Don’t know exactly where this is… it says “South St. Louis”…

St. Louis Residents Sue City for Allowing Couple to Camp in front of their Home, Use Sewer as Toilet

By RYAN MILLS March 1, 2024

“According to the lawsuit, it was in the fall of 2020 that the homeless couple first erected their tent on a strip of city land in front of Baumhoff’s and McClanahan’s home… The couple lives in a makeshift tent built with “old pieces of canvas
and plastic tarp” and held up by grocery carts and other items, the lawsuit says. It is visible on Google Maps… The tent is erected over a stormwater drain that Schock believes is “doubling as the toilet for these people,” he said. According to
the lawsuit, neighbors have seen the couple “straddling over the sewer, using it as a toilet,” and “noxious odors” come from the tent…”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/st-louis-residents-sue-city-for-refusing-to-clear-unsanitary-homeless-tent-outside-their-home/

“Richard Baumhoff and Steven McClanahan have stopped using the porch of their south St. Louis home because of the noxious odors emanating from the homeless camp out front.

They don’t utilize or mow their front yard much because the man and woman living in the ramshackle tent by the road often scream at them and become aggressive. The homeowners park their cars out back and fear for the safety of their guests if they dare
to visit.

And, Baumhoff and McClanahan contend, St. Louis city leaders have taken no action to remove the squatters or to clean up the filth they’ve allowed to fester on a strip of public land in front of their home for over three years now, according to a
lawsuit filed on February 16.

The lawsuit from St. Louis attorney W. Bevis Schock argues that city leaders, through their neglect, have created a private and public nuisance in front of Baumhoff’s and McClanahan’s home. The city’s neglect has prevented Baumhoff and McClanahan
from enjoying their property in peace, it has reduced the value of their property, and is generally “an offense against the public order,” according to the lawsuit.

The argument in Schock’s lawsuit is similar to the one that lawyers in Arizona made last year in a successful effort to force the City of Phoenix to clear out and clean up a massive downtown homeless camp known as “the Zone.” In that case, an
Arizona superior-court judge ordered city leaders to “abate the nuisance” they had illegally maintained at the camp site.

At its peak, more than a thousand people were living in the Zone. While the scale is much smaller in Baumhoff’s and McClanahan’s neighborhood — their lawsuit is aimed at removing a single tent in front of their home — Schock believes a jury will
be similarly appalled.

“When the clients came to me, I started rooting around in the law, and I concluded that, actually, this nuisance theory is a pretty good theory,” he told National Review. “And in Missouri, it turns out, whether your neighbor is causing a nuisance
depends on what the jury says is reasonable or unreasonable. That’s great for us.”

“We think that the jury is going to be startled that these people are allowed to be there by the city,” Schock added. “It seems to me, very much, that the city’s administration, they’re really kind of on the side of the homeless people.”

Multiple attempts by National Review to reach Alderwoman Daniela Velázquez via phone and email were unsuccessful on Monday and Tuesday. Nick Dunne, a spokesman for the city’s far-left mayor, Tishaura O. Jones, similarly did not respond to requests for
comment.

Dunne excused the city’s lack of action in a comment last week to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He said the city has been trying to provide services and shelter to the homeless couple for a decade. “But they have to accept those services,” he told
the paper. “We cannot force them.”

According to the lawsuit, it was in the fall of 2020 that the homeless couple first erected their tent on a strip of city land in front of Baumhoff’s and McClanahan’s home. The identities of the man and woman aren’t clear, though they are believed
to be Sudanese and seem to understand at least some English, the lawsuit says.

The couple lives in a makeshift tent built with “old pieces of canvas and plastic tarp” and held up by grocery carts and other items, the lawsuit says. It is visible on Google Maps.

The tent is erected over a stormwater drain that Schock believes is “doubling as the toilet for these people,” he said. According to the lawsuit, neighbors have seen the couple “straddling over the sewer, using it as a toilet,” and “noxious
odors” come from the tent.

The couple are believed to use heaters and cookstoves inside the tent, creating a fire danger. They sometimes wash and expose themselves outside, the lawsuit states, and they leave “litter and refuse outside their tent.”

“Plaintiffs have seen rats at and near the tent at least six times,” the lawsuit states.

Schock said his clients have made city officials aware of their problems “many times.” They’ve sent emails to Jones and Velázquez; reached out to the Citizen Service Bureau via X, formerly Twitter; made calls to the city’s nonemergency police
line; and spoken to beat cops in the neighborhood. The response so far has been “nothing, crickets,” Schock said.

“I suspect if these homeless people were in front of the mayor’s house, they’d probably get moved along,” Schock added. “But they’re not in front of the mayor’s house. They’re in front of my clients’ house.”

Schock noted that in early October, ahead of a visit by Vice President Kamala Harris, city leaders cleared a homeless camp that had been growing outside of city hall. At the time, Dunne cited public safety as the reason for clearing the camp — about 50
police calls for service in the previous months; more than 30 EMS calls for overdoses, seizures, and other emergencies; fights; drugs; and reports of city employees being accosted, according to a local NBC report.

Activists said clearing the camp near city hall was inhumane and unnecessary, according to the Post-Dispatch. At least two far-left aldermen joined activists to block police from clearing the camp, butting heads with Jones, the mayor, a supporter of
decriminalizing minor offenses who promised before she was elected to “look at every issue through a racial equity lens.”

In the end, the effort to clear the camp seems to have been akin to a game of whack-a-mole — many of the homeless residents seem to have simply set up their tents in other camps and nearby public grounds, according to news reports.

Schock said that St. Louis’s problems with homelessness are, at the moment, “a small fraction” of the problems that West Coast cities like San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle are dealing with. But St. Louis’s homelessness problem has gotten
worse in recent years.

His lawsuit is calling for a court order that would declare the camp in front of Baumhoff’s and McClanahan’s home a public nuisance, require the city to remove it, and require that the city not allow the homeless couple to come back to the area.

“I don’t care how they do it,” he said. “They’ve got to make them move. I don’t care if they have to arrest them. I don’t care what they do with their personal property.”

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