Behind tent city: A man who’s fought St. Louis mayors for decades (2024)

ST. LOUIS — As police officers closed in on the homeless camp at City Hall last week, it felt like the Rev. Larry Rice was everywhere at once.

He was praying with campers terrified of losing their homes. He was carping to reporters about the cruelty of Mayor Tishaura O. Jones’ decision. He was challenging the activists assembled outside the Market Street doors not to yield to the city’s aggression.

“Is everybody ready,” he shouted, “to get arrested?”

Rice, the leader of New Life Evangelistic Center and a longtime televangelist, was one of many opposing the clearing of the encampment, which in its final week hosted more than 30 tents and all manner of vices. Perhaps 30 or more activists, advocates and aldermen joined him to protest its closure. But it was hard not to give Rice credit for the show: He worked for weeks to publicize the inhabitants’ woes. He urged them to protest city laws on homeless shelters. And he and his staff at New Life Evangelistic Center regularly provided food, blankets and the lion’s share of those multiplying tents.

It was just like old times: For decades, Rice has made a practice out of publicly poking mayors in the eye to bring attention to the plight of people living on the streets, with little more than prayers to keep them going. And just a few weeks after some Jones appointees killed a push to reopen Rice’s downtown shelter, she was being treated to her first run-in with the street preacher.

“Larry Rice has been a rite of passage for every mayor since Vince Schoemehl,” said Richard Callow, the veteran political operative who has either worked for or against them all.

To be sure, things have changed since the days of the “Schoemehlvilles” — the original City Hall encampments in the 1980s. The fights with former Mayor Francis G. Slay were especially hard on Rice: He lost his big shelter, on Locust Street. He lost the court appeals. He had to sell his TV channel to help cover legal bills and other costs.

But through his work in recent months to publicize and grow the latest City Hall tent village into a spectacle, Rice made clear he has no plans to fade away.

“I think they thought we would be gone a long time ago,” Rice said in an interview. “But we’re still here. They only closed a building. You can’t close a church.”

Trying to get a mayor arrested

Lawrence Rice Jr. came to St. Louis in the early 1970s to attend Concordia Seminary in Clayton to complete his training to be a Lutheran minister. But it didn’t work out. He recalled a lot of dissension in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod at the time, as fundamentalist and modern philosophies fought over control.

And, for perhaps the last time in his life, he walked away from a fight.

“I didn’t want to spend my life fighting preachers,” he said. “I ended up spending it fighting politicians.”

He started small, as a street preacher working out of a trailer in Wellston. Then he bought a house in Lafayette Square. And in 1975, he bought the old five-story Young Women’s Christian Association building at 1411 Locust. Shortly thereafter, he was making headlines pushing the state to bar utility shutoffs during the winter.

Then he turned his attention to officials in St. Louis, where he saw a growing lack of affordable housing and the shutdown of state-run treatment facilities for mental illness building to a crisis on the streets. He challenged then-Mayor Vincent C. Schoemehl to do more for the poor. He wanted the city to open public buildings to those living outside in the winter, hire homeless people for entry-level positions, and open and staff a new emergency shelter.

The administration argued that that the city was funding shelters through contributions to private institutions such as the Salvation Army and the Relocation Clearing House.

“We are the only political entity providing any aid to homeless — yet we’re being singled out for some reason by Reverend Rice,” Ed Bushmeyer, Schoemehl’s press aide, said at the time.

But in 1985, Rice championed a lawsuit against the city aimed at forcing it to expand homeless services, and in the middle of the summer, he led the homeless to camp out on the lawn under Schoemehl’s second-floor window at City Hall. He estimated more than 400 people stayed at least one night over the course of two weeks.

The lawsuit was settled later that year, and Schoemehl signed a bill the following summer increasing some services.

But even then, Rice was unsatisfied. He continued demanding the city open and run a shelter. In 1987, he even tried to have Schoemehl arrested for refusing the demand, arguing it was required under the bill.

