With a camp on the steps of City Hall, St. Louis leaders pitch a homeless Bill of Rights (2024)

ST. LOUIS — For months now, City Hall has been home to a homeless encampment.

It started small: Just a few tents next to the parking lot behind the building. Then more popped up in the grass at the Market Street doors, underneath Mayor Tishaura O. Jones’ window: First five tents, then eight, then 10. Then campers started protesting, saying Jones wasn’t doing enough for them.

In response, the city has not cleared out the tents and has no plans to do so. Instead, caseworkers are meeting with the homeless and trying to get them help one person at a time.

For the past couple of years, city officials have been trying to chart a new path toward helping the homeless who have long flocked to the city center and prompted concern from residents, visitors and businesses. Officials have broached the idea of city-sponsored encampments. They have delayed clearing a riverfront camp for months as they worked to find people shelters. And last week, they unveiled plans to make it easier to open shelters throughout the city by eliminating neighbors’ power to stop them.

Now, Aldermanic President Megan Green and her progressive allies at the Board of Aldermen are about to call for more: a new social contract between the city and its homeless.

The board will introduce Wednesday an Unhoused Bill of Rights, which would commit the city to treating people living in tents with more respect and restraint: City workers couldn’t evict campers unless they could offer shelter beds in return. Campers’ belongings would have to be held for safekeeping. And there would have to be places where they could camp without threat of removal; the city would provide showers, toilets, access to services and 24-hour security.

“They have to have somewhere to go,” Green said in a recent interview.

Altogether, the new proposals mark the latest attempt to put an end to decades of what they see as the cruel bulldozing of tent encampments, and inaugurate a more humane and effective policy toward some of the city’s most vulnerable residents. The hope is that the new approach builds trust with people living on the street, prompts the construction of more shelters in the city, and ultimately makes it easier to get people from tent to bed to home.

Advocates are heartened by news of the bill of rights.

“This is about meeting people where they are,” said Anthony D’Agostino, who leads Peter & Paul Community Services and heads a coalition of organizations that work with homeless people in the city. “This forces the system to actually come up with solutions.”

He warned, however, that living up to the promise of the legislation will take more resources from government, businesses and residents.

But it’s not clear everyone is on board.

‘For Pete’s sake’

Aides to Jones, usually a close ally of Green’s, were noncommittal about the plan to strip neighbors of their right to sign off on the creation of new shelters near them, a move that would require changes to land use rules.

And Jones herself has not publicly endorsed the bill of rights; she said this week the city is already doing all it can for its unhoused. Aides noted the administration is paying for thousands of housing units and hundreds of shelter beds, and just spent $1.2 million in federal pandemic aid to double the size of a tiny home village in the northwest corner of downtown.

Of all the shelter beds in the city and St. Louis County, Jones said, over 80% are in the city.

“I think this is also a time for us to take a regional approach to addressing our unhoused,” Jones said Tuesday. “How can we have resources for our unhoused neighbors around the region, and not just the city of St. Louis?”

Alderman Tom Oldenburg, of St. Louis Hills, said Jones was right. And he predicted that if aldermen go along with Green and pass the bill of rights, the promise of free camping space will attract vagrants from across the country, overwhelming the city’s resources, degrading neighborhoods and harming quality of life here.

“I just don’t follow the logic,” he said. “We’ve got tents outside City Hall, for Pete’s sake.”

And Matt O’Leary, a longtime downtown resident and advocate for the neighborhood, predicted serious political consequences.

“There is a backlash coming against the radicals in power,” he said. “I think a lot of people are not going to be excited about this.”

Advocates have been pushing for the enumeration of rights for the homeless across the country for decades. Advocates in New York started calling for guaranteed right to shelter as early as the 1970s. Rhode Island became the first state to style an actual bill of rights, guaranteeing protections against discrimination, in 2012.

In 2017, Green, then an alderwoman from Tower Grove South, brought it here.

In the bill, Green argued that shutting Rice down had created a huge unmet need, and that the city needed to do better all around. She said it should give notice before clearing an encampment, show some respect for people’s belongings and leave the camps alone when all the city’s shelter beds were full.

Anything less, she said, amounted to a violation of people’s constitutional rights and a breach of the city’s moral duty. “Any community’s values,” she wrote, “are rightly demonstrated to the world by the treatment of the most vulnerable members of that community.”

It went nowhere. The same thing happened in 2020, when then-Alderwoman Christine Ingrassia filed a similar bill just months after then-Mayor Lyda Krewson’s administration cleared an encampment in Poelker Park, across Market Street from City Hall.

And while administration officials said they tried to find everyone shelter before clearing encampments downtown in 2021 and on the riverfront in March, activists were dubious, saying there just weren’t enough beds to meet everyone’s needs. Rice, the downtown shelter operator, condemned city rules requiring him to get consent from neighbors to reopen his shelter — a de facto ban for institutions that most people don’t want anywhere near them.

Space at City Hall

In an interview Wednesday, Green made clear change is coming. She said the city must have a plan in place for any homeless person forced to move, because doing otherwise can make the person stop trusting service providers and less likely to get help in the future. It usually guarantees another encampment will spring up to take its place, too, she said.

“We’re essentially playing whack-a-mole,” she said.

The plan to make it easier to open shelters will help some, she said. And the intentional encampments — rebranded as “safe camping areas” — are aimed at helping the city reach people who aren’t ready for shelters, whether they can’t abide by sobriety restrictions, don’t want to separate from spouses or pets, or just don’t want to go inside.

Green acknowledged criticism from aldermen like Oldenburg and residents wary of having shelters spread out across the city and encampments springing up with the city’s stamp of approval.

But she said the answer to the problem is helping people. “People have got to be housed, and have to get the services in some way, shape or form, or we just continue perpetuating the cycle,” she said.

And Green agreed that the city should push the rest of the region to do the same.

Meanwhile, back at Market and Tucker Boulevard, the encampment continues to ebb and flow. There were 14 tents behind the statue of Ulysses S. Grant on Thursday afternoon.

The newest residents were 25-year-old Hadah Moore and her three dogs: Paco, Chapo and Giaa.

She said she and her husband had just come from Arizona after her husband lost his job and they lost their apartment. “We just threw darts to where we were going next,” she said.

They called shelters upon their arrival, Moore said, but there was only space for her, not her husband or their dogs. They tried camping on the riverfront near Laclede’s Landing and were told they couldn’t be there.

The Rev. Ray Redlich, of Larry Rice’s New Life Evangelistic Center, told them they could probably find space at City Hall.