It’s Thanksgiving morning, and around 60 people are lined up on Locust Street in front of what was once a massive homeless shelter run by the New Life Evangelistic Center.
Before it was shut down by the City of St. Louis in 2017, that shelter in Downtown West could fit up to 300 people on a given night. Now, people aren’t allowed in the building.
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Normally, they can still expect a hot meal on Thanksgiving, as well as other supplies and coffee. But what New Life described as a problem with a caterer means the bunch gathered outside the former shelter gets a $10 Kentucky Fried Chicken gift card instead. The KFC a few blocks away is closed on Thanksgiving, and the next closest locations are both around four miles away—making for a dispiriting holiday.
The crowd still waits in line and collects their coffee, transit passes, and gift cards before heading out into the city, which is mostly desolate on this holiday morning, except for a few law enforcement officers outside the nearby Central Library.
Frenetically darting around the scene is the organizer and former televangelist Rev. Larry Rice—a known entity to most everyone in the media since he became the face of the effort to shelter homeless St. Louisans, first setting up shop in the early 1970s. He’s been serving Thanksgiving meals for just as long. There was a time when these events were much more attractive events for the city’s political leaders, but now New Life’s staff and volunteers are serving the public on their own.
Nearly a decade after Rice’s Downtown West shelter closed, and after attempts to reopen it failed, he’s shifted focus to St. Louis County. There is a growing number of homeless people in the county, he says, and it’s not doing enough to help them.
He zeroed in on requests by County Executive Sam Page to spend millions in Rams settlement money on upgrades to the county-run animal shelter, saying the county treats dogs better than homeless people. He’s pushed for the county to gift him vacant acreage in Wellston, where New Life started, so he can build an estimated $15.5 million campus called the “City of Refuge.”
Rice’s continued prodding at County Council meetings has landed New Life meetings with leadership in the county—and a pledge from one councilmember to include New Life on a committee of service providers. But requests for land have yet to be answered, and one of the parcels it had hoped to develop was granted to another entity last week.
New Life appears to be facing an uphill battle. Multiple sources speak to Rice’s waning relevance; one remarks that his credibility was vestigial from a time when he was the only advocate for the unhoused in town, adding that his confrontational, personality-based style fell out of fashion as more academic, data-driven methods came into favor.
As the space has become crowded with more service providers, Rice’s methods seem outdated to some, but New Life maintains that it has a stronger bond with the people it serves. Both New Life and the other providers tout themselves as the best path forward for uplifting people from poverty and getting them from the streets to being reintegrated with society. But prevailing attitudes in the nonprofit sector clash with New Life’s philosophy. Rice is seen as occupying his own silo in a fractured system.
Rice’s grandson, Pastor Chris Aaron Rice, also New Life’s chief financial officer, acknowledges New Life’s reputation as a lone wolf.
“Rev. Rice recognized early on that the government does not play well with adapting; they move very slow and they’re out of touch, really, with reality, with the people they’re trying to serve,” he says of his grandfather. “In the ‘80s and the ‘90s, when New Life was growing very big, part of the controversy was Rev. Rice pointing out flaws in the government, in their approach, and that made him, individually, very unfavorable to United Way.” He says New Life hasn’t “bought in” to the Continuum of Care that helps distribute federal dollars for homeless services, or other agencies in the field, but adds, “We are willing to work alongside them and help them in practical ways.”
Even so, where the Rices are most effective may be pushing government agencies and other providers to acknowledge a situation few others want to talk about. It’s something Rev. Rice has long excelled at. Stick with him long enough, and you’ll notice he doesn’t struggle to find people to attest to his commitment to the cause. One woman he presents, named Carol, tells SLM in tears how he rescued her from homelessness.
On Thanksgiving, Rice seems to see a host of familiar faces, including the talkative Eugene Mitchell Jr., who shares a good-natured conversation with Rice before telling SLM about his experience with homelessness. He describes St. Louis as “a cold city with a cold heart.”
Tactical disagreements
Rice’s latest push illustrates the gulf between the work New Life Evangelistic Center does and that of governments and other regional nonprofits. Rice and New Life pride themselves on not taking any government funding to remain fiscally independent and are unabashedly faith-based, two things that they say isolate them from other local homeless services groups.
New Life says its outreach teams, and decades of advocacy, place it in a unique position to meet unhoused people where they are. New Life is relational, while others are more “academic,” they say.
“We’ve seen, often, an academic approach to a human problem,” says Chris Aaron. “It’s easy to develop programs and stipulations for those programs when you’re sitting behind a desk; it’s much harder, on the ground, for people to access those services when they have to jump through hoops that are very challenging for them.”
When asked if New Life was leaving money on the table not accepting public funds, he laughs. “You’re asking a pastor, ‘How do you think you’re going to continue?’ And, I’m saying: ‘It’s only really by the grace of God.’”
