Messenger: Leaders across St. Louis region will look for unified strategy on homelessness (2024)

ST. LOUIS — Eddie is a few years younger than me, though you wouldn’t know it by looking at him.

Living on the streets will do that to a man.

When I write about homelessness, Eddie is often my muse. He’s the person I think about as I sift through policy discussions and strategies and government conflicts that all have one ultimate goal: to get people like Eddie living under a roof.

That happened for Eddie more than 8 years ago. He made me a cup of coffee in his apartment on south Broadway, a simple act of hospitality that is part of our daily lives but felt damned important at the time. This was Eddie’s coffee. Eddie’s kitchen table. Eddie’s home.

Homelessness has gotten worse nationwide since I first wrote about Eddie. The same is generally true in the St. Louis region. The pandemic didn’t help. Rents are rising faster than paychecks.

“Your instinct is not wrong if you think you’re seeing more visible signs of homelessness,” Samantha Stangl said Wednesday.

Stangl is the executive director of House Everyone STL, a nonprofit formed to unify governments and agencies in the St. Louis region and adopt an overarching strategy to combat homelessness. She was speaking to the East-West Gateway Council of Governments, which is comprised of the top elected officials in the region.

Shortly after Stangl spoke, the council voted unanimously to back a proposal from St. Louis Mayor Tishaura O. Jones and convene a homelessness summit. The goal is for cities and counties on both sides of the Mississippi River to devise a singular strategy to help people like Eddie enjoy a cup of coffee under their own roofs.

The vote, years in the making with civic and government leaders working behind the scenes, seemed almost anticlimactic. There was no opposition.

But the attempt to find a regional solution, and using East-West Gateway as a conduit, may be seen two decades from now as a significant moment in the region’s history.

“The city and our regional partners need to all pull in the same direction if we are going to find solutions that make a difference,” Jones said after the vote.

The move follows a similar one last year, when Jones and the rest of the elected officials on East-West Gateway convened a gun violence summit.

For that effort, researcher Thomas Abt helped come up with a plan called “Save Lives Now!”, which aims to reduce homicides in the St. Louis region by 20 percent through a “focused deterrence” policy.

On the issue of homelessness, there’s little question that leaders plan to use the “housing first” model, which focuses on getting people into housing quickly. It was the philosophy that led to Eddie’s apartment. He’s moved around a bit since then, and he had another brief stint on the streets. Even with help, avoiding homelessness is difficult for some folks.

Nearly two years ago, around the time Eddie was moving into his latest apartment, civic leaders like Jay Shields and his Think BIG Unhoused Initiative brought national expert Mandy Chapman Semple to St. Louis to discuss regional collaboration — and the growing pains of getting governments, businesses and nonprofits on the same page.

“It’s great to see this river-spanning, public-private partnership emerge,” Shields said.

Representatives of Greater St. Louis, the key business leadership group in the region, echoed that view, suggesting it’s the path for St. Louis to “reach our true potential as a metro,” even if the river dividing two states and the border dividing the city of St. Louis from the county create the occasional difficulty.

As with crime, the most visible signs of homelessness are often in downtown St. Louis, where people seeking services tend to gather. But make no mistake, said East-West Gateway Executive Director Jim Wild, “The issue of homelessness really affects every county in the St. Louis region.”

Can our region’s elected leaders, guided by data and nonprofits like Places for People, which helped find Eddie a home eight years ago, improve access to affordable housing? And can they help not just folks already on the street, but also those who are in danger of losing their homes?

“There is a playbook for how to do this,” Stangl told the leaders before they voted to figure out if they can adapt that playbook to St. Louis.

Every person who is homeless costs taxpayers about $35,000 a year in public safety and other expenses, Stangl said. That’s a good incentive for elected officials who answer to taxpayers to put their heads — and money — together on one solution for St. Louis.