create a problem, so that they have a reason to shut it down,” he says. “It’s kind of a stacked committee. They’re all good old boys.” (He doesn’t mention the two portable toilets that used to be near NLEC; one was overturned, and the other was burned to the ground.)
As for policing the streets, that’s the cops’ job, not Rice’s. “If a person is out on the streets, how can I tell them to move?” Rice asks. “I don’t have any authority on a public place.”
Larry is the sort of person who can only see the world one way. His singular focus on carrying out his mission has allowed him to persevere in circumstances that would have caused any reasonable man to quit years ago. But it’s also led to clashes between him and the city, the business of serving the poor reduced to egos, agendas, and name-calling.
So it’s no surprise that Rice ain’t going down without a fight. “Bear in mind, I got to follow the mandates of that book there, the Scriptures,” Rice says. “I’m following Jesus Christ, not Francis Slay.” So if Mayor Slay’s lackeys revoke his permit, but God tells him to keep providing shelter, what will he do?
The law of the land can’t stand in the way of the work of the Lord. He’ll take the city to court: “We are determined to be here all the way to the Supreme Court if we have to.”
As part of NLEC’s communal structure, its staff comprises mostly homeless people. Opponents say this is akin to letting the inmates run the asylum.
Bill Gruhn worked on Larry’s staff in 1979. Even then, Gruhn says, Larry’s domineering leadership style, along with the imbalance between high demands and low compensation, led many employees to give up. “The only people Larry could get to staff New Life were people that were homeless,” he says. “That’s the downfall of the place. His management style is such a put-off.”
Today, if someone shows up at NLEC’s door looking for emergency shelter, they can stay for 14 days. At the end of that period, they can either find somewhere else to go for 30 days or join one of NLEC’s programs. There’s a 30-day program for men and women, a 90-day program for veterans and women, and a two-year leadership program.
In each case, people exchange labor for room and board. They operate the shelter at night when the pastors go home. They also provide security, do administrative work, cook, clean, and serve as cameramen and producers for Larry’s TV station. They receive no wages. They’re also required to attend daily prayer meetings.
Members of the two-year program are often shipped off to one of Larry’s farms, where they tend to livestock, operate broadcast centers, or turn used vegetable oil into diesel fuel as part of his Missouri Renewable Energy initiative. Their work generates income for NLEC, but still, they receive no wages. In fact, members of the two-year program who collect disability or other benefits are asked to donate 40 percent.
Larry says these programs break the cycle of homelessness and provide on-the-job training. But one homeless man describes the arrangement as “almost like modern-day slavery for blacks and whites.” I meet with Chris Rice in his office to discuss the programs.
Chris became a pastor at New Life in 2010 and has been trying to continue and expand upon his father’s work. “They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Gruhn says, “but Chris doesn’t even seem the same kind of fruit.”
The younger Rice is soft-spoken and kind. He responds to stress with a smile and a laugh. And he strikes a much more conciliatory tone than his father with the city, fellow shelters, and their neighbors. “I want a lot more conversations,” he says. “I want a lot less othering and demonizing.”
Chris grew up living with homeless women in NLEC’s former Lafayette Square facility. In many ways, the shelter is the only life he’s known. He looks weary. He’s a recovering addict, though he won’t say of what vice.
He calls the programs “unpaid internships,” not indentured servitude. If people think they’re getting a raw deal, all they have to do is quit. “No one is here because they are coerced,” he says.
Doesn’t the 14-day limit apply silent pressure to join? Well, Chris says, 14 days is more of a guideline than a rule, with exceptions made in particularly cold weather, for example. And he personally makes sure that each person who joins the program knows what they’re getting into.
“Anybody that we involve long-term, we want to make sure that they are in control of their decision,” he says. Chris will personally help guests connect with outside services, like job training at St. Patrick Center. He also helps train the security staff, emphasizing “verbal de-escalations.” Whenever a staff member or guest is accused of breaking the rules, he investigates.
How can one man play so many roles? Is it all too much? “That’s a good question,” he says. “That’s the question that is before us right now.”
