Parson signs bill to stop homeless sleeping on the streets

By Brooke Muckerman Jun 29, 2022

Gov. Mike Parson signed a bill into law Wednesday that would punish people who are caught sleeping on streets in Missouri.

House Bill 1606 includes language that makes street sleeping a Class C misdemeanor, which carries a possible fine and jail time. The wide-ranging bill contains several new and unrelated regulations for political subdivisions, from requiring counties to publish annual financial reports to how to deal with vacant St. Louis buildings operating under the Municipal Land Reutilization Law.

During the bill signing, Parson said Missouri must do a better job of solving the problem of homelessness. He added that emphasizing mental health and addiction rehabilitation will create resources to help homeless people “back into society.”

“Not only just get people in a safe environment, but how do you get them back in society,” Parson said.

The provision in the bill is not new and was developed by the think tank Cicero Institute of Texas. States such as Tennessee and Texas have also adopted it. Banning street sleeping is intended to redirect services toward addiction rehabilitation and mental health resources rather than providing permanent housing.

Many critics of the new law have said it “criminalizes homelessness” as those who are caught street sleeping could face jail time. The federal approach to homelessness is the “housing first method,” and the new law is a direct contradiction to that, several Missouri organizations who work with homeless people have said. Some of those groups fear they will lose state and federal funding under the bill.

Nate Schlueter, chief visionary officer of Eden Village in Springfield, said he has been “calling people who know how to get ahold of the governor” in an effort to show him the impact a housing-first solution has on a community. Schlueter is offering to fly Parson to Esperanza Community near Austin, Texas, to gain an understanding of the real implications of the new law.

Eden Village no longer receives state funding because of the “strings attached” with doing so, Schlueter said, adding that private money allows the organization to provide more effective services for chronically homeless people.

The new law prioritizes state-sanctioned camps for people who wish to continue sleeping outside and is modeled after Camp Esperanza in Texas. The state-run camps would provide access to water and electricity, and they would give people resources to address mental health or drug abuse issues. Where the money for those resources would come from remains unclear.

Schlueter toured Esperanza Community in Texas when it was first established and said that the living conditions were nowhere close to acceptable and that there were more than 100 stolen bicycles on the property.

Schlueter said there were six state troopers patrolling a two-acre parking lot and that people had used pallets to build shelters on it.

“It reminded me of a mission trip, hiking out to the desert outskirts 12 years ago in Mexico,”

The job of enforcing the ban on street sleeping will fall to local governments and police departments. Cities and towns that fail to enforce the ban face the possibility of losing all state money for homeless resources.

In addiction to that provision, service organizations state-wide could also lose state funding if they have per-capita homeless rates that exceed the Missouri average. For Peter and Paul Community Services in St. Louis, that could mean losing 40% of their federal funds that are given to them by local and city governments.

Peter and Paul spokesperson Tom Burnham said the bill “on so many levels” contradicts the approach to homeless advocated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provides much of the money for housing and homelessness programs that communities rely upon.

“There’s best practices from HUD, there’s best practices from the Centers of Disease Control,” Burnham said. “And both of which say, encampments should not be uprooted.”

Burnham added that encampments established by homeless people should be allowed to remain to avoid the spread of COVID-19 and to ensure that homeless people receive resources “in place.”

Burnham said his organization recently celebrated 40 years in St. Louis. It mainly caters to those struggling with mental disorders and HIV by providing services such as transitional housing, shelter resources and permanent supportive housing.

State Rep. Bruce DeGroot, R-Chesterfield, supported the bill.

“It is not designed to take money away from the problem,” DeGroot said. “It’s designed to have those programs more effective.”

As of January 2020, more than 6,500 people were experiencing homelessness in Missouri. The bill’s sponsors told the Missourian that there must be a new way to address homelessness. DeGroot called the new method the “conservative model.”

“Too often in the past I think we have thrown money at this problem and not really demanded results,” DeGroot said.

State Sen. Holly Rehder, R-Sikeston, who helped move the bill through the Senate, said many people fail to recognize that 75% of homeless people experience mental health or addiction problems. Rehder said her goal was to put resources to the forefront.

“This bill really focuses on moving from just focusing on the housing model to actually focusing on the root of the problem which is mental health crisis,” Rehder said.