Solving homelessness with permanent housing, not shelters, is the battle cry of House Everyone STL.

By Christy Marshall / Photos of Samantha Stangl by Carmen Troesser

The homeless are everywhere.

Fortunately, a number of St. Louisans have stepped up to the plate to try to solve it.

“Homelessness is like a jigsaw puzzle,” said Jay Shields, CEO of Schaeffer Manufacturing and co-founder of Sons & Daughters of Soulard, a business networking organization that funds homeless services. “I put all the pieces on the table in front of you. But then I hide the box. That is what solving this problem is like … We have to pull the box out from underneath the table.”

Seeing that finished picture has been translated to coming up with a whole new approach.

Currently, Shields leads Think BIG, a component fund of the St. Louis Community Foundation, which is raising money to help improve the delivery of services to St. Louis’ unhoused through systems change. Looking for guidance, they researched cities where the number of homeless had been greatly reduced.

Mandy Chapman Semple, who was working for the Corporation for Supportive Housing (a national non-profit intermediary which supports and funds the creation of permanent housing) when she started working with Houston Mayor Annise Parker.

“It took us about four years to implement,” Chapman Semple says. “We saw tremendous progress immediately. We saw a 60 percent drop in overall homelessness and 75 reduction in unsheltered people homelessness. When we started in Houston, we had more individuals sleeping outside than in shelter.” Ultimately, she founded a firm called Clutch Consulting Group, located in Houston.

“The strategy is to move people back into permanent housing to stabilize them as quickly as possible,” Chapman Semple says. “In many cases, we want to skip the shelters altogether and get them into housing with wraparound services so they can stabilize in a non-crisis environment. We can work with them in their home to move down a path of recovery, however that may look like for the individual. The [Houston] city and county made a commitment to expand the number of permanent housing units and to find and triage the people who had been in homelessness the longest because those were the individuals who had been left behind in previous efforts. If we could get those people who were being counted year after year after year, that’s how we would be able to bring the overall census down.”

Peter Miller, formerly a senior executive with St. Louis-based financial firm A.G. Edwards and a co-founder of Sons & Daughters with Shields, now heads the Meadows Foundation in Dallas. He initiated an effort there to hire Chapman Semple and work toward systems transformation. The foundation raised money toward the effort from several Dallas corporations and foundations. With Chapman Semple’s guidance, Housing Forward was designated as the umbrella organization to set strategy and facilitate coordination and collaboration with Dallas service providers. The (not always cooperative) Dallas’ city and county governments both signed on.

In three years, Dallas rehoused 2,700 persons, closed 10 encampments, and was able to voluntarily place 145 of the 147 people living there into permanent housing. Prior to Housing Forward, Dallas’ best record was placing 250 persons in a year.

“In Dallas, we leaned into rapid rehousing which is time-limited housing and time-limited services,” Chapman Semple says. “The principle is still the same to get people into housing as quickly as possible and help them stabilize in that housing. And then triage them out into our more limited long-term subsidies if necessary. We have been able to develop new ways to use every dollar that is available to us to make that housing as rapid as possible.”

In November 2022, Miller and the Meadows Foundation paid for Chapman Semple to come to St. Louis and relate the success in Dallas at a Sons & Daughters of Soulard meeting which included regional business leaders.

From that meeting, Shields founded Think BIG and established a component fund at the St. Louis Community Foundation to accept tax deductible donations. Its mission: Transform the service delivery system serving the region’s unhoused by bringing Mandy Chapman Semple and her methods to St. Louis. A grant from the Missouri Foundation for Health and Shields’ fundraising prowess enabled Mandy and her associate, Brooke Spellman, to begin working in August 2023. They presented findings in November.

“Before you can launch any of these major initiatives to rehouse you really have to assess the readiness of the community to all work in concert,” she said. “So our initial engagement in St. Louis was really about doing that assessment.”

The goal was to have Clutch present a plan to address the problem. They did not get that far.

Yet.

“We didn’t get to design a major imitative because what that initial assessment revealed was St. Louis wasn’t quite ready,” Chapman Semple says. “There were some things that needed to be put in place, some decisions the community needed to make before they could start thinking about a major initiative. When we concluded our engagement in November, we left the community with that feedback and the results of our assessment and they have been working very hard ever since to move the pieces around so that they could be ready to start talking major initiative.