Sitting in a vacant office space inside one of his buildings, Brad Waldrop doesn’t come off like a greedy developer. His family owns several properties in the immediate vicinity of 1411 Locust, and he organized the petition against NLEC. But he’s also served on the board at The Bridge, a downtown day shelter and soup kitchen set up in conjunction with the city. He laments the “backward” and “conservative” nature of the western suburbs, where he grew up, and considers himself a progressive.
Waldrop says the Rices and the media have been framing the battle to shut down NLEC all wrong. It’s not condo owners versus the homeless. He says it’s condo owners versus a bad homeless shelter, one that’s hurting the homeless. “The media spins it as if residents do not like poor people,” he says. “This pisses me off.”
For years, Waldrop has been lobbying for smaller shelters, distributed across the region. The Housing Resource Center hotline, which coordinates care among shelters that work with the city, actually receives more calls from St. Louis County than from the city, but many people are directed—or dropped—downtown, because that’s where the services are. Rice, Waldrop, and the city agree that places an unfair burden on an urban core that is still working its way back. Their collective pleas that the county open shelters of its own have gone largely unanswered.
Waldrop argues that because NLEC handles so many people—up to 300 a night, according to Larry—and because it doesn’t have social workers on staff, it is unable to truly meet people’s needs.
Small shelters, with maybe 20 beds each, could get to know people better, understand their problems, and connect them to services that can help. The city’s 10-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness calls for such triage facilities, but eight years in, zero have been opened.
Waldrop is sick of waiting.
Back in 2011, he met with Chris. Waldrop’s operation is small, with zero employees, so he cleans his buildings himself, while his mother works their parking lot. They were having trouble with people sleeping and making a mess on St. Charles Street, behind NLEC.
When this was mentioned to Chris, “He’s like, ‘I’m afraid to go in the back of the building,’” Waldrop alleges. “Then he told me that he believed anything outside his walls was not his problem.” Chris denies saying this.
After that meeting, Waldrop decided that if NLEC refuses to be a good neighbor, it should be closed.
Like Larry, Waldrop says he’s willing to see it through. “I think he’s hurting the people he serves,” he says of Rice. “So yeah, that’s why I want to take it to the Supreme Court.”
If Waldrop succeeds at shutting NLEC down, but fails to get the city and county to open the smaller shelters he proposes, what will happen? His answer is abstract, something about transient homeless people moving on and other shelters “stepping up.” The fact is, nobody really knows.
In 2002, police suspected that a disgruntled homeless man intentionally set a damaging fire at 1411 Locust, after he was turned away one night. “Fire officials said the building had several code violations,” noted an Associated Press report on the incident.
In 2006, at a New Life Evangelistic Center free store and shelter in Joplin, a man who was part of Rice’s two-year leadership program was charged with raping a 15-year-old girl.
In 2007, Rice was allowing people to sleep in his free store in Springfield, Mo. A man named Darin Robinson was in charge. He brutally raped a woman who came there for shelter. Robinson was later convicted of forcible sodomy and sentenced to life in prison.
In January 2008, at Larry’s location in New Bloomfield, where at the time he had a TV broadcast center, a man attacked two men with a chain saw and two others with a knife.
In February, a homeless man named Robert Gamble got into a fight on the street. That night, when he came into the shelter, Gamble thought he recognized someone from that dispute. In fact, 21-year-old Jeremy Dunlap hadn’t been involved in the earlier altercation, but that didn’t save his life. Gamble stabbed Dunlap to death. He was later convicted of murder, and NLEC’s insurance companies eventually settled a wrongful death suit with Dunlap’s parents.
In fall 2012, an intoxicated homeless man fell to his death in a stairwell at NLEC.
When asked about these occurrences, Larry remains defiant, calling them “isolated incidents,” though he also says NLEC has made changes to prevent future violence.
On the topic of Dunlap’s murder, he sees hypocrisy. “The parents sent the person here for housing,” he says. “They didn’t handle taking care of him.”
Larry says none of this is germane to the current debate. “The issue still remains the same,” he argues. “If we weren’t here, where are people supposed to go?”
Secretary Cherise Thomas hasn’t even finished reading the roll at the opening Board of Public Service hearing on September 24, and already there’s controversy. “Director Siedhoff is excused,” she says, and a collective “Huh?” spreads through the audience in City Hall’s Kennedy Hearing Room.
