The forecast for St. Louis tonight is snowy and below freezing. If the most recent census of the cityâs unhoused is any guide, about 800 people will be hunkered down in emergency shelters while 100 will be âunshelteredâ: in a tent, under an overpass, on the sidewalk, at a bus stop. Outreach workers will try to bring those individuals in from the cold, but Iâve talked to several homeless service providers lately, and theyâve all made the same point: There arenât enough shelter beds.
âWe have a shortageâI think anyone in St. Louis would tell you that,â says Amanda Laumeyer, executive director of St. Patrick Center. âEvery winter, we talk about this.â
In this framing, the problem is supply. A natural response is to want to boost supply. Certain aldermenâBoard President Megan Green and Alisha Sonnier of the 7th Wardâseek to do just that by relaxing restrictions on building shelters. But thereâs a different way to look at it. What if the real problem were not an inadequate supply of shelters but rather a bottleneck of demand caused by a lack of exits from shelters? Asked another way: Should the collective goal in St. Louis be to help the unhoused move into emergency shelters or move into housing?
Mandy Chapman Semple, a national consultant on homelessness, advocates for the latter goal. âIn the cities that are moving the needle,â she tells me, âthatâs where the energy is focusedââi.e., on minimizing shelter stays in favor of âhousing-firstâ policies such as rapid rehousing and permanent supportive housing.
Chapman Semple is considered the architect of Houstonâs strategy. It has garnered interest and praise for its 62 percent reduction in sheltered and unsheltered homelessness over the past decade. She did that work within municipal government; she has since co-founded Clutch Consulting Group, which has helped Dallas to hit a big goal of rehousing 2,700 people in two years and to achieve a 32 percent decrease in chronic homelessness.
Last year, Clutch came to St. Louis after being hired by Sons & Daughters of Soulard, a business group focused on homelessness. Clutch met with civic leaders and local service providers to look for ways that the system could improve. What Chapman Semple and her team found, she says, was a provider community consumed with trying to get what it needed from City Hall (specifically, from the Department of Human Services, which was managing about $14 million in federal funds and contracts in this sector). City Hall, meanwhile, was consumed with administering that complex funding. The result, she observed, was a âtransactionalâ relationship âcompletely divorced from bigger strategic questions of how to end homelessness.â In Chapman Sempleâs view, âthere was no one sitting at 30,000 feet asking how to align all these resources to have the maximum effect.â
And the maximum effect, in the view of most contemporary scholars and policy analysts, is achieved by placing people into housing with optional supports. Thatâs the conclusion of the researchers Gregg Golburn and Clayton Page Aldern in their book Homelessness is a Housing Problem (which, if you want to nerd out on this topic, I fervently recommend). The specifics of such interventions will vary. Certain people face such steep challenges (e.g., severe mental illness, disability, etc.) that theyâre going to need permanent supportive housing. Most people, however, donât need that, the authors assert; rapid rehousingâin which you help people find lodging quickly, help pay for it, and connect them to services and jobsâwill commonly suffice. Whatever the details, Colburn and Aldern write, a city must create a sufficient number of such alternatives, because âlimited opportunities to exit the shelter systemâor leave the streetsâturn the response system into a warehouse for people experiencing homelessness.â
The reason for minimizing nights in a shelter, says Chapman Semple, who has run shelters herself, is that they typically donât conduce to recoveryâno matter how nice the facility. They tend to have large groups of strangers who are in a crisis, in survival mode, and sleeping in a big room together, she says; belongings and personal safety may be at risk. âJust the act of having a room with a door that locks changes the psychology of an individual,â she says. âIf I need to embrace behavioral health services, or harm reduction, or counseling on budgeting, Iâm more apt to do that, because now Iâm in a place where I am protected.â
Itâs true that protected, supportive spaces are expensive. That doesnât necessarily mean theyâre a drain; one recent âstudy of studiesâ found that permanent supportive housing has a benefit-to-cost ratio of 1.8 to 1. But these kinds of policies are also hard to execute. âWhen youâre skilled at outreach and shelters and you havenât yet built the muscles to rehouse,â says Chapman Semple, âthatâs a very daunting pivot to consider.â
So will St. Louisâ community of providers consider it? In a post-consulting presentation, Clutch noted that providers here had shown a âdeep advocacy around getting people insideâ but that âcontinued focus on access to and expansion of emergency shelter will not result in reductionsâ in the unhoused population. Clutch also noted their âdifficulty staying focused on designing to help people exit homelessness,â yet in addition, âa clear openness among the group to redesign.â
(Iâve detected this openness, too. Laumeyer at St. Patrick Center tells me she supports both housing first and more collaboration with peer organizations. And Anthony DâAgostino, the CEO of Peter & Paul Community Services, wrote a blog post urging everyone to âlean into the current homeless response system restructuring.â)
Maybe what they need is breathing room. The providers have created a nonprofit called House Everyone STL and voted for it to replace City Hall as the main interface with the federal government. Samantha Stangl, HESTLâs executive director, tells me that a big part of her job will be to âalleviate the pain pointsâ of federal reimbursement and contracting. She aims for HESTL to be a âbackboneâ organizationâinspired by The Way Home Houstonâthat does enough administration to allow provider leaders, who already have full-time jobs, to collectively choose a direction and paddle in unison. With that kind of focused effort, HESTL could also leverage private funding: the regional business group Greater St. Louis Inc., for instance, is interested in doing more in the unhoused space, Stangl says.
At any rate, because of the regional nature of homelessness and St. Louisâ fractured governance, a neutral third party such as HESTL is best positioned to be the backbone entity, Chapman Semple says. She says she didnât meet directly with Mayor Tishaura Jones or County Executive Sam Page. âWhile I canât speak directly to all cityâs elected leadership,â she says, âI can speak to general tone that I received in my time there: that there was eagerness to lock arms.â
Maybe arms will lock. Maybe they wonât. Either way, it will be cold tonight.
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