I Dunno, Maybe Take it Easy on The Poor

Greater St. Louis just can’t deal with the less fortunate.

I was raised in the “Metro East” in Southern Illinois, got married while living in Downtown St. Louis, and just finished up a stint living in West County, and perhaps all that unites us in this area is our irresistible desire to stick it to people who’ve already had it stuck.

When I say “we,” if you’re thinking, well that doesn’t include everyday people like you or me, super wrong.

Our latest regional debacle centers around nearby Edwardsville, Illinois, where the city is clashing with a Baptist church for operating an overnight warming shelter on nights when the temperature dips below 20 degrees. This practice started after a man in the area lost both feet to frostbite in 2022.

The face-off, according to local news coverage, started because relatively wealthy neighbors didn’t want homeless people around, particularly when their kids were walking to school. You would think they’d be glad there was a warmth shelter on the way to school if they’re having their kids walk when it’s 15 degrees.

As church leadership pointed out, the building is also situated 0.2 miles from the county jail, and that the area is home to no shortage of registered sex offenders. Maybe “cold people” shouldn’t be the top concern.

Unfortunately, one of my takeaways from this story was, “at least a church is trying.”

When we first moved to Chesterfield, across the Mississippi River in Missouri, we got a look at some world-class religious not-giving-a-shit that still surprises me years later. Having just moved, we wanted to take an opportunity to go through our closets to clear out unneeded items, free up space, and hopefully help someone in the process. We called a church in the city that’s locally famous for its blue-jeaned preacher on a stool in commercials telling you Jesus loves you over acoustic guitar, all but certain they’d be at the tip of the poverty outreach spear in the area and would be thrilled to receive donations.

Nope. And I’m not completely sure that outreach spear exists at all.

My wife called the church — where they routinely hold big festivals complete with carnival rides in the city’s upscale retail district — and the woman who answered made clear they wouldn’t take our donations at all.

Not, “No, but we can connect you with a great organization in the area,” not, “No, but we have several families in need in our congregation, let’s figure something out,” just no, they don’t do that.

In an effort to be abundantly fair, I went and checked the website again today for any mention of outreach of, hell, any kind. If you would like to volunteer, I learned, there’s a great opportunity to go clean the church campus for free so they can start decorating for Easter.

The local Goodwill picked up the slack and we took donations there as often as we had them for the four years that followed.

But why should this care for the poor fall on the shoulders of Christ followers?**

The practical answer may be that no one wants to wash their fancy hands of the poor more than local government. Illinois Business Journal just ran a story about ongoing “panhandling concerns” in Fairview Heights, where I briefly lived as a kid.

There, the mayor says people with signs asking for money are impacting public safety at what he says is the “busiest intersection south of Chicago,” which I’d need to see a source about.

I’m not known for my “bleeding heart,” but the article is difficult to stomach if you have any conscience at all. It quotes a UPS driver (you’ve seen the size of those trucks) saying “something needs to be done” [about people asking for money at stop lights] “…to protect us…”

Yes, won’t someone finally consider those of us headed for a Tempur-Pedic mattress tonight?

The mayor seems to skirt that disparity in conversation by never missing an opportunity to cast doubt on the needs of these people in the first place, and blaming the US Supreme Court for recognizing their rights. He’s described throughout the IBJ article characterizing “panhandlers” as people who aren’t likely in need at all, who get dropped off to beg for the day before getting picked up in a “luxury car” to split the money with their partners. He accused one man of pretending to have a physical deformity to gain sympathy.

Man. That guy who had his feet amputated deserves a fucking Oscar.

The article shares another of his anecdotes about a “baby buggy” lady known throughout the city in the 1990s who lived that way by choice.

We insist these people are mentally unstable and can’t be trusted when they need a warm place to stay, and we swear they’re perfectly fine when they need some pocket change.

I knew exactly who the mayor was talking about, by the way. We all saw the “baby buggy” lady all the time in the neighborhoods nearest to the mall. Always with what appeared to be her every earthly possession in a stroller. I never saw her ask anyone for anything. Years after I got used to seeing her around town, my grandpa told me my mom had recently offered her a meal, took her to the donut shop, and tried to talk to her about Jesus (because that must be the problem). The lady said she was an atheist and offered to give the food back.

Right or wrong, I couldn’t help but laugh. Being raised in church I was just drowning in examples of Christians approaching the poor like, “the big problem here is your soul,” and rarely was it so succinctly handed back to them.

But the fact that, in the 2020s, the mayor had to reach back to a story from the 90s got me wondering how much of this the city (or, indeed, the region) is actually dealing with.

If you go by the comparison data, not much. We’re just bad at it.

The USAFacts 2022 map of cities with the most homelessness, for example, doesn’t give Greater St. Louis so much as a dot or a footnote for representation. If you drill into the underlying data from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, St. Louis doesn’t show up near the top of any of its data views, nor does Missouri. Illinois shows up in several lists having shown the greatest decreases in homelessness between 2007 and the time of the study. And, keep in mind, any data mentioning Illinois is usually focused almost entirely on Chicago.

This didn’t slow Fairview Heights down from petitioning the Department of Transportation in 2022 to place plastic or plexiglass “stanchions” on highway medians to make a notoriously unwalkable city even more difficult for anyone who might want to stand in the street.*** The DoT declined.

I’m sure the mayor would point out that a study of homelessness isn’t necessarily a study of people who would ask for money in public, but I tell ya, I bet there’s a correlation in there somewhere.

Amidst waves of resentment, a few people in the community are actually doing good work. One lady in the area is known in community Facebook groups for rallying support, gathering donations, and actually getting them into the right hands. I’m sure there are more that I don’t see. A couple of churches do keep a storage area full of things for families in need. A few organizations work tirelessly to keep the region’s most vulnerable under a roof with lights and heat on.

My issue is not even with the level of activity in support of those in need which is not high enough for almost any of us. I just don’t see how it’s going to improve while we have this weird, shitty attitude about all of it.

** Setting aside that Jesus repeatedly insists upon this in Biblical scripture, accepted by the Church as God’s inerrant living truth.
*** Fairview’s most well-known city park has a WalkScore.com rating of 34/100 for walking and biking and a 28/100 for public transportation.