The 29-year-old is about to start the seventh year of a 10-year track to take over New Life from his 76-year-old grandfather. “I take a more pastoral role in a lot of the day-to-day activities: I teach regularly; I do Biblical counseling,” Chris Aaron says. “But, in general, I’m more of the diplomatic [one]. I meet with individuals, and he is more of the one who keeps the pressure on, appropriately.“
New Life does not follow the now ubiquitous “housing-first” approach to homelessness, the theory that service providers must get people off the streets and into a stable form of housing before providing wrap-around services that help them.
“Our nation has fallen for this housing-first model, where we just take somebody from the streets—rapid rehousing, put them in a home or an apartment,” Chris Aaron says. “And, what we’ve seen is that the rate in which they return to the streets is quite high, at least in this region, and the reason is because, without a relational approach in your programming, it’s going to fail long-term.“
But housing-first is the one backed by the most data.
“Research shows housing-first is the model that works best,” says Anthony D’Agostino, CEO of Peter and Paul Community Services. “You have to get them inside and get them safe, and get them some kind of housing, apartment or even shelter.” From there, he says, you can help people develop habits that allow them to live sustainably, and eventually gain long-term stability.
People within the shelter services community fault Rice’s operation for focusing only on immediate goals, and indeed, there appears to be an attitudinal difference between New Life’s approach and others in town.
Chris Aaron says that with other groups, reliant on public money, “the money just dictates how you help, rather than the other way around.” New Life’s safe houses are led by formerly homeless women, Rev. Rice says, giving their resources “a unique sense of compassion.”
“New Life has a very close relationship with the people we’re trying to work (with), we employ them in a sense,” Chris Aaron says as his grandfather chimes in that most of their workers are or were homeless. “All throughout our structure here, we want to push the principle that they are really no different than us, and that’s why.”
Rice adds that the lack of a walk-in, low-barrier shelter in recent years has kept New Life from providing services to the extent they want to. But D’Agostino says there’s a conflict between the need for a true low-barrier shelter—often in high demand during winter months—and the desire to avoid “warehousing” people, a criticism levied by some at the old Locust Street shelter. “How do you get from warehousing to sheltering to housing to sustainability? It’s trained staff and services,” D’Agostino says, remarking that those services tend to be expensive, before stopping short from speculating on the inner workings of New Life.
New Life, in other words, frames its services in terms of care, while D’Agostino and others often frame services through a lens that maps a path out of homelessness or poverty.
“I think the critique, not necessarily for me, but in general that I hear, is: Are all of the services that those clients need being rendered, and are they getting some of their extreme needs filled beyond just the basic of staying warm inside,” D’Agostino says of New Life.
These days, New Life operates a series of “safe houses” in Missouri, a few in the St. Louis area, one in central Missouri, and another in Springfield. Those can collectively shelter less than a quarter of what Locust could at its peak: around 70 people.
Leaving Downtown West
Rev. Rice partially blamed the end of the Locust Street shelter on a new, affluent crowd settling downtown. A book he wrote—still available through Amazon—curtly summarizes his perspective in its title: “Through the Fire: How St. Louis Gentrifiers Tried to Destroy a Church Because of its Homeless Congregation.”
Downtown and Downtown West have long been considered the hub of the region’s unhoused population. When New Life’s shelter on Locust Street was active, it became an emblem of that perception, with some saying the shelter was dangerous and led to a concentration of unhoused people in the heart of St. Louis. Some thought it encouraged homeless people to go downtown to access services, exacerbating the perception of the neighborhood’s relative lack of safety. Rice himself told SLM in 2013 that “it was not uncommon” to see St. Louis County police officers coming to New Life to drop people off.
But Rice also blamed people moving in for being bad neighbors.
“Condominium owners move in near a shelter,” Rice told listeners in a 2013 sermon. “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.”
Yet even after the city closed down the shelter, homeless people continued to stay downtown. For years, the city has struggled in the winter with its lack of the kind of low-barrier shelter that Rice used to provide. Several people have died while sleeping on the streets in freezing weather. Last year, one was sleeping just outside City Hall when she froze to death.
Chris Aaron says New Life is now focused on direct street outreach to the unhoused, directly ministering, providing food and supplies and helping people get transportation.
“They’ve never been able to really recover the kind of resources that were provided at 1411 Locust,” he says. “Because we were the low-barrier shelter, you could come in and get some help no matter what situation you were in, and the cops, hospitals, a variety of other agencies, knew that about us, and would bring people straight from the hospital to the shelter. And they’re just not able to do that anymore.”
Downtown advocate Les Sterman says that when the Locust Street shelter was active, its policy of taking people in at night, and turning them away in the day, led to drug dealing, violence, and “aggressive panhandling” in the surrounding neighborhood. Sterman says drug dealers would “prey” on the people who congregated outside the shelter, exacerbating drug use among people New Life was trying to lift out of poverty.