Bill Siedhoff is director of the city’s Department of Human Services, which is responsible for serving the homeless. He’s certainly qualified to have an opinion on NLEC. But because of his well-documented and long-standing differences with Rice, he’s decided to recuse himself.
“The relationship with Rev. Rice goes back so far,” Siedhoff says. “It was just better for me to not be a part of that discussion.”
The hostility between the two is probably overstated. In 2012, they were fighting over homeless camps on the riverfront, which Rice supported. The city eventually closed them after a homicide at a camp called Hopeville. In a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article at the time, Siedhoff said Rice “preys” on the needy for publicity; Rice called Siedhoff a “rodeo clown.”
Once upon a time, they were allies. Until 1985, the city was doing little to help the homeless. Rice encouraged hundreds of people to demand change by setting up tents on the lawn of City Hall, a gathering that became known as Schoemehlville, a reference to then-Mayor Vince Schoemehl Jr. Through litigation, the city was forced to sign a consent decree agreeing to provide services to the homeless. Siedhoff was appointed to the task force charged with implementing it.
In the mid-2000s, a dispute over a downtown building ended their relationship. Federal law dictates that homeless shelters get first crack at government agencies’ surplus properties, but when the Abram Building on Market Street became available and Rice attempted to acquire it, the city fought him, eventually taking it over. The building is now home to Siedhoff’s office, a thumb in Larry’s eye. “Federal surplus property belongs to homeless people,” Rice says, still fuming. “They should have a homeless shelter in there.”
But there’s more to the disagreement than that long-ago slight. Rice prides himself on not taking public money—local, state, or federal—so that he can remain independent, free to criticize whoever draws his ire. (His critics say that the accountability that goes with public funding wouldn’t reflect kindly on his operation.)
Siedhoff says Rice’s approach, hundreds of homeless people under one roof, is an outdated recipe for disaster. He supports a nationally recognized (and federally funded) model that calls for putting people directly into permanent supportive housing, as a way to stabilize their lives. The city’s 10-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness has created more than 1,400 such housing units, including some through the heralded BEACH Project in 2013.
“The way business ought to be conducted is to follow the housing-first model,” Siedhoff says. “That turned out to be a very workable model, we think, and a very successful model, and that’s what we’re going to continue to employ.”
But the city’s 10-year plan addresses only the chronically homeless, a technical designation that includes only those who have been on the street for more than a year and have a disability, which accounts for a small portion of the homeless population. In fact, the city has focused so much on permanent housing, there are actually fewer emergency shelter beds available today than when the plan went into effect.
When someone ends up on the streets and calls the Housing Resource Center hotline, one of the most common answers is that all of the beds are full. You might try Larry. He doesn’t turn anybody away.
So why hasn’t the city opened more shelters of its own? “If we don’t want to rely on New Life Evangelistic Center, provide a better alternative,” says Jay Swoboda, a downtown developer and the founder of Whats Up Magazine, which raises money for the homeless.
For his part, Larry would like a little respect. By sheltering 300 people a night, 365 nights a year, at around $20 a person per night, he’s saving taxpayers a couple million bucks, he says. “The only overnight shelter that Bill Siedhoff and the mayor provide is at the city jail,” Rice quips.
The room fills in as the September 24 hearing begins. Larry wears jeans and a blazer. Chris, who’s wearing dress pants and a blue shirt, looks happier than usual. The hearing opens with the simple matter of verifying that enough people signed the petition against NLEC to meet the requirements of a city ordinance titled “Roominghouse or Hotel Detrimental to Neighborhood.”
If a majority of property owners within roughly 400 feet of a hotel sign a petition calling it a detriment, a hearing is triggered before the Board of Public Service. Waldrop received signatures from 138 of the 227 owners in the area surrounding NLEC, a resounding 61 percent.
The sides’ respective lawyers fire some preliminary volleys. Elkin Kistner, the bulldog representing the petitioners, argues that Rice’s attorneys shouldn’t be allowed to turn this hearing into a referendum on the plight of the homeless: We all feel bad for the poor, but good intentions don’t make NLEC exempt from the law.
