In my years as a newspaper editor, I’ve never made candidate donations, posted lawn signs or made personal endorsements. My one exception was in 2024 to contribute to Ray Hartmann’s 2024 long shot congressional bid in St Louis. Ray was a good friend and one of the most politically astute people I knew, an industry colleague who had founded and operated the alternative weekly Riverfront Times for more than two decades. His life ended last Thursday at 73 when a wheel flew off a truck and crashed through the windshield of his car.
Ray had been a fixture on a political television show in St. Louis and a passionate voice for the First Amendment, compassion and government accountability. With his passing, the industry lost one of its brightest lights. This is a column from his Substack, written a month before he died.—Dan Pulcrano
If you’re waiting for the government to solve the homelessness crisis with anything resembling a heart, forget about it.
What we are watching is a bipartisan race to the bottom. The Trump administration has kicked into full cruelty mode, demonizing the homeless as just another population to be disposed of.
But Democrats aren’t awash in solutions, either. In city after city they govern, the homeless are subjected to sweeps—masked as “relocations”—so as not to ruin the aesthetics of the next multi-billion-dollar sporting spectacle. Look at the headlines from just this past week.
When Robert Marbut—the Trump administration’s senior homelessness advisor—was in Portland for a closed-door meeting with local officials, his message was clear: The federal government is done with permanent housing.
The new model pivots to temporary transitional programs with two-year expiration dates and mandatory compliance requirements. Housing isn’t a human right in this framework. It’s a reward for good behavior.
And if you aren’t compliant? The administration has already laid the groundwork for involuntary civil commitment—institutionalization dressed up as care.
Even veterans aren’t safe. On March 11, the VA and DOJ announced a plan allowing government attorneys to initiate guardianship proceedings over homeless vets deemed unable to care for themselves. If a court approves, a veteran can lose the right to vote, the right to marry, the right to manage their own affairs.
On this point, the Democrats are at least espousing better values (a low bar, to be sure): Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., the ranking member of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, put it succinctly:
“Veterans fought for our freedom and theirs. The federal government should not be engineering ways of taking it away.”
But don’t mistake this for a Republican problem alone. The race to the bottom has no party affiliation.
In Atlanta, a Democratic mayor is preparing for the 2026 World Cup. Homeless advocates on the ground are watching the city’s “Downtown Rising” initiative with deep skepticism—not because housing people is wrong, but because the urgency arrived with the FIFA schedule, not before it.
One advocate put it precisely: “Don’t use the World Cup as a broom.”
The history here is not reassuring. When Atlanta hosted the 1996 Olympics, more than 9,000 homeless people were arrested in the cleanup. Now, the World Cup looms, and advocates fear an encore.
The pattern holds everywhere. San Francisco swept encampments before last month’s Super Bowl and opened shelter beds that advocates had been requesting for months. New Orleans relocated people away from the Superdome to a warehouse before last year’s game.
Whether it’s a Republican talking about clearing the streets or a Democrat sanitizing them, the message to the person in the tent is the same: You are a nuisance to be managed, not a neighbor to be helped.
Of all the problems the government is failing to fix, this may be near the top. And it may be one of the few issues left that can still stir some decency across our political divide.
For more than a year, I’ve had a first-hand education in the homelessness crisis in St. Louis through a nonprofit called InExcelsis. It’s only one of many good organizations working on this crisis, and any of them is worth your support.
I learned from a guy half my age who grew up 6,580 miles away in Cameroon. His name is Severin Pelekara, and he founded InExcelsis several years ago after arriving as a Methodist missionary.
Pelekara was on his way to missionary work in Brazil when a storm knocked out the shared shower at the housing complex where he was staying. It wasn’t supposed to be a long delay. It turned into 10 days.
Ten days without a shower. Think about that—not as an abstraction, but as a physical reality. The smell. The discomfort. The way it changes how you carry yourself.
When the shower was finally restored, Pelekara stood under the water and felt something shift. Not just hygiene restored—something deeper. A sense of being human again. Of belonging to the world of people who can present themselves to it
So when Severin Pelekara founded InExcelsis, his first idea was something that St. Louis hadn’t thought of: Showers. More specifically, showers provided by a mobile trailer that comes to homeless people where they are.
Serving people — as opposed to sweeping them away — is about as far from government cruelty as you can get. Last year, InExcelsis provided 542 showers—with the help of more than 100 volunteers. But that’s just a starting point in addressing the cycle of homelessness.
So InExcelsis is expanding. A converted bus will travel alongside the shower unit, stocked with clean clothes—coats, socks, underwear—and connected to resources that actually open doors: help obtaining IDs, birth certificates, the kind of assistance that makes a job interview or a doctor’s appointment possible. A shower and clean clothes together don’t just restore hygiene. They restore the baseline of dignity that makes the next step possible.
On Saturday mornings, InExcelsis hosts a weekly gathering at One Family Church in the city. I’ve helped serve food there on occasion—nowhere near as often as the volunteers who show up every week without fail. But something happens nearly every time I do. One of our guests looks up and asks if I’m that guy from Channel 9. Every time, my heart sinks a little.
Not because they recognized me. Because of what the question means. This person—living outside, without a shower, without a change of clothes—used to have a roof over their head, a couch to sit on and a television to watch. They had opinions about what we were yakking about.
They were us. They are us.
