A new exit out of homelessness in the city of St. Louis: Francie’s Place

If you’re striding downtown toward a Cardinals or Blues game and you spot someone curled up with belongings in a stairwell, you may wonder: What does this person need to get off the street for good? The answer, according to years of trial and error all around the country, is that they need—before anything else—their own living space with a door that locks. But that’s probably not sufficient in this case. The so-called “housing-first” model doesn’t mean “housing-only.” Chances are high that a person sleeping outside needs professional help, too, whether they’re dealing with mental illness, addiction, or a disability—and they may need that help indefinitely. Wrapping that person in a combo of (1) a subsidized place to live and (2) optional supports is called “permanent supportive housing.” And St. Louis’ supply of that kind of housing, by many accounts, isn’t meeting demand. This past week, however, after years of work, the supply got a little bigger. 

Francie’s Place is at 3600 S. Jefferson, a couple blocks south of Cherokee in the Marine Villa neighborhood. In the run-up to move-in day, I took a tour of the place from Cynthia Duffe, executive director of the nonprofit Gateway Housing First. She first showed me the new studio apartments. There are 15 of them, most on the second and third floor. Each has a kitchenette, bathroom, and living space with heavy, durable furniture from a vendor who crafts pieces specifically for this population. “We went for the homiest package they had,” said Duffe. The air in this 140-year-old building smelled of fresh paint and treated wood. 

Then Duffe showed me the ground floor of Francie’s Place. The space used to be a live-music bar called Schaffer’s. It’s been transformed into a large common area and an office for the behavioral-health service provider Places for People, which will have staff on-site 24-7. The office also has a large monitor with feeds from security cameras; guests will need to sign in and out as they come and go.

Those security features are a relief to a 39-year-old man I’ll call Tim, who will soon be a tenant. “The low-income apartments I’ve been in, it’s unprotected,” he said in a phone interview. “People be running in and out.” 

Tim said that after growing up on the North Side and moving in and out of the foster care system, he got into a bad car accident about a decade ago. It left him without the use of his right hand. At one point, he secured an apartment near Forest Park, but got evicted and has been “bouncing around” since then, often sleeping outside. Then he heard about Francie’s Place. He filled out an application with Gateway Housing First, not expecting much. Then, on a recent day, while at Tower Grove Park, where he’d been sleeping, he got the call informing him he’d been accepted. “I was so happy I wanted to cry,” he said. 

One reason for his shock: It’s widely known within the city’s homeless response system that permanent-supportive-housing slots are tough to come by. The system’s managers keep a dynamic list that prioritizes folks by need, and in 2023, the managers were able to make 142 placements into permanent supportive housing, according to Jonathan Belcher of St. Patrick Center, a ministry of Catholic Charities. But in 2024, that number dropped to 28 placements, and so far in 2025, they’ve made only three, Belcher said. (The reason for this slow-down, Duffe hypothesizes, is a dwindling of pandemic-relief money at the same time that local rents have risen faster than federal housing subsidies.) Given that these slots are reserved for the chronically homeless, you’d expect to see a resulting rise in that population—and indeed, that’s what the data show: The average number of chronically homeless people in the city per month has risen from from 472 in the first half of 2023 to 613 in the first half of 2025.  

Francie’s Place is a small piece of good news in that it doesn’t reshuffle the system’s pot of resources but rather expands it. The city’s providers receive a certain kind of federal funding to maintain roughly 1,642 permanent-supportive-housing beds. Yet the two organizations behind Francie’s Place—Gateway Housing First and Places for People—didn’t fight for a piece of that funding. Instead, each drew on separate streams of public and private money, then joined forces to create a project combining housing plus services. Thus they added more exits out of homelessness in the city without drawing down those  limited federal funds.

This collaborative model is “not very common,” says Teka Childress, Gateway’s program director. “And what it provides is something that’s desperately needed.”

Places for People will be drawing on Medicaid, Medicare, and money from the Missouri Department of Mental Health. At Francie’s Place, they’ll have not only case managers on hand during the day but nurses and psychiatrists as needed (as well as transportation to such professionals elsewhere). Then, throughout the night, they’ll have behavioral health technicians there to help with medication and crisis support if necessary. All these services are optional for residents, points out Meagan Doty, vice president of clinical services at Places. But, previous collaborations that her group has done with Gateway suggest that tenants who don’t enroll notice what’s happening with those who do: They’re sharpening skills in personal finance, cleaning, finding and managing insurance, and dealing with doctors and medication. “They see the actual benefits in real-time,” says Doty. 

On the property side, Gateway Housing First acquired and rehabbed the building with a capital stack composed of its own funds plus help from multiple agencies, including the city’s Community Development Agency and the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, the St. Louis Mental Health Board, the Missouri Housing Development Commission, and the Federal Home Loan Bank of Des Moines. Tenants will pay 30 percent of qualifying income for their units; if their income is zero, they pay nothing. As for the housing subsidy, Gateway went to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which gives out housing choice vouchers. Those Section-8 vouchers are designed for all low-income people and are tied to individuals, who use them in the private market. What Gateway did, in essence, was arrange for some of those vouchers to become project-based instead, tied not to people but to units at Francie’s Place. This created a new access point for homeless people (such as Tim) who didn’t have a voucher or much income: They could apply directly to Gateway Housing First rather than wait to reach the top of the response system’s priority list. 

And Tim, when I spoke to him in late September, couldn’t wait to move in. “It’s been a long time comin’,” he said. While waiting for Francie’s Place to open, he added, he’d been sleeping “a little bit of everywhere,” but he only truly gets rest while staying at a friend’s place. Outside, he said, you must be acutely aware of your surroundings. “On the street,” he said, “you don’t sleep.”