Why NLEC Needs to Go, Now
NLEC’s Facility at 1411 Locust is Horribly Unsafe
NLEC Operates at 10 Times its Permitted Occupancy: One reason cities require occupancy permits is in order to ensure that those people in the permitted facility, up to the permitted occupancy, are safe while they are in the building – safety improvements such as fire sprinkler systems, adequate numbers of stairs and exit, fire alarms and otherwise are required when these permits are issued based upon the number of occupants; an adequate number of plumbing fixtures are also required to allow to sanitary conditions in the facility; NLEC’s only occupancy permit was issued in 1976 to allow for 32 people to spend the night at NLEC, and improvements were required only based upon this number of guests; at 1411 Locust, NLEC currently houses up to 350 people overnight and has never secured an occupancy permit for more than the 32 beds originally approved; this means that NLEC was never forced, in order to increase permitted occupancy, to make safety and sanitation improvements for a population more than 10 times its permitted occupancy; this creates an incredibly unsafe and unsanitary situation for NLEC’s guests, particularly since many of them are mentally ill and/or chronically intoxicated;
NLEC has Grossly Inadequate Staff: In order to save on costs (for reasons described below), NLEC uses grossly inadequate staffing, magnifying the problem with the safety of the facility; NLEC, for decades, has had no social worker on staff despite the population it serves; the only overnight staff at NLEC, other than a security guard at the first floor lobby, are largely untrained persons who were recently (often the day before) homeless who have now entered into an NLEC training program and its management staff; NLEC testified at the protest hearing that the only overnight staff for its main men’s shelter room, housing over 150 often mentally ill and chemically dependent men, is one such recently homeless man; this in part explains the chronic complaints of rapes, thefts, drug use and dealing, assaults and other crimes that occur at NLEC;
NLEC’s 1411 Locust Facility is Prone to Catastrophe: While numerous deaths have occurred at NLEC to date, no catastrophe has yet struck NLEC, despite the fact that NLEC was fire bombed in 2005 by a disgruntled client (resulting in some smoke detectors being added); however, the State of Missouri has history with such catastrophes at similar facilities; in 1978, the Coates Hotel, an old, unsafe hotel that housed primarily transients caught fire and burned to the ground, killing 20; NLEC’s facility at 1411 Locust, without a working fire sprinkler system and dangerously over capacity, could generate a much higher death count than Coates, which at least was designed originally for residential occupancy, unlike NLEC;
The NLEC Model is Detrimental to Those NLEC Claims to Serve
The NLEC Model is Not a Best Practices Model: The NLEC model of warehousing up to 350 homeless individuals in a single facility without the provision of any significant services is antithetical the best practices models that have been proved to reduce homelessness;
NLEC Contributes to Overburdening the System: The NLEC model of using the homeless as pawns in order to attract media coverage as well as using its television and radio broadcasting network to highlight the supposed services it provides at 1411 Locust results in the recruitment of homeless individuals into Downtown St. Louis from all over the St. Louis region and from many surrounding states, resulting in an overburdening of the system with homeless individuals seeking services from all over the country who arrive in St. Louis only to find out NLEC offers them nothing other than a bed or a spot on the floor; this prevents the City of St. Louis from adequately serving the homeless individuals who originate from St. Louis that are the responsibility of this community;
NLEC Operates Outside the System, to the Detriment of the Homeless: NLEC for decades has largely operated outside of the City of St. Louis Continuum of Care, the body designed to effectuate the City’s policies related to abating homelessness in a coordinated way; NLEC has refused to take any funds from the City of St. Louis in order to avoid being forced to coordinate with the Continuum of Care; and, NLEC’s practice of not complying with the policies of the Continuum of Care and adopting modern permanent housing based policies related to homeless has frustrated the implementation of City of St. Louis’s federally supported and award winning model and has resulted in the City of St. Louis becoming the destination of homeless individuals from all over the Midwest seeking a rules free, enabling community that does not exist in other cities without an NLEC;
NLEC Frequently Fails to Even Offer Referrals to Other Providers: Many homeless individuals who have stayed at NLEC in the past have told the story that despite staying at NLEC on multiple nights when they first became homeless, NLEC’s staff never even offered them a referral to the various other service providers in the network (such as the Veterans Administration’s Hope Recovery Center on Jefferson (8 blocks away) or St. Patrick’s Center (4 blocks away), providing the illusion that other services don’t exist (or why else would NLEC fail to make the referral) and preventing these new guests from accessing essential services;
