KANSAS CITY, Mo. — It’s not as if Molly Hastings, a defense attorney used to helping those in trouble, isn’t sympathetic to homeless people.

“We are very houseless-friendly, the people in my firm,” the defense attorney said.

But in July, Hastings moved her law office to Ninth Street and Baltimore Avenue across from the headquarters of the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, a historic 12-story brownstone built in 1890 as the New York Life building.

It is also where, every weekday for the last 18 months, the diocese has been running its Morning Glory Ministries breakfast that it had operated for more than a decade near its gold domed cathedral— feeding some 180 homeless people who tote their belongings inside for a prayer, meal and coffee to make their difficult lives a bit easier.

“It’s very important,” said Cory Davis, 42, who has been homeless for three months and recently huddled outside at 6 a.m. against the chill waiting for breakfast to begin. “Most places, they feed later in the morning. But this place actually gives you someplace to go when it’s cold outside. A lot of people wouldn’t have nowhere to go.”

Except in the wake of a lawsuit and complaints by residents and businesses regarding defecation, urination, break-ins and harassment, the question of whether the program is benefiting anyone — the homeless included — has become fraught with tension.

Diocese leaders insist they are being scapegoated, and being falsely blamed for attracting more homeless people to downtown when, in fact, they are simply feeding the rising population that exists.

“It’s easy to put the blame on us,” said John Kraus, Morning Glory Ministries’ director. “Everybody wants to point the finger. We’re not bringing the homeless here. They’re here and we’re feeding them.”

More than that, the ministry also supplies people with shoes and clothes, pantry and hygiene items. It also helps people secure documents such as birth certificates. It does not supply housing assistance.

Chief among the program’s critics are Kansas City officials who insist that although church leaders may be well meaning, programs like theirs — focused primarily on feeding needy people — are not helpful. They may, in fact, do more harm than good in that they make it easier for people to live on the street, which is both dangerous and deadly.

Kansas City Assistant City Manager Melissa Kozakiewicz said that effective programs work to get people off the streets, by helping them access the medical, psychological, housing and other help they need. The city, she said, has asked Morning Glory to either do more or work with effective organizations that do, but have been turned down.

“The goal is to end homelessness,” Kozakiewicz said. “So anything that doesn’t do that, anything that doesn’t send us on the pathway to do that, is not helpful. In fact, it’s detrimental.

“No one ever gets better by living outside. So if you give someone food and nothing else, then you are prolonging their homelessness and increasing their chances of dying on the street.

“Their (Morning Glory’s) goal is to make homelessness comfortable. You can’t make homelessness comfortable. It’s literally not a thing. Living outside is always dangerous. …

“We have asked them multiple times, ‘Can we help you do a thing that helps the community that you think you are helping?’ And they said, ‘No.’ They’re not interested. They want to do it the way they’re doing it because that’s their ministry.

“We have talked to them about this. And they don’t care.”

‘Life threatened’

The diocese maintains it is doing God’s work.

For 45 years, the church had been feeding and clothing the needy downtown from its Catholic Center alongside the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. When the diocese in 2023 began construction of a new 19,000-square-foot parish hall, the Bishop Hogan Center at 11th Street and Broadway Boulevard, it shifted the breakfast program in May to the chancery’s offices at 20. W. Ninth St. The building is also home to Bishop James V. Johnston Jr.

“Caring for the poor, the hungry and those in need is central to the mission of the Catholic Church …” Johnston said previously. The Star requested an interview with church leadership, but was denied.

“I live in the Catholic Center (Chancery) building and consider it my home, and the surrounding area my neighborhood, too,” Johnston said. ”It is our duty and our privilege to serve the homeless and hungry in our neighborhood.”

But since the move, those who live and work in the district insist that the result has ranged from disturbingly eye-opening to dangerous.

“We’ve had more incidents in the last few months,” Hastings said, “then in the 10 years I worked at 10th and Walnut.”

The problem, they say, isn’t the breakfast, per se. It’s the stream of people it draws and what happens at 7:45 each morning when the breakfast ends and people leave to walk the neighborhood.

“The first week we moved in, there was a naked homeless gentleman taking a (expletive) on the rooftop,” Hastings said. “There was a couch up there that people used to sleep on.

“Another naked woman lit a dumpster on fire in the middle of the night and it just burned to the studs because no one attended to it.”

Hastings revealed photos on her phone of a naked man, half-naked woman, a dumpster turned to ash. She walked behind her building to show a fence erected to prevent people from gaining access to a building alcove.