For the defense, Todd Lubben argues that while NLEC does have a hotel license, which it acquired in 1976, it shouldn’t need one because it’s not really a hotel, in that it does not receive compensation in exchange for lodging. “This ordinance itself is arbitrary and unconstitutionally vague and, therefore, unenforceable,” he continues, and “the ordinance at issue today is unconstitutional, as it restricts New Life’s rights to practice its religion.”
With the posturing out of the way, the petitioners call their first witness, Lt. Dan Zarrick, who’s in charge of the downtown bike police. Zarrick testifies that because overnight guests are asked to leave each morning before 7 a.m. and aren’t permitted back into the building until around 5 p.m., they end up spending a lot of time on the street, often misbehaving. Kistner leads the officer through the “detriment to the neighborhood” factors listed in the ordinance, and Zarrick says he sees all of them frequently: littering, drinking in public, lewd conduct, sale and use of illegal drugs, aggressive panhandling, noise, fighting, street and sidewalk congestion…
A period of particular concern came in the summer of 2012, when an encampment formed on the sidewalk outside of Rice’s shelter. (Rice says people stayed out there because they didn’t want to follow his strict rules; several others, including Zarrick, say it was because the people felt safer out there than inside.)
Zarrick says the camp had as many as 60 residents, including women and small children, and that there “were rats on a couple of occasions that I saw in very close proximity to the children.” He goes on to tell of a sex-for-drugs transaction that he witnessed on the corner. Conditions in the camp eventually led the city to close the sidewalks near NLEC by blocking them off with metal barricades, an extreme (and not exactly pedestrian-friendly) measure.
The petitioners brought out the fact that several sex offenders list their address as 1411 Locust, a concerning and potentially illegal situation, given the shelter’s location, in proximity to schools and the playground in Lucas Park. “I believe that it creates an environment for potential crime,” Zarrick says. “Many of these individuals are out of the building during times where they could possibly encounter some of these children.”
So is NLEC a detriment? “I think its current operational plan is a detriment to the neighborhood,” Zarrick says.
On cross-examination, however, he admits that patrons of Washington Avenue bars commit their fair share of nuisance crimes, too. He says sex offenders usually don’t have to register every time they stay in a hotel. And he acknowledges that he’s dropped people off at NLEC, even some who didn’t ask to be taken there. If he thinks the shelter causes harm, why would he do that?
Over the course of four hearings, the petitioners call 14 witnesses. All of them testify in one way or another to observing illegal activity in the streets surrounding NLEC, perpetrated by people they believe are associated with the shelter.
Problem-property officer Daphne Allen testifies about calls for service. According to data acquired by SLM through a Freedom of Information Act request, between January 1 and October 31, 2013, there were 227 calls for service (basically 911 calls) to 1411 Locust. The petitioners enter into evidence a similar log showing that between August 2012 and July 2013, there were 305 calls to NLEC. That means it had the sixth most for any site in police District Four, behind police headquarters and Union Station, but just ahead of Busch Stadium. As Rice remarks, nobody is trying to shut those down.
Allen testifies that NLEC’s call numbers are a sure sign of a bad time. “This is extraordinary,” she says. She hears from homeless people who would rather stay out in the elements than go to NLEC. “They are afraid to go inside,” she says. “There’s no security… I mean, how do you keep these people safe, you know?”
John Tullmann, who became homeless last winter, spent 40 or 50 nights at NLEC this year, before deciding he was better off sleeping on the street. “I’ve had quite a bad experience there a number of times,” he testifies. “I’ve had personal property of mine stolen, prescription medications, a laptop computer…”
His belongings were supposedly kept in a locked storage room with a camera on it, but when he came back in the morning, they were gone. He also says that he witnessed not just drug use, but also drug transactions inside the shelter. “It was common knowledge that if you wanted to purchase drugs that you could go to New Life, out front of the building or inside, and obtain narcotics,” he says.
James Mosley is the most colorful witness. He says that after spending the night inside NLEC, when people come out at 7 a.m., it’s time to “hit a pipe, hit a syringe, hit a left-handed cigarette.” He says that inside NLEC, you keep your possessions close, lest they be stolen. “You sleep with your shoes underneath your mattress, because I’ve seen more than one man walk out of there in socks.” As he leaves the stand, Mosley turns to Larry. “You’re looking rather dapper today there, Reverend.”
