Advocates push back against new Missouri law that criminalizes sleeping outdoors

ST. LOUIS — Jonathan Byrd has been homeless at least three times in his adult life. Each time he had a job, and when he couldn’t sleep in his car or at work, he’d lean on his family or friends for a safe place to stay.

He was born and raised in Cincinnati, but now works to organize and advocate for tenants and the unhoused in Springfield, Missouri, a city little over three hours from St. Louis.

Byrd is one of three plaintiffs suing the state of Missouri over a law passed last year that makes it a misdemeanor for an individual to sleep or camp out on land owned by the state (if the offense is repeated after one warning). He said he wants to push back against stereotypes of who is without a home and why.

“I’m trying to fight for people who are impacted having a say in the things that are going to affect them,” Byrd said.

On any given night, nearly 6,000 people are unhoused in Missouri, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness. Missouri State Sen. Holly Rehder has said the law, which went into effect this year, was to help them. Rehder, who introduced similar legislation last year, also told the Missouri Senate Minute that encampments are dangerous especially in extreme weather.

“Change is hard, it absolutely is hard and doing things differently is going to be hard but we have to look at what we’re doing and say, ‘This is trending in the wrong direction,’” she told Missouri’s KFVS.

The law, which the Republican-led state legislature passed in June, redirects state funds intended for permanent housing toward assistance with short-term housing, mental health and substance use services. It also rewards cities that are able to reduce the number of unhoused people with additional funding, while those with a higher per-capita homelessness rate than the state average risk losing funding until those numbers decrease.

A Circuit Court judge ruled in favor of the state earlier this month, saying that the law is constitutional. The plaintiffs are appealing to the state Supreme Court, arguing the policy violates the Missouri’s Constitution which requires that “legislation bear its original purpose, a single subject, and a clear title.”

Byrd said the bill was “designed to cause confusion from the get go.” But the judge ruled that the bill wasn’t amended past its original purpose.

But advocates say the state government has not responded holistically to homelessness, or appropriately funded things that would address the issue, such as affordable housing.

When new proposals pop up, they’re often rooted in harmful stereotypes, said Jonathan Belcher, a senior director of programs and long-term transformation at St. Patrick’s Center, a nonprofit helping unhoused people in the St. Louis region.

Trying to reduce the unhoused population “doesn’t mean that we need to criminalize homelessness,” he said. “It means that we need to target better services and bring in more funding as a community so that we can address the issue at hand and not put Band-Aids on things.”

At the start of the year, the St. Patrick’s Center opened Grace House, a 24-hour safe haven offering services to those needing shelter and providing them resources to find permanent housing. Photo courtesy of St. Patrick’s Center

As the lawsuit continues to wind its way through the court, advocates say the law is not very clear on what it means by state-owned land or how people are supposed to know what land is state-owned and what isn’t. It’s not clear how often the law is being enforced.

Three months into the policy becoming law, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department told the PBS NewsHour it does not have any incident reports “containing the offense of ‘unauthorized sleeping/camping/long-term shelter on state-owned land,’ as the law is written.”

The city of St. Louis did not respond to questions from the NewsHour about whether any of its departments have seen changes from the legislation.

The NewsHour also asked the Missouri Department of Economic Development for more clarity on how it would regulate funding, where the money would come from, how it would track the homelessness rate, among other questions. A spokesperson for the department said “The Missouri Housing Development Commission (MHDC) is the only entity associated with the Department that administers the type of funds that would be impacted by this statute” and that it would not comment on ongoing litigation. Republican state Rep. Peggy McGaugh sponsored the version of the bill Gov. Mike Parson later signed into law. She did not respond to a request for comment. Rehder did not provide answers to questions from the NewsHour about her goals for the law and whether she has seen any impact so far.

The law would also redirect funding to mental health and substance abuse treatment services. The Missouri Department of Mental Health told the NewsHour it “doesn’t receive any diverted General Revenue funding in connection to this law.”

Criminalizing homelessness

More than half a million people experienced homelessness in 2022, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness. Missouri is not the only state to address the issue this way. Lawmakers in Kansas proposed a similar bill in February called the Safe Cities Act. The bill makes it a crime to sleep on state and local-government owned land. This legislation also places stipulations on state funding, tying it to a city’s ability to get its per-capita rate of homelessness lower than the state average, as does Missouri.

According to a National Homelessness Law Center report released in 2021, at least 15 states have laws that restrict camping in particular public places. It estimates that at least 48 states have at least one policy “restricting behaviors that prohibit or restrict conduct of people experiencing homelessness.” In 2020, Tennessee passed a law that increased the penalty for camping on state property from a misdemeanor to a class E felony. Later in 2022, state lawmakers expanded the law to include local public property as well.

Many cities, including St. Louis, have cleared unhoused encampments themselves. City workers used a bulldozer to remove a camp of tents along the riverfront in early March. At the time, city officials told reporters that 19 people from that location accepted help and transitioned into housing.

