ST. LOUIS — It is not unusual for me to get hit up for change a
half dozen times between the time I leave my downtown office to
grab a bite to eat and return. The record is ten. By and large,
these panhandlers are not the noble economic victims the
mainstream media likes to romanticize on the six o’clock news —
the formerly middle class two-parent families whose jobs were
lost due to cruel free market policies and whose homes were taken
away by greedy, predatory bankers. Rather they are largely single
men with chronic drug and alcohol habits, and a miscellany of
mental illnesses. A few are unregistered sex offenders, others
prone to violent attacks, and some can be found standing on
street corners cursing the principalities of the air and scaring
the Dolce & Gabbana suits off of young female associates.
Downtown is also crowded with young urban pioneers who, at least
until the recent economic downturn, were settling here in droves.
After being pronounced dead in the 1970s, downtown has returned
to life due largely to state historic rehabilitation tax credits.
Two grocery stores and a brand new bookstore are opening, and
soon a ballpark village housing restaurants, shops and high-end
condos. For the first time in decades, the city has seen an
uptick in population, due largely to these loft-dwellers.
All of these new homeowners, however, present a dilemma for the
Democratic mayor’s office. How to pretend to be compassionate
toward those “unfortunate person[s] caught in the horrible cycle
of poverty,” and, at the same time, make downtown a desirable
place for the young, taxpaying, creative class to live? How to
strike a balance between basic civil liberties for street
persons, and important issues of quality of life, public health
and safety? Thus far the balance has tipped in favor of the
homeless. When the mayor’s office had police crackdown on
vagrants before the popular Fourth of July celebrations in 2004,
it was sued in federal court. The case was eventually settled
with the city agreeing to pay some two dozen homeless men $1,200
each.
The homeless weren’t a problem for previous administrations since
few taxpayers lived downtown. Business executives ventured
outside their office towers only at lunch hour and in the safety
of packs. Then the tax credits kicked in and developers began
buying up and rehabbing abandoned buildings, and, finally, the
ultra-progressive loft-seekers arrived. Their compassion and pity
for the homeless, however, lasted about as long as Britney
Spears’ marriage.
Suddenly the homeless were a serious problem. It wasn’t just the
aggressive, threatening panhandling. It was more the public
urination, the public drunkenness, the way the homeless passed
out in the doorways of multi-million dollar loft buildings, and
the drug dealing in downtown parks. The homeless congregated in
the downtown area because that was where one found the city’s one
major homeless shelter — the New Life Evangelistic Center. St.
Louis’s main business district long ago migrated from downtown to
Clayton, in St. Louis County, but you will find no homeless
there, since office space is at a premium, and panhandling is
actively frowned upon.
New Life is a queer amalgamation of things. It is a mission, a
television and radio station, a church, and a dilapidated
homeless shelter. It doesn’t do any of these things well. New
Life is run by the creepy Lutheran preacher and perennial
candidate for Missouri governor, Larry Rice. The Rev. Rice
operates 11 television stations, nine radio stations and 23
homeless shelters in the U.S. with operations overseas in India,
Nigeria and Haiti. According to records filed in federal court,
his nonprofit has assets between $40-50 million, plus $5 million
in disposable assets. His businesses are run largely by the
homeless who work long hours and are unpaid. As Rice told one
reporter, “A paycheck does not solve people’s problems.” To make
a few bucks they are forced to panhandle, which Rice encourages,
since its increases the visibility of the poverty problem.
Meanwhile most St. Louisans support the Rev. Rice — as long as
he keeps his vagrants downtown and off their well-manicured
suburban lawns. They might even give a panhandler a buck or two,
but their compassion ends there. Any attempt to build a homeless
shelter in the suburbs would be met with howls. And these
suburbanites have even less compassion for the downtown
loft-dwellers, some of whom are attempting to get New Life
designated a “detriment to the neighborhood” and shut down. They
knew what they were getting into when they moved downtown, the
suburbanites say, the implication being that downtown is the
homeless’s territory. If you don’t like drug addicts, public
drunkenness, public urination, etc., buy a condo in the ‘burbs.
THERE ARE SIGNS that popular opinion may be shifting. News of
violent attacks has begun leaking out of the homeless shelter. In
the past year there have been reports of a chainsaw attack, a
rape, a murder and several violent beatings in Rice’s shelters.
The local alternative weekly is full of letters from readers
demanding to know what professional qualifications Rice and his
homeless staff have to care for the non-spiritual needs of
addicts and the mentally ill.
Rice himself seems oblivious to the
criticism. As he told the Riverfront Times, it is
only he and his courageous staff standing between the general
populace and “people turned away from other places.” “You’d think
maybe the loft-dwellers would recognize that and not shoot
themselves in the foot. Without us here these people would be
sleeping in the parks and on the loft-dwellers’ doorsteps.”
Of course, what the homeless desperately need are professional
rehabilitation services and mental health care, and for
well-meaning, but misguided citizens to stop subsidizing their
self-destructive behavior. This can best be accomplished in
mental health facilities, not in a television station/homeless
shelter/campaign headquarters.
Unfortunately, most addicts and most mentally ill persons are in
no condition to check themselves into such facilities. And a
series of 1970 court decisions prohibited involuntary commitment
unless a person was found to be a danger to himself or to others.
At the same time, vagrancy laws were struck down in order to
encourage alternative urban lifestyles and to celebrate a diverse
street life. According to the National Mental Health Information
Center, in 1969 state and county mental hospitals housed 369,969
patients; in 2002 that number was down to 52,612. A good
percentage of mentally ill are doing well as outpatients, but if
there seem to be more “crazy people out there” than before
deinstitutionalization, it is because there are.
This has created to an advantageous niche for quacks like the
Rev. Rice. As for the homeless, “Hundreds of thousands of the
deinstitutionalized mentally ill have died prematurely from
accidents, suicide, or untreated illnesses,” noted Dr. E.
Fuller Torrey in City Journal. “All too frequently, the
consequences of this failed social experiment have been tragic
and fatal.” A local blogger put it more bluntly: “How
many more people have to die and lie in hospital until Larry
realizes that his organization does more harm than good?” But
then the principle “first do no harm” would be foreign to
witchdoctors and mountebanks.