Matt O’Leary is a neighborhood-watch type; he readily admits to calling the police to break up “illegal feeding,” when good Samaritans don’t get the right permits to hand out food. But his testimony is graphic, including an event he calls “the trifecta.” “We found a couple fornicating on the fire escape while a guy was defecating and another guy was dumpster diving.”
Another time, O’Leary recalls, a grandmother and two children were sitting on a park bench. Two men approached. “One guy unzipped his pants, started to masturbate, and said, ‘Who wants to party?’ while the other guy dropped his pants and defecated.”
Resident Michael Butcher testifies that with all of this going on, families will move out of downtown. “If you have a baby in a stroller and you’ve got some big guy standing over you with his [genitals] out,” he reasons, “you’re going to move somewhere else.”
Perhaps the most damning testimony comes from Waller McGuire, executive director of the St. Louis Public Library. In his opinion, the residents of NLEC are trashing the beautifully renovated Central Library a block away.
He tells of a man having a psychotic breakdown in his office, people loitering and littering near the library’s entrance, and patrons reporting drug deals in the bathrooms. On three separate occasions, deadbeat parents abandoned a set of three “small children, non–toilet trained, hungry, very unhappy” in the children’s library, requiring a call to Child Protective Services.
Does McGuire think NLEC is a detriment? “I’m sorry, I do.”
On a Friday morning in October, I meet with Larry and Chris at the shelter. There are some things being said in the hearings that they’d like to address.
Despite telling me just a few weeks earlier that the sidewalk isn’t his responsibility, Larry says he tries to be a good neighbor. In fact, just yesterday, he encouraged a group of guys on the corner to either come in or move along. But if the city shuts him down, he’ll have no service to offer, and therefore, no influence. “I shudder at the potential,” he says.
Larry calls in the Rev. Redlich, who’s worked at NLEC since the ’70s. He’s here day to day, while Larry travels around to other locations. Redlich says NLEC is safe. “I remember years ago before we had security—I’m talking about 30 years ago—things got a little hairy down here,” he says with a laugh. “Now, things I feel are much better, and we’re having maybe five times the people staying here.”
Chris and I discuss security. He explains what he sees as limitations to drawing conclusions from the calls for service. For one thing, Waldrop admitted in testimony that he summons authorities to NLEC as many as 100 times a year, maybe more. That could represent a third of the calls to 1411 Locust. Plus, the police consider NLEC’s block a hot spot, meaning officers are given overtime pay to make arrests there.
And of the hundreds of calls, very few of them actually result in formal complaints, arrests, or charges. Rice’s attorneys pulled out police reports supposedly associated with NLEC where the connection was tenuous. A woman dropped off a donation there, then lost her ID somewhere else. Many calls are for an ambulance, to pick up a sick person at NLEC. Are ambulances a detriment to the neighborhood?
As for the calls that are legitimate, steps have been taken to alleviate the problems. A couple of years ago, at Waldrop’s suggestion, NLEC added security cameras throughout the facility. Chris says the implication by Waldrop and the police that NLEC is unwilling to cooperate is false. “Detective Zarrick said that he tried to reach out to me and that I didn’t respond,” he says. “That was a lie.” He says he’s never heard from Zarrick.
Chris also mentions that, a few days earlier, NLEC had hired a private security firm. Two guards will now patrol both inside the building and out on the street throughout the night. Chris claims that the decision to hire them had nothing to do with the ongoing hearings. Rather, it was the result of a regular “internal review.”
A couple of weeks later, Chris gives me a tour of the building. In the basement, there are showers, a laundry facility, and a free store offering clothing. The first floor has the worship studio, some offices, and a winding cavern full of TV production equipment. On this day, fresh produce is being distributed in the lobby; later, they’ll hand out sandwiches. The second floor is home to the kitchen, boasting a Grade A sticker from the city. The women and children stay on the third floor, which is strictly off-limits to men. Men in the programs or on staff stay on the fourth floor, while the fifth floor, a large open bay of maybe 150 bunk beds, houses the men who come for emergency overnight shelter.