Members of the U.S. National Park Service clear an encampment in Washington, D.C., that’s two blocks from the White House. Photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Similar clearings have happened in recent months in cities like Spokane, Washington, and Louisville, Kentucky.

Belcher at the St. Patrick’s Center said these clearings aren’t long-term solutions.

“We have a lot of work to do that could really move folks who need that housing intervention, need to get in the shelter, move them through the system quickly and at this time with that, that’s an area that our system is really struggling with,” Belcher said.

Last year, Belcher said the St. Louis center served close to 4,000 people. With this need in mind, laws like this one, Belcher said, show a “short sightedness” among lawmakers in the state.

“I generally think many stereotypes were used to create a law that can really impact the lives of the clients that we’re serving,” he said.

As many national and local organizations in Missouri work to move the unhoused into housing, advocates like Belcher have had to brief their clients of the consequences of the latest legislation.

“It’s just more of trying to advocate what the impacts could do … and really the stereotypes that are being placed on our clients just because … they’re sleeping in a tent on state land or on the highway overpass,” Belcher said.

Under the new law in Missouri, any city that doesn’t enforce local ordinances on public camping can be sued by the state’s attorney general. Belcher said the law points to a larger issue of both criminalizing individuals and not actually getting to the root of people’s experiences.

For Jessica Honeycutt, a community health worker and plaintiff in the lawsuit against the state, affordable housing is a major issue that needs to be addressed as part of the conversation around homelessness.

Honeycutt nearly became homeless during the pandemic. Her marriage had come to an end, and rent in Missouri and across the country started to rise, leaving her on a search for a place she could afford. Pew Research data released in 2022 shows that the median monthly cost of rent increased 12 percent since before the pandemic, increasing from $909 in 2019 to $1,015 in 2021. In Missouri, the average rent for a one bedroom between March 2020 and October 2022 rose by nearly 18 percent, according to Apartment List.

Sixty percent of Americans still say they are very concerned about the cost of housing, according to a Pew survey released in October.

“That really concerns me on a deep level that somehow criminal action, and to me, feeding the prison system, is more beneficial than helping people find affordable homes,” Honeycutt said.

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual report, 60 percent of unhoused people were staying in sheltered locations such as safe havens and emergency shelters in 2022. The remaining 40 percent were living “on the street, in abandoned buildings and places not suitable for human habitation.”

“Any amount of homelessness is too much homelessness,” said Steve Berg, chief policy officer at the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

The nonprofit advocates for ending homelessness nationwide by conducting research, analyzing policy and assisting organizations on the ground doing the work.

“The difference between what a modest job pays and what a modest apartment rents for kept getting worse and worse, and it continues to get worse and worse, and that’s become the main driving factor of homelessness,” Berg said.

According to a Rent.com estimate, the median rental price in the U.S. is $1,942. But the rental price doesn’t matter if you cannot find a place in the first place.

A Freddie Mac report released last year estimates the U.S. was “short some 3.8 million units in 2020.”

“In a country as wealthy as ours, people should be able to count on a stable place to live that will allow them to get jobs and take care of their kids and take care of their families,” Berg said.

The need for a long-term solution

A little more than 10 years ago, Marna Coleman spent her first night without housing. She had just returned home to St. Louis from military deployment to discover that she had been evicted.

“All my furniture, everything that I had was gone so the only thing that was left was my car,” she said.

Marna Coleman remembers opening up her car to other unhoused people when she lost her home more than 10 years ago. Today, she runs her own nonprofit working to bring resources to people who are looking for shelter and a hot meal. Photo courtesy of St. Patrick’s Center

Her car is where the Army veteran and her then-6-month-old baby slept, right outside the St. Patrick Center doors. Sometimes, she opened her car to other families to keep warm too. But then she lost her job and her car, and by the next year they were sleeping on the street.

“I had basically hit rock bottom,” she said.

After a period of time spent at St. Patrick’s Center, the nonprofit later referred her to other organizations that helped her get housing and other resources. Today, she is married with two kids and a home she owns.

She has a job, and in her free time she runs her own nonprofit called Meals N Wheels, which caters to St. Louis area veterans experiencing homelessness.

Though her situation has changed, her concern for unhoused people remains. When she learned that the state would now make it a crime to sleep on state-owned land, her first thought was that it was “unacceptable.”

“It’s upsetting because basically you’re criminalizing someone who doesn’t have an option to not live on the street.” she said.

Still, Coleman believes Missouri’s move to, after a warning, take criminal action against those with no place to go is not the solution.

“You’re sending them to sleep in a cell with a hot meal, let them watch TV. Allow them a bed to lay on … some clothes to put on and after they’ve been there for about maybe a week … they get back out and guess where they go back— to the streets,” she said.

At the start of the year, the St. Patrick’s Center opened a new 24-hour safe haven on the city’s northside. It can serve 25 to 40 people and helps people with other physical, mental and social needs,, too.

For Coleman, who remembers the days when she didn’t have a place to go, part of helping the community is making sure individuals in the community know where and when they can get help.

“We need to meet them where they are, and that’s how we begin to fix the problem — to really understand the problem,” she said.