The NLEC Model Enables the Homeless: The NLEC model of offering a bed to essentially anyone, despite their level of intoxication or behaviors in the community, without offering substantial services or requiring anything in return for the bed, serves to enable a large number of homeless individuals to live on the streets outside of the system intended to help them out of homelessness, mostly numbing themselves to their situation by remaining constantly inebriated and trapping them in a toxic co-dependent relationship;
NLEC’s Operation Worsens the Region’s NIMBY Problem: By operating its facility at 1411 Locust in the way it does, as an enormous blight on community, NLEC worsens the problems other homeless service providers have finding locations for facilities operated according to best practices; this is because NLEC is so high profile and so clearly disastrous for the area around it that no other community wants to risk ending up with an NLEC type facility and thus work to keep any facility serving the homeless out, thus forcing many homeless individuals from the suburbs away from their communities in order to receive services;
NLEC’s Operating Model Helps Take the Suburbs Off the Hook: The fact that NLEC is allowed to operate with an unlimited occupancy gives the St. Louis suburban communities the political cover to pretend that homelessness does not afflict those communities and to provide no resources to deal with homelessness where it is generated; instead, these suburban communities know that they can simply deliver problematic homeless individuals to 1411 Locust and that they will be taken in (providing they follow NLEC’s rules) by NLEC without NLEC calling these communities out, thus converting a suburban need into an urban need without any political fallout to the suburban communities using police cars as a homeless shuttle;
NLEC Sucks Up Significant Regional Charity for the Homeless: Because of NLEC’s media network and brilliance at getting media attention, NLEC is able to convince huge numbers of potential donors that are interested in the issue of homelessness to donate to NLEC, depriving other homeless service providers using best practices of additional resources to help reduce homelessness;
NLEC Uses the Homeless
NLEC Uses the Homeless: A significant part of NLEC’s business model involves effectively threatening to deny their homeless clients housing in order to force these homeless individuals to provide testimonials for NLEC, attend Sunday church service as a back drop for preaching, and to get on the NLEC bus to attend NLEC events and press conferences and make it look like they support NLEC; this is despite the fact that they are only there because otherwise NLEC would force them out onto the streets on cold nights; this is all calculated to allow NLEC to generate media attention to portray NLEC as the selfless and isolated advocate for the homeless, under siege from City government; and the whole point of NLEC’s constant press conferences and attempts to gain media attention is to generate donations from people who believe the message NLEC is conveying so that NLEC can avoid taking any money from any governmental or civic funder who would hold NLEC accountable for their methods and facilities;
NLEC Misuses the Donated Funds: Rather than using the money that is donated by people who think NLEC is the selfless advocate for the homeless to either improve the facility at 1411 Locust to make it safe or to provide professional staff to keep the homeless safe while they are there and to assist their process of escaping homelessness, NLEC instead continues to allow the 1411 facility to be a fire trap and uses untrained homeless people as the bulk of their staff, and uses a large portion of the donated funds to enrich the organization – NLEC has testified in court documents to a net worth of up to $50 million;
NLEC Causes a Massive Amount of Detriment to Downtown
NLEC Fails to Comply with Laws on Neighborhood Permission: The laws of the City of St. Louis, and communities all over the world, recognize that local communities have rights to protect themselves from the problems often created by housing large numbers of transient guests in great density in a specific community; one law of the City of St. Louis generally requires that operators of hotels, rooming houses, boarding houses, dormitories and homeless shelters (all offering short term housing to transient guests), obtain the consent by a majority of members of the immediate community in order to start and continue their occupancy; the law further requires that existing facilities that want to expand their occupancy and house more transient individuals needs to obtain neighborhood consent to this expansion; NLEC has simply ignored this provision of the laws of the City of St. Louis and expanded its occupancy, vastly past its original permitted occupancy of 32 beds, without any efforts to obtain the neighborhoods consent; for this additional, reason NLEC continues in operation in violation of the laws of the City of St. Louis;