When Schoemehl and others denied him the old City Hospital, on the near South Side, for a shelter, selling it instead to a developer, Rice crawled in through a hole made by vandals and tried to set one up anyway.

And summer after summer, he revived the Schoemehlville encampment around the same time as the VP Fair celebration, which brought thousands and thousands of people downtown.

“As St. Louis parties each year, we want people to remember that many, many of their neighbors are still struggling to survive,” Rice explained. “We want people to see.”

‘Hellholes’

The next mayor to really get an eyeful was Slay, who took office in 2001.

Rice briefly terrified the administration in 2003 and 2004, when he made a bid to turn a vacant federal office building downtown into a mega-shelter capable of serving 1,000 people. City Hall ultimately beat back the effort, which would have killed plans to redevelop the old Kiel Opera house.

But a few years later, he confronted them with a series of encampments around the city. He’d recently taken a trip to Portland, Oregon, where he'd seen something he’s still trying to re-create today: Dignity Village, a city-sanctioned encampment on a patch of land near the airport where people were living in tents and small structures without fear of being cleared. They had rudimentary cooking and sanitary facilities, and access to social services. They elected their own leaders and made their own rules to keep order.

He returned to St. Louis determined to press for something similar here. He began demanding the city designate some land for the homeless. The city was giving all kinds of tax breaks to developers, he said. Why not something for those with nothing?

And when City Hall refused, and tore down three makeshift encampments along the riverfront, Rice tried leasing his own piece of land on the western edge of the Botanical Heights, at Interstate 44 and Vandeventer Avenue, for an endeavor he dubbed “Integrity Village.”

But officials’ patience was wearing thin. They called the encampments Rice sponsored “hellholes” — unsanitary, unsafe and unwanted. His philosophy ran directly counter to their strategy of trying to get the homeless immediately into permanent housing. And they saw all of his public outrage as effectively preying on the poor to raise money for his church.

They bulldozed Integrity Village within a few days. And they spent the next few years running him out of downtown.

Bedbug bites

While Rice had been fighting with the city to expand his services, the area around his Locust Street headquarters had changed. Loft-dwellers and developers were reimagining the Washington Avenue corridor. They saw New Life and some of the characters it attracted as an obstacle to progress, citing fighting, drug use, loitering and littering around the center.

Rice fought back, blasting his neighbors and city officials who heeded them as gentrifiers who didn’t like the homeless or understand their needs. As his losses mounted and the walls closed in, he even ran for mayor as an independent on the slogan “The People Have Suffered Enough.”

But by the spring of 2017, it was over. He had been running his shelter on a hotel license, but city officials had pulled it. New Life, they said, was letting in hundreds more guests than the 32 allowed. The old building was a mess of code and health violations.

“It was an unsanitary building,” said Slay, who on Friday recalled two people showing him bedbug bites they said they picked up at New Life.

A judge rejected a last-ditch attempt to save it on March 31, 2017.

The next day, after he and his staff packed up some things to move to another building in Overland, he went around to see the homeless around downtown to say his goodbyes. “I had to admit,” he later wrote, “it was one of the hardest and saddest nights of my life.”

Jones’ 2021 campaign for mayor offered some hope. She spoke of a new, more humane approach to homelessness, and said she was open to discussing Rice reopening the Locust building as a daytime refuge. After she took office, her aides talked about setting up “intentional encampments” with security, services and sanitation that sounded like what Rice had admired in Portland.

But when Jones’ encampment proposal made it to the Board of Aldermen in the summer of 2021, they made execution all but impossible. And in July 2023, a city appeals board featuring multiple Jones appointees rejected another of Rice’s bids to repair and reopen the Locust building as a so-called day center and church. If Rice wanted to reopen a homeless shelter, they said, he needed to follow city rules and get a majority of voters or property owners within 500 feet to sign a petition allowing it. Given Rice’s many enemies downtown, and the notorious difficulty of getting people to approve a shelter petition anywhere in the city, it was a de facto ban.