The bathrooms are outdated, and on the top floor, they seem insufficient to deal with the crowd, with just a couple of urinals and a couple of stalls, one of which is out of order. The linens on the beds are changed only once per week, with different men sleeping in them each night, which might contribute to bedbug issues. Then again, fancy hotels in New York have bedbugs, too, Chris points out.
As we travel through the facility, we meet several members of the programs. They report that they’re appreciative of the opportunity to work in the shelter. A man sitting at a console in the TV studio says he isn’t sure whether he’d like to pursue a broadcast career when his two-year term ends, but he’s glad to learn a new skill. A woman in the office boasts that she’s doing data entry. As someone in a vulnerable situation that can be humiliating, working at NLEC has helped her feel valuable, given her a purpose. She beams with pride.
On November 1, NLEC hosts a night out with the homeless on a vacant lot near the intersection of Interstate 44 and Vandeventer Avenue. Larry leased this property in 2012, but when he set up a tent there for the homeless, he was arrested. Recently, a federal court issued a temporary order allowing him to return to the site, saying that the city had infringed on his religious rights as a church.
Larry announces that he’s considering litigation against St. Louis County to force it to provide more shelter beds. He mentions an incident where a homeless woman died in a county jail after being forcibly removed from a local emergency department. He also speaks about the city’s paranoia regarding sleep. Police clear the parks at 10 p.m., keep people on the move. Then sleep deprivation sets in, an exhausted person does something unusual, and they throw him in jail. Larry cautions that no one should fall asleep tonight, because the police are watching. “There are sleep police all over the place here,” he says, in his best spooky-campfire-story voice. “They wander around. They see you sleeping. They’re going to get you.”
He’s hardly exaggerating. Maggie Crane, a spokesperson for the mayor, told me earlier that if anyone here tonight did anything other than church functions, the city would intercede. “We would enforce our ordinances,” she says.
One of the people here tonight is Rita Sharratt. She, her daughter, and her four grandchildren became homeless this past September, when her husband died and the bank foreclosed on her house after it was discovered that her name wasn’t on the loan.
She’s been calling the Housing Resource Center hotline every day for months with little luck. Her family was sleeping in cars before they found NLEC. Now, they’re in the 90-day program, and having an address has allowed the kids to remain in school. Jade, the oldest at 11, just got her report card: four A’s and four B’s.
“We are very happy,” Rita says. “If they weren’t there, we would literally still be on the streets. My children are doing great.”
Steve Campbell, executive director of Peter and Paul Community Services, has been helping homeless people in St. Louis since the 1980s. Peter and Paul offers emergency shelter, transitional housing, programs for homeless people living with mental illness or HIV/AIDS… The organization is in the process of creating a facility that will provide permanent supportive housing for the chronically homeless, through the city’s 10-year plan.
Peter and Paul’s 60-bed emergency shelter for men in Soulard bears many similarities to NLEC. Men stay in an open bay of bunk beds. Shelter monitors, not uniformed security, run things, involving the police when necessary. Security cameras keep an eye on people everywhere but the bathroom.
Campbell says closing NLEC might create more problems than it solves. “I would say don’t do it unless you have a plan of what to do with the 150 or 200 people who are living there,” he says.
Campbell agrees that some level of neighborhood impact goes with the territory of serving the homeless. But when asked about the 2008 homicide at NLEC, he demurs. “I don’t know what to say about that,” he says. “I will say it’s quite possible we have just been very lucky. We haven’t had any deaths at our shelter.”
Kathleen Wilder, who at the time of our interview is finishing her term as executive director of The Bridge, is hesitant to comment on NLEC directly. She doesn’t doubt Larry’s intentions. “I believe he’s doing what he believes he’s supposed to do,” she offers.
But Wilder’s staff includes several licensed, uniformed security guards, and guests are screened with a metal-detecting wand upon arrival. She also has a rule that if clients want to smoke, they must go at least two blocks away. She relies on moral, rather than legal, authority, and doesn’t hesitate to approach violators to explain the need to be good neighbors. She doubts that’s happening at NLEC.