NLEC Has Operated its Facility in Contempt of the Spirit of this Law: One strongly intended effect of the above law is to ensure that the operator of the facility start the facility and continue its operations in a way that does not cause destruction and detriment in the community the facility is housed or be subject to the community ejecting the facility through a protest action; since NLEC sees itself as above this law and its’ spirit, NLEC has operated its facility without any concern for the detriment caused upon the neighborhood, which has been enormous and chronic as demonstrated in detail at the Protest hearings: drug dealing and use, violence and assaults, harassment of residents, constant panhandling, car break ins, muggings, devastation of the community parks, threats to parents with children, overburdening of the limited law enforcement resources, extensive noise, intimidation, constant public urination, senseless property damage, and the list goes on almost infinitely without even mentioning the damage inflicted upon the homeless themselves;
NLEC Uses the Homeless as a Weapon to Create Detriment: NLEC is not merely negligent in the creation of detriment in the Downtown community; NLEC purposefully uses its homeless victims as a weapon in order to create the maximal detriment in order to heighten the consequences of the problems of homelessness in order to generate media attention in order to raise money; NLEC ejects the homeless from its facility at 7:00 am in order to maximize the amount of time enormous numbers of homeless individuals with many problems spend on the streets; NLEC has required that its clients overwhelm areas that the neighborhood was trying to improve as a price of being housed, such as Lucas Park and Central Library, frustrating the legitimate rights of the community trying to lift itself up after decades of decline;
NLEC Has Been Downtown’s Biggest Headwind to Revitalization: The Revitalization of Downtown St. Louis and the broader of City of St. Louis is of enormous regional importance related to issues including economic justice and homelessness; the problems of income inequality, high urban unemployment and homelessness have been driven by regional development patterns that involve the affluent and middle class leaving the poor behind in urban ghettos; the most effective way for these problems to be addressed is for Downtown to be revitalized and serve as a beacon to draw those with means back into the City of St. Louis, using their money, their time, their status as role models, their businesses and employment opportunities, their political influence, and their knowledge to reverse the development patterns that have helped generate the long term problems of homelessness in the first place; and, there is no organization that, more than NLEC, has purposefully and maliciously tried to undermine gigantic and important regional efforts to try to deal with the long term problems that underlie the issue NLEC claims to care about, for its own short term economic gain;
NLEC is Actually Emblematic of Crony Capitalism
NLEC is Not What it Seems: NLEC, rather than being the paragon of progressive, populist virtue that it portrays itself as, is actually emblematic of the crony capitalistic system that it pretends to despise and uses the tools of that system to enrich itself in the short term at the expense of its customers and society generally;
Use of Media to Embellish Itself: NLEC is unparalleled in its ability, clothed in garments of religion, to portray itself as a unrivaled community asset through the channels of mass media; NLEC uses its own television and radio network, its access to local media in many communities, social media, and many other tools to fashion the public’s perception of itself with as much skill as any modern multi-national corporation conducting an image enhancing PR campaign (think BP or big tobacco); NLEC fashions a public persona of deep religious belief and caring for those most unfortunate, an unmatched selflessness, all a fraud;
Use of Politics and Media to Insulate Itself: NLEC has, for decades, used its mastery of politics and the media, and its ability to control a large population of destitute homeless individuals, to insulate itself from rules and regulations that would interfere with its ultimate purpose – generating private wealth not subject to taxation; NLEC has been able to use political bludgeoning, misleading press accounts, threats of slander to quiet critics, and many other tools of the modern corporation in order to avoid compromising its private purpose and complying with the rules and regulations of government, whether joining the Continuum of Care and working to fulfill the common mission, or complying with the Building Code of the City of St. Louis related to public safety and the safety of its guests, or complying with the laws of the City of St. Louis related to securing community support for its expansion, or conducting itself in accordance with best practices in its industry group, homeless service providers;
