A new 24-hour safe haven offering wrap-around services for people experiencing homelessness in St. Louis has opened in the city’s Old North neighborhood.
The safe haven, called Grace House, is the first of its kind in St. Louis, according to St. Patrick Center. Grace House will stay open year-round and provide services to whoever needs them, says Anthony D’Agostino, CEO of St. Patrick Center.
“We tried to create a safe haven for St. Louis that could get people off the streets and provide safety for people who can’t go to traditional shelters,” D’Agostino tells the RFT.
Grace House will prioritize the chronically homeless and connect them to permanent housing. Safe havens act as 24/7, low-barrier alternatives to traditional shelters and often serve homeless individuals who have been banned or removed from other programs for the unhoused.
About a dozen staff members work at Grace House to connect people to support services, including mental-health or substance-abuse counseling.
Grace House was a long time coming. The Board of Aldermen set aside $16 million in American Rescue Plan funds for homeless services in August 2021, with about $1.3 million appropriated for a safe haven.
Since then, city officials have considered at least two third-party agencies to open a safe haven after issuing a request for proposals. The city later backed out of negotiations after determining the providers could not meet certain requirements for safe havens, such as maintaining 24-hour operations.
D’Agostino says St. Patrick Center is currently finalizing contract details after the city chose the nonprofit to run the safe haven last fall. A search for a place to put Grace House that met all federal requirements began soon after.
Now that a location has been secured, says Yusef Scoggin, director of human services for St. Louis, the city is “working diligently with [St. Patrick Center] to ensure we can employ best practices and provide low-barrier services to the hard-to-reach unhoused neighbors with severe mental illness and substance use disorders that a safe haven is meant to serve.”
The city has long lacked shelter space during winter weather, Alderwoman Christine Ingrassia says.
Ingrassia, an outspoken supporter of St. Louis’s unhoused community, says she’s been frustrated with how long it’s taken the city to use the federal funding set aside for a safe haven.
“It’s overdue, but I’m grateful it’s happening,” Ingrassia tells the RFT.
A permanent safe haven hasn’t operated in St. Louis for the past several years — not since the closing of The Horizon Club, a 24-hour center for homeless people with developmental disabilities, D’Agostino says. The center closed in 2016.
Twenty-five to 40 people can stay at Grace House at a time, according to D’Agostino. Stays include three meals a day, along with access to computers and telephones. There’s no time limit on how long someone could stay there, but the goal is to get clients out of shelters and into permanent housing.
Compared to shelters, safe havens cost two to three times more money to run, D’Agostino says, so he understands why there’s been such a deficit of safe havens in St. Louis. But St. Patrick Center pushed to open one this winter “because we didn’t see anyone else doing it.”
Without city support, Grace House will cost over $100,000 a month to operate.
“It’s not sustainable for us to create that kind of deficit spending, which we’re currently doing… We’re working in good faith with the city and have no reason to think this isn’t going to work out,” D’Agostino says.
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