“I think he’s certainly a problematic operator,” Sterman says of Rice. “I mean, the building itself that he was using had numerous building code violations, and the fact that he basically pushed people out on the street during the day. I’m hardly an expert on all of this stuff. He really wasn’t providing the homeless with the resources that they needed to ultimately improve their situation.”
Yet Sterman acknowledges that some issues with the New Life shelter were systemic. He doesn’t full pin the blame on Rice: “It’s hard to know where one takes up and the other leaves off.”
Adam Pearson, the city’s Department of Human Services director, shares a similar sentiment about the state of the Locust Street building when it was in use. “I’m all about anybody who is able to meet the standards that the city and the Continuum of Care providers set for making sure that people get access to case management, making sure the facility is safe, meets building codes and all of that,” he says.
He adds that he welcomes “any provider that is willing to open up quality, safe, shelter services.”
But Rice says it’s not that easy. “All it takes is one or two neighbors filled with fear, that inject fear, and then [it’s over],” he says. “Homeless are the most discriminated against group of people in America today. People would say anything about the homeless. They think that they’re pedophiles, all of them. They’re not that. ‘They all got mental problems; they all got drug problems; they got alcohol problems.’
“But, they represent society as a whole, and many of them just can’t afford the rent anymore.”
Pushing ‘City of Refuge’ in St. Louis County
Rice, and New Life, say their experience tells them the number of homeless people in St. Louis County is in the thousands, but proving that can be challenging. Many agencies rely upon the numbers gathered through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Point in Time count. The count is, essentially, a census of unhoused people done by volunteers. But groups such as the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty have called it “severely flawed,” saying that while well-intentioned, the volunteers often undercount homeless people massively.
A dashboard showing 2025 point-in-time count data says there are 389 people with some form of housing insecurity in St. Louis County: 59 unsheltered and 330 sheltered. That number includes people living in non-permanent housing. In the city, the total is 1,637, counting 1,250 sheltered people and 387 unsheltered people.
The Rices say they can “effectively show” there are at least 5,000 people who are unhoused in St. Louis County, including people who might be “couch surfing” but not completely out of shelter. The high end of their estimates says there could be as many as 10,000.
To solve this hard-to-see problem, New Life wanted a parcel of land in Wellston to open a “City of Refuge” a multi-phase plan that would include a place to safely live in one’s car, a low-barrier shelter, and eventually a transitional housing facility. In New Life’s vision, that campus would allow for a clearer pipeline to address people’s immediate needs and eventually bring them back into stable housing and employment.
More recently, Rice also seems to have shifted to asking for the county to pay for hotel vouchers to distribute to those without shelter during the winter—a tough ask in a county making tough cuts to address an $80 million budget deficit. He has resurfaced at county council meetings, repeatedly pushing for land for the project and also more work to address the needs of homeless county residents.
Many of the requests have been overshadowed by the council’s recent focus on addressing its budget deficit. Then, last week, the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership announced that the Laborers International Union of North America would build an “urban training center” on one of the sites Rice had been asking for. That site was attractive to New Life due to potential job training opportunities that could be activated at nearby industrial buildings, and presumably to the union for the same reason. (New Life did not reply to questions about the impact of this development by publication time.)
Both that property and the other one New Life wants, in the nearby Wellston Industrial Park, have environmental concerns, Councilman Michael Archer said previously, which he said gave him some pause. Rice, however, thinks the sites are clean, at least partially, providing SLM with a packet that said the state called both sites a “success story.”
When asked about his position on Rice’s requests, Councilman Dennis Hancock says the Reverend has “his own constituency,” and says the council had “tried very diplomatically” to tell him about the services the county does provide. Hancock also points to fiscal woes as a reason for not addressing the concerns further. He also insists that there are far fewer homeless people in the county than Rice says.
“He raises an important issue; we all are concerned about people who need help and we want to help them in the best way that we can,” Hancock says, relating the metaphor that it’s better to teach someone to fish rather than give them one.
Rice counts Council Chair Rita Heard Days and Councilwoman Shalonda Webb as amenable to his ask. As for Archer, he speaks sympathetically about New Life and expresses admiration for Rice even while pointing to fiscal concerns in the county. But, he says, he wants to see New Life in meetings between county service providers.
Chris Aaron says he’s now had meetings with three County Council members and the county’s Department of Human Services. Their advocacy has allowed for some “constructive conversations” between that department and the County Council to talk about what services the county does and doesn’t provide, Chris Aaron says.
“I see that as a positive thing, that we’ve kind of stirred the pot a little bit and gotten the county to really look at what they are doing and what they’re not doing,” he says.
But New Life’s ambitions to set up a big new base of operations are so far unfulfilled. “I don’t really see much movement, at least externally,” Chris Aaron acknowledges. “They have dismissed, I guess, our oral arguments, and also not really taking as much action on the plans that we’ve set in their hands.”