The biggest difference between Larry and Wilder seems to be philosophical. She sees homelessness as something to eradicate. He thinks of the homeless as a protected class, whose rights need be defended. “If you’re not working daily to end homelessness forever,” Wilder says, “you will unknowingly do things that will perpetuate the cycle.”
Echoing Waldrop’s suggestion, Wilder says a better method for emergency shelter would be to follow the model used by St. Louis Winter Outreach, which deals with smaller groups at shelters across the area, so that “you can know who they are and know how to help them.”
Teka Childress is the founder of Winter Outreach. She’s also worked for BJC Behavioral Health for the last 11 years and is part of the team at Karen House, a Catholic Worker women’s shelter that several homeless women tell me is the best in town.
Childress is a staunch supporter of NLEC, explaining that it plays an important role. Shelters like Karen House, which is limited to 20 beds, can provide exceptional hospitality, because they know when they turn people away, NLEC will take them. “If you want New Life to do a great job, give them a small number of people to work with, and they’ll do a great job,” she says. “The fact that they haven’t turned people away, is it ideal? It’s definitely not their fault. It’s kind of a virtue of its own. It’s short-term shelter for everyone, as opposed to longer-term for a few.”
Michael Stoops, the director of community organizing at the National Coalition for the Homeless, also supports NLEC. “Every community should have an advocate like Larry Rice,” Stoops says. He mentions that Larry ran for governor in 2000. How many homeless advocates have done that?
Stoops says if shelters were the solution, homelessness would have ended long ago. Programs to place people directly into permanent housing are wonderful, but also expensive. With limited budgets, the number of available housing units comes up far short of the demand. While needy people sit on long waiting lists to get apartments, we need to support emergency shelters, so they have somewhere to go in the meantime.
Closing NLEC would just be a step in the wrong direction.
“No city, including St. Louis, is able to shelter all of its homeless population,” Stoops says. “So private nonprofits, churches, ministries that are doing God’s work, in terms of sharing food with the homeless or sheltering people, should be applauded and not run out of town or demonized.”
Rice’s attorneys present NLEC’s defense at hearings that run through the month of November. They offer a very different picture of the shelter’s guests than the one presented by the petitioners. Some of them are homeless because of mental illness or substance-abuse issues, but others were victims of the recession, racked up unmanageable medical bills, or didn’t have supportive families to fall back on.
Larry testifies that NLEC is “probably the most secure shelter in the area.” He also quotes quite a few Bible verses, more witnessing than testifying. But the real intrigue comes on cross-examination. You won’t find two people with stronger wills than Larry and Kistner, Waldrop’s bull of a lawyer. Kistner tears into Larry so ferociously, the reverend’s supporters shout their objections to more than one sharply pointed query. When he asks a yes-or-no question, Kistner demands a yes or no answer. And Larry repeatedly refuses to provide one.
Larry’s 1976 hotel license allows him to shelter only 32 people, and he has never applied to expand the occupancy. Kistner again and again attempts to force Larry to admit that he’s in violation, and again and again, Larry dodges the question, saying that inspectors have never complained. Eventually, with Larry talking in circles, Kistner cuts him off.
“Sir,” he interjects, pleading with the uncooperative witness.
“I’m just trying to answer your…” Larry begins.
“I didn’t think you were trying to answer my question,” Kistner says firmly. He repeats the question once more, in case there was any confusion.
When it’s his turn, Chris testifies that some things have changed at NLEC, just in the few weeks since this hearing started.
He mentions the private security firm. He produces a pamphlet detailing the guidelines and procedures for each of the programs. Then he explains that every guest who enters is asked to sign an agreement that he or she will follow the rules. (This document was drafted October 21,
just 22 days prior to his testimony.)
The shelter has long had a rule that drugs and alcohol are not permitted in the building. It’s been previously reported that patrons would just drain their bottles before entering. But Chris testifies that if any guest is suspected of being intoxicated, they are given a Breathalyzer test, and if they fail, they are asked to leave. (In a later conversation, he tells me this practice was instituted after the drunk man fell to his death in 2012.)
Asked about nuisance crimes in the neighborhood, Chris says that NLEC works tirelessly to prevent its guests from misbehaving on the street, in contrast to what his father said just a few weeks earlier. “We take loitering very seriously,” he says.