“They had to erect a fence with barbed wire to keep people from this little stoop where people would do drugs and hang out,” she said. “We’ve had a lot of police contact.”

Homeless people have long occupied the streets of downtown. But homeless advocates concede that number is growing.

Jon Gerner, who has run the Milwaukee Delicatessen Company at 101 W. Ninth St. for 11 years, said that both the population and negative incidents have risen in the time the breakfast program began.

“I’ve had my life threatened,” Gerner said. “I’ve had guys in here that have just come in and taken food off of tables (while people were eating) and have told me they’re going to kill me. It’s a real deal. I’ve been here for 11 years and it never happened.”

Female employees and customers, he said, have been harassed. “There’s been vandalism,” he said.

Veronica Garcia-Ibarra and Roberto Vidal, who in 2020 relocated their restaurant, Wrap It Up Tex Mex Grill, to 104 W. Ninth St., have been broken into twice since the breakfast began, the same number of break-ins they had in the 10 years prior.

“This is last week,” Vidal said. Security camera photos on his phone showed their ransacked register. Another showed a thief carrying away a black garbage bag stuffed with equipment.

“I love what they’re doing, feeding people that are homeless,” Garcia-Ibarra said. “But it’s intimidating for the customers. … They have to move it.”

Safety and sympathy

Matters became so worrisome for the employees at Univision, the Spanish language news and media organization, that Velia Chavez, the station’s general manager, picked up and moved her mostly young and female staff as soon as the company’s lease expired in 2023. They had occupied their space for eight years.

“It became a safety issue,” Chavez said. “It got to the point where we were being harassed as we were walking into the building. I mean there has always been stuff going on because it’s downtown. But the last six months before we left, it had gotten worse to the point where nobody would get out of their cars until someone else was there so we could walk together.”

Chavez, like nearly all the people The Star spoke to, is sympathetic to the church’s mission.

“They’re trying to help people,” Chavez said. “But, at the same time, these were people, some of whom are not mentally stable. Sometimes you’d be walking and some of them would sit there and act like they were shooting a gun. They were pretty scary.

“I’ve grown up in the urban core all my life. It takes quite a bit for me to get scared off. But it got to the point where it wasn’t just my safety, but it was also the safety of my team.”

Clayton Ashby, who co-owns Mildred’s Food & Drink at 908 Baltimore Ave. with his brother, is likewise sympathetic to the church’s mission.

“I’m anxious about looking uncaring. We’re certainly not that,” Ashby said. “The issue is the security afterward. Most people go about their day. But we’ve had people who are unstable.

“We had the lady who started a fire in our dumpster. There was another person who came into the restaurant bathroom and the lady found a crack pipe in there. We got a bad Google review because of that: ’Don’t go to that place because they have crack pipes in the bathroom.’ Another person came in and started flushing a T-shirt or a sweater down the toilet. We had to close early and it cost people their wages. It’s been difficult.”

Backyard bias

In October 2023, five months after the breakfast program moved, Craig Slawson of Denver, a real estate developer who owns the former Kansas City Club and several other buildings downtown and in the River Market, forced the diocese into Jackson County Circuit Court.

Slawson, through his companies, Baltimore Place Partners LLC, Baltimore Square LLC, LaRue Baltimore LLC and KC Club LLC, sought an injunction to shut down the program claiming, essentially, that it was a nuisance that “unreasonably interferes with public safety and public comfort and convenience.”

“We weren’t, of course, trying to remove the homeless,” Slawson told The Star. “What we were trying to do was to get them (the diocese) to be responsible for their actions. Because what they basically do is feed them and kick them off their sidewalks.

“They quit responding to us. So that’s why we had to eventually go to a lawsuit.”

In September of this year, Judge Kevin D. Harrell denied the motion to shut down the program.

To stop it, he ruled, the law called for the plaintiffs to prove that the breakfast program itself was the primary cause of the problems people were experiencing — which the plaintiffs could not show. Homeless people had been living on the streets there long before the program began.

They would also have to show that if it were not for the breakfast program, the area would be free of the problems, which was also not provable.

The judge even went further, saying that those complaining about the program had already wanted it gone before any incidents occurred. He implied they just didn’t want the program in their backyard.

“In fact,” Harrell wrote, “the evidence demonstrates that Plaintiffs were seeking to blame Defendants’ breakfast program for unhoused issues in the area before Defendants even launched the program at its current location.