The camp at City Hall grows

A few weeks later, as he and his staff were handing out bus tickets, Rice met a woman named Mary Carder. She was camping out beneath Jones’ office window to protest the lack of shelter space for people with dogs.

He was impressed. He called a press conference on Aug. 18 to amplify Carder’s cause. Carder blasted the mayor, and passed out fliers urging people to report the city to the U.S. Department of Justice.

And when Carder landed an apartment, Rice found others in the camp to continue the protest.

Ericka and William Clay couldn’t find shelter space that wouldn’t require them to separate. Rice held an impassioned press conference Sept. 13 calling out the city for making it difficult to open new facilities. “It’s direct discrimination,” he said.

He also blasted broader society for allowing the situation to continue. “The new N-word in America today,” he said, “is homeless.”

Meanwhile, word got around town that if you wanted to camp out somewhere without being told to move, City Hall was your best bet. That’s what Gino McCoy and Hadah Moore heard from Rice’s longtime lieutenant, the Rev. Ray Redlich, when they and their three dogs were kicked out of Laclede’s Landing after relocating from Arizona.

More followed, and Rice handed out tents to those who asked. He steadfastly denied engineering the stream of newcomers, but he said he had an obligation to help them once they arrived.

“If people ask me for tents,” he said, “I’m going to do what I can to help them.”

First, he was buying them from Walmart, where he could get a two-person tent for $30. Then as awareness of the encampment grew, he started getting deliveries from donors: 10 tents. Then 20. “People were seeing the need,” he said.

And over the next two weeks, the camp ballooned to at least 35 tents, covering the grass on both sides of the Market Street doors and becoming a symbol of the city’s inability to find shelter for all the homeless in need.

The growth dovetailed with trouble, however. City officials grew alarmed by calls about fights, drug use, overdoses and other lawlessness. Efforts to get people into shelter or housing seemed futile as those who left were replaced by new arrivals.

Rice said he tried to do something about it last Sunday, by requiring people to start signing covenants agreeing not to use drugs, and to keep the area clean. He had plans to bring in portable showers, too.

‘22 tents coming on Monday’

But by then, Jones had had enough. The next day, she called in the police to clear the camp. And Rice found himself outside City Hall that night shouting, lamenting and praying.

“I was trying to engage in as much ministry as possible,” he said, “because people’s hearts were broken.”

It looked like his was, too. At one point, he had to sit down at the nearby bus stop to collect himself. Tears in his eyes, he said he couldn’t believe that the city would do what it was doing.

Then, something else happened. Alderman Rasheen Aldridge, of downtown, told the administration that he and the crowd resisting the clearing weren’t moving, and he was able to negotiate a temporary reprieve. Still, tents started coming down in the morning, and were all gone by Tuesday evening.

Days later, in an interview on Thursday, Rice said he saw a silver lining: The way activists, Aldridge, and Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier, of Tower Grove East, rallied to resist the camp clearing was like nothing he’d ever seen. He was happy to see several people, including the Clays, McCoy and Moore, offered spots in the tiny homes northwest of downtown.

And he was cheered by a push at the Board of Aldermen for an Unhoused Bill of Rights. It would, among other things, require the city to offer campers appropriate shelter beds before clearing tents, and to establish city-run encampments with security, services and sanitation for people unready or uninterested in shelter.

“This is what I’ve been wanting to see for almost 40 years now,” he said.

The bill’s path through the board is unclear. There are questions about whether it would be workable or pass muster with residents. Jones, who campaigned on passing an unhoused bill of rights, has been publicly noncommittal.

Rice said she’ll have to sign it if it gets through the board, though. Meanwhile, he’ll be on the streets.

“We’ve got 22 tents coming on Monday,” he said. “We’re not done.”