Kistner asks Chris specifically whether he’s aware of any NLEC guests urinating in the neighborhood. There’s a long pause, then Chris says no. Using drugs? No. Littering? No. Panhandling? No.
In just the three months I’ve spent reporting this story, I’ve been panhandled near NLEC more than once. I’ve seen public drinking and urination. And loitering? People loiter outside NLEC every day. Chris has never seen that? A couple of days after his testimony, I call and ask.
He says Kistner was trying to trap him. “What he’s seeking to prove is that, yes, not only do I witness it,” Chris says, “but I tolerate it around our building.”
Kistner didn’t ask if he tolerated it, though. He just asked whether he was aware of it. Was he? “The answer is yes.”
But perhaps a more important question is this: Would closing NLEC actually do anything to resolve the problems in the neighborhood? Faye Abram, an associate professor of social work at Saint Louis University who’s been studying homelessness for decades, testifies that she doubts it. “The evidence suggests that it’s unlikely that the nuisance behaviors occurring outside New Life Evangelistic Center would be eliminated or alleviated if the center was closed,” she says.
When Childress takes the stand, she puts it more bluntly. “If we close New Life, it would be a disaster for the city,” she says. “It keeps people alive at night. It’s not perfect. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It has one very specific job. It does that very well.”
As the hearings drag on through November, the Partnership for Downtown St. Louis weighs in, issuing a statement supporting the petitioners. It argues that NLEC provides insufficient services for the mentally ill and substance dependent, making the shelter “detrimental to the homeless and to the neighborhood.”
At press time, the hearings were proceeding with no end in sight, and a ruling wasn’t expected until early 2014, if not later. Regardless of the outcome, both sides have pledged to take the issue to court, should they lose.
Melvin McGhee will never forget the date: July 11, 2008. That’s when he became homeless. With nowhere else to turn, he came downtown and spent the night at NLEC. “Walking in there, it was a total culture shock,” says the Army veteran. The hardest thing to adjust to was the stench. “Feet, body odor, I’m just going to be frank, butt. It was horrible,” he says.
Upstairs on the fifth floor, he began to undress to go to bed. He removed his pants and folded them neatly. A guy came over and said, “Man, you better watch your shit.” Soon enough, he learned to carry a knife into the shelter for protection. He had no trouble getting it past the halfhearted pat-down at the front door.
At night, Larry would leave the shelter, escorted by security. Once he was gone, it was chaos, McGhee says. He claims one of the security guards would bring in drugs and smoke crack with guests on the fifth floor. There were also sex acts in the bathroom, McGhee recalls.
Later, he joined NLEC’s 90-day veterans program. He didn’t mind the required work, but he thought it was unfair that people had to attend the daily Bible studies. “You were forced to do a lot of things you shouldn’t have to be forced to do,” he says.
McGhee says he once saw Larry kick out a woman and her six kids because they wouldn’t go on camera to sing NLEC’s praises. “He would get up in front of his camera and preach the word of the Lord,” he says, “but then off that camera, those horns and tail would come out.”
Often, members of the program let their newfound power go to their heads. “A lot of them had the attitudes, you know, they talked to the guests negatively, scream and holler at them, and just threatening them,” he says.
One time at the shelter, a man didn’t appreciate the way Larry was treating him. “Larry disrespected this guy, and the guy punched him,” McGhee says. “Toupee went one way; he went the other way. I didn’t mean to laugh, but it was funny.”
After finding housing for a couple of years, McGhee became homeless again. He went back to NLEC, but one night, he woke up itching all over. “It got to the point that I itched so bad that I drew blood,” he says. He walked downstairs, took a shower, got his luggage, and never went back.
After all that, McGhee’s take on whether NLEC is a detriment to the neighborhood is perhaps a surprise. “It’s not Larry; it’s the people,” he says. “They’re drinking in public, smoking dope, panhandling, leaving trash all over the place. So we are the ones that are getting that place closed down and causing problems for the neighbors.”
Does he think it should be shuttered? “To be honest, if Larry closed down, they would have no place to go,” he says. “So I’m thinking about the people more than I am Larry. No, they really shouldn’t close it.”
