ST. LOUIS — Last week, the Public Safety Committee of the Board of Aldermen offered a flashback to another time.
It was four years ago, and the activists behind the Close the Workhouse movement were gaining steam. They had convinced aldermen and other officials that the decrepit Medium Security Institution on Hall Street, with its well-documented history of bad conditions and lawsuits, needed to be closed.
They pressed their case before the Public Safety Committee, with people who had survived the workhouse offering testimony about the conditions. Two aldermen — Joe Vaccaro and Tamika Hubbard — were dismissive of the folks who used to be incarcerated, all but calling them liars. Eventually, the activists won. After Tishaura O. Jones, long an advocate for closing the workhouse, was elected mayor, she emptied the jail and made room for the detainees in the City Justice Center.
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But the workhouse, while empty, is not yet closed. And that’s why the activists were back before the Public Safety Committee on Thursday. They presented a citizen-led report on how to re-envision the workhouse and the property where it sits, on the far north side of the city. The group, established by Jones, did its work over two years. Its offers multiple possibilities for the use of the 30-acre property, from an animal shelter with some space for unhoused people who have pets, to a solar farm or other industrial uses. Key to the proposal is building an off-site community resource hub, elsewhere in the city, to connect vulnerable populations to jobs, transportation, health care and social services.
Jones has floated the idea of using the site as a tiny-home community for unhoused people, much like the one the city operates at Jefferson Avenue and Martin Luther King Drive. Members of the committee aren’t happy with that suggestion.
“The mayor deciding that she wants to take one of the most vulnerable populations and disappear them, just like the city has been doing for 150 years with the workhouse, is disgusting. And everyone involved in this plan should be ashamed,†Inez Bordeaux told me last week.
Bordeaux, a key player in the Close the Workhouse movement, was part of the group that studied the site. She, too, has spent some time in the workhouse.
“The only people who think putting unhoused people on the workhouse site is a good idea are people who never spent one night in the workhouse,†she said.
People who spent time locked up at the workhouse were ready to testify at last week’s Public Safety Committee meeting. Bordeaux, always a bundle of activist energy, was not pleased when it became clear there was no time for them at the meeting, and she let the committee chairman, Alderman Bret Narayan, know it. They’ll have to come back to share their views at another meeting.
This time, unlike four years ago, nobody was rude to the workhouse activists, but they still felt dismissed. According to the report, the people most affected from their time in the workhouse are offended at the idea of putting unhoused people where folks used to be locked up in inhumane conditions.
“There was a very strong opposition to having housing on the site,†Sophia Xiao-fan Austrins, an architect who worked on the workhouse site report, told the aldermen. “The site is at the very edge of the city with little connection to neighborhoods.â€
That’s an obstacle the city believes it can overcome, said Adam Pearson, director of the Department of Human Resources. Current ordinances make placing any sort of shelter for unhoused people in the city nearly impossible because of neighborhood opposition, he said. (Another bill before another aldermanic committee is trying to fix that problem.) While the city hasn’t decided for sure what to do, Pearson believes the site — with some remediation and extra transportation options — can help people who need shelter get on a path toward housing.
“I believe this is an opportunity,†Pearson said.
If you drew a Venn diagram that included people who want to do more in St. Louis for the unhoused and activists who worked to close the workhouse, nearly everybody would end up in the same overlapping circle. If there’s optimism that Jones and the Close the Workhouse activists can come together, it’s because they at least have the city talking about creating more shelter and services for folks who need housing.
But before any compromise can be reached, the folks who were dismissed four years ago — and who didn’t get a chance to speak last week — deserve an opportunity to be heard.
“We did not elect a progressive mayor and a progressive board of aldermen for easy fixes. We can do hard things. It just requires political will,†Bordeaux told me. “Hopefully this will be a start of a conversation to do better than what the mayor has planned.â€