NLEC Masterfully Externalizes its Costs: With remarkable adeptness that any multi-national would be proud of, NLEC has figured out how to externalize its costs upon the homeless and the community in which NLEC resides, whether in the form of continued high rates of chemical dependency in the homeless, or vast amounts of crime and blight around its main facility, or huge risk to public safety inside and outside its facility, or the movement of resources from truly beneficial operations to itself;
NLEC Preys Upon the Weak and Vulnerable: With the mastery of big tobacco, big pharma, big gambling / lottery, and many other of the “bigs”, NLEC preys upon our most weak and vulnerable, our homeless, including those mentally ill or chemically dependent, by interfering with their ability to access real resources in their battle to escape homelessness; instead, NLEC uses them, threatening to remove the adverse weather housing it provides, in order to manipulate them to serve its’ purpose;
NLEC Hides it Enrichment: NLEC goes to elaborate efforts to hide and deny the fact of its enrichment, clothing its employees in outdated and threadbare costumes, ensuring that its facilities appear (truly) on the verge of collapse, pleading poverty and desperation for support in public, all the while stockpiling its wealth and using that wealth for no good public purpose;
NLEC Uses its Legal Structure to Avoid Liability: As with any modern business using its corporate structure to insulate those in charge and shield them from legal or social liability, NLEC uses its status as a church to deflect any legal or other liability, insulating its leaders from taxation, regulation, social pressure and legal liability;
NLEC Only Focuses Upon the Short Term: As with any modern corporation focused on the short term maximization of its share price and the wealth of its equity owners, NLEC is always focused, at least publicly, upon the emergency that it faces in “serving” its customers; this allows NLEC to deflect any discussion or criticism related to the efficacy of its “services” or its role in shaping the long term health of the system;
There are Two Ways to Proceed Related to NLEC
NLEC’s Refusal to Cooperate or Change: Because NLEC is unwilling to cooperate in any useful way with the community to reduce the detriment it causes in the neighborhood, is unwilling to comply with its permitted occupancy of 32 beds (and instead exceeds that by 10 times), is unwilling to even discuss the possibility of a cap on its total occupancy, continues to insist that it must be free to accept any person who shows up at its door step regardless of the consequences to the neighborhood or those who are unfortunate to show at NLEC’s doors or the laws of the City of St. Louis, actively promotes detriment in the community by the way it operates its facility, and refuses to discuss the preferred option of the Downtown community and many homeless service providers for resolving this situation (a staged decrease over up to 5 years in NLEC’s occupancy to its permitted occupancy of 32 beds in a way that protects maximally the NLEC’s clients), there are really only possible options for the community:
First Option – Status Quo: The first option for the community related to NLEC is to allow the current situation to continue; this would involve allowing NLEC to operate a vastly dangerous facility at an order of magnitude above its permitted occupancy with no cap on the total number of clients served; this would involve allowing NLEC to operate outside of the City’s Continuum of Care, sabotaging the implementation of the City’s plan to end homelessness; this would involve the continued and growing devastation of the area around NLEC, an area of crucial importance to the important regional agenda of Downtown revitalization and economic justice; this would involve the continued predation of NLEC upon the homeless in order to provide NLEC with constant media attention and financial enrichment; and, this would likely involve, at some point in the future, due to the dangerous and unimproved nature of the vastly over-capacity facility, some type of catastrophe involving the death of many homeless people who are being “served” there;
Second Option – Change: The second option, the only one left for the Downtown community, is to continue to press forward with the Protest action, utilizing the only tool under the law to abate this menace to Downtown and the homeless; the Downtown community resisted bringing such an action for years hoping that the situation would change without the nuclear option being required; however, the situation continued deteriorating, even after the end of the Great Recession; this option, if successful, will pave the road for a drastic change in homelessness in St. Louis; the in-migration of homeless individuals from other communities in this region and other regions will decrease; the number of homeless individual escaping homelessness generally will increase; the number of homeless individuals escaping the area around NLEC to go back to communities where they have ties will increase; the detriment around NLEC will plummet; economic growth in Downtown and the City of St. Louis will rise; and resource rich individuals and businesses will move back into the urban core of St. Louis and partially reverse the development trends that have led to broader issues of economic injustice that resulted in the Ferguson incident and protests.