“There is some disjointedness among the region,” she continued. “I think this is part of the DNA of the region. When it comes to a major initiative for the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County and the municipalities contained within, at a minimum work needed to be done to develop a regional leadership commitment on this issue and to empower an organization like House Everyone STL to really serve as the backbone of the initiative.”

But the City/County divide wasn’t the only problem. “The provider community within the City of St. Louis was very focused on advocacy and shelter,” Chapman Semple said. “They were going to need to take all of that energy and pivot it into energy for rehousing … What we said was we need you to pivot to getting people out of homelessness. Frankly crisis response is not going to solve your homeless problem. We challenged the providers to take all that energy for advocacy for the crisis response and sheltering and move it into action around rehousing. It’s not that rehousing isn’t a part of how providers do business today, it’s just not the priority. What we know to be true is rehousing has to be the focus of the response system. They must move from being a crisis response system into a rehousing system because rehousing ends homelessness and it immediately solves the crisis.”

Founded in 2021, House Everyone STL stands ready to turn the tide. At first the organization was headed by Laurie Phillips, who previously led St Patrick’s Center, but in August, Samantha Stangl took the helm. A graduate of Washington U’s Brown School of Social Work, she came with decades of experience as a service provider to the homeless and abused, as well as working for the Clark-Fox Family Foundation and for St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell.

Samantha Stangl, executive director, House Everyone STL.

“I have always just been really drawn to innovation, systems thinking,” Stangl said. “It’s just big picture thinking. I've done the individual casework. I know how important individuals are in the community and in these systems but unless we start to really focus upstream, we're going to keep doing the same thing over and over again. That's really what House Everyone STL was designed to do.”

“This is not a program, it’s a system,” Jay Shields explained. “The last thing anyone needs is another program or plan gathering dust. This is a system that has worked in other cities like Houston and Dallas and will be tailored to ours. It is intended to move the unhoused off the streets, get them the help they need, and get them housing. We want them to have dignity again.”

Stangl explained that St. Louis has “populations of people who are experiencing homelessness for the first time, who got evicted, lost a job, maybe spent some time sleeping in their car. But we also have folks who, because it's taking six to 10 months to get referrals for housing, are staying in the crisis part of the system. So our outflow is not matching our inflow. The population within the system is growing because not enough people are exiting to permanent housing. We need to look at how do we rapidly get people into housing?”

Working alongside Continuum of Care agencies serving the unhoused, and Adam Pearson, director of St. Louis City’s Department of Human Services, among others, House Everyone STL leverages data to set long-term strategy and coordinate regional efforts. But they are not and never plan on being a direct service provider.

“I’m looking at the forest; the providers can focus on the trees,” Stangl says. “It is our sole and exclusive job to focus on system functioning, innovation, and supporting individual providers so that they can do what they do best, which is care for folks and get them into housing. The solution to homelessness is housing. Not shelters.”

“You need to get everyone together and that is a tall order for St. Louis,” Shields said.

Chapman Semple added “The ball is in St Louis’ court. Given where everyone’s interest is, the resources they have available, and the concentration of where this issue takes place, you are going to do best when you get a region connected … You have seen the tension between the provider community and the City. So if we are going to break that tension, the Mayor, the City needs a larger set of partners that really compel everyone out of that dynamic of tension and into a more generative place focused on moving the system forward.”

Jay Shields and Samantha Stangl are undaunted.

“It’s really coming together,” Shields said. “It’s hard to get unity in a meaningful sense. No one agency or organization can make an impact. The County realizes this is a regional problem and not just a City problem. The City is where the resources are so that is where the homeless go. The County has just as much concern about this as the City does, not to mention Metro East and surrounding counties that feel the burden of homelessness.”

“We have a ton of community providers helping support this effort and vision, and we have enjoyed frequent communication with the business community led by Greater St. Louis Inc,” Stangl said. “We're a small organization nation. We couldn't do any of this without the community support.”

“It feels very solvable,” Chapman Semple says. “Most of the time, this is something we can tackle. It’s not easy but it is doable.”

Samantha Stangl agrees. “This is the time. This is the moment and this is something that we can truly solve.”

Housing The Unhoused