“Plaintiffs’ witnesses admitted that they were seeking other parties to join them in opposing the opening of Defendants’ breakfast program — before a single incident occurred. To the Court, it appears that Plaintiffs’ suggestion that Defendants’ breakfast program caused their alleged injuries is nothing more than a product of confirmation bias linked to a preexisting bias against the breakfast program held by Plaintiffs before the program even opened.”

Among those who testified in support of the injunction was Sean O’Byrne, the executive director of the Downtown Community Improvement District. O’Byrne said he not only is a parishioner at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, but also was on the campaign to help raise money for the new Bishop Hogan Center.

Still, he wanted the program moved.

The Downtown Council, O’Byrne told The Star, helps support the Downtown Community Services Center at Seventh Street and The Paseo Boulevard. He thought an idea that would benefit everyone, including homeless people, would be to have the diocese move its program to a place that would allow those its serves to connect to programs that already benefit homeless people.

“NourishKC is our partner on the lower level. They serve up to 50,000 meals a month,” he said. “Then upstairs you have Care Beyond the Boulevard, where you can see a medical doctor, a dentist, a psychiatrist. We have the Greater Kansas City Coalition (to End Homelessness) upstairs that can do social work, get your housing referral, help you get documents. We’re within two blocks of all your major overnight shelters — reStart, City Union Mission, Hope Faith.”

Hope Faith Homeless Assistance Campus, 705 Virginia Ave., offers more than a dozen services such as food, shelter, laundry, mail, employment services, health care.

“No one is against the ministry,” O’Byrne said. “Feeding the hungry is noble. But the way it really works well is to have those services in a cluster.”

City officials agree that coordination is vital. In 2022, the city launched its Zero KC plan to end homelessness in the city in as little as five years. Three years on, with homelessness rising, it continues to struggle and work to build a system to get people the services they need and off the streets.

One struggle has been to build a permanent “low-barrier” shelter, meaning one that accepts people regardless of their religion, addiction or other circumstances. Proposals to do so have repeatedly stalled in the City Council.

Josh Henges, the houseless prevention coordinator for Kansas City, said the one thing that is not needed is a breakfast program that feeds people without going to the next levels of helping people get out of homelessness.

“It’s not going to help,” Henges said. “I’ve been doing this 17 years. I have never worked with someone who’s living on the streets that was actually and genuinely hungry. It doesn’t happen in America.

“We have a lot of organizations that want to feed the homeless. It’s 20 to 30 to one compared to the organizations that are working with the homeless to move them out of homelessness. … But that’s the game. If you are not working to end someone’s homelessness, then get out of the way. I have no time for you. You are wasting time and money.”

‘We’ve been through things’

Others hardly think it’s a waste.

Ministry volunteers begin their work at 4:30 a.m. Men and women begin showing up outside often around 6 a.m.

Carolyn Hebeler, 51 and homeless on-and-off for 30 years, was there on a recent morning. Known on the streets as Mama Ci Ci, she currently had housing, but said she soon was going to be kicked out of an apartment riddled with mold and where, with subsidies, her paperwork showed she was paying $1,100 a month.

“I do have a place. I do have a place,” she said. “Technically, I’m going back to homeless. I’m getting ready to get kicked out because of my reporting them to the Health Department.”

The night before, she didn’t go home. “I just walked around with my stuff,” she said, until she came for the breakfast.

She knows that people in the neighborhood have been complaining about their presence. She concedes, yes, there are a few people who do cause problems. But not most.

“I think the community is more haters on the homeless,” she said. “I think it (the breakfast) is not a problem at all. I think they have it in their heads that, well, they’re a problem because they’re homeless and they stink, or because they’re dirty or filthy or some such scenario.

“People don’t understand, we’ve been through things.”

Stephen Gordon, a minister in his own church and the head of the private security detail hired by the diocese, said he has been working with homeless people for 35 years. When the breakfast program relocated, he said, there were some problems: people bringing food outside and leaving garbage, some men urinating on walls or in entryways.

They’ve tamped down on what they can. If people are found breaking rules, they’re not allowed at the breakfast for some time.

“We have pretty good people come to eat,” he said. “But what the people down here in the downtown association got to understand is that these people have been out on the streets all night.

“They’ve been drinking, They’ve been drugging. Some of them have medication. They take a night dose. But, after all that, they forget to take their medicine. So, when they wake up in the morning, they’re in a frenzy.”

Gordon said he trains his team to react with compassion. “Treat them like you want to be treated. Treat them as human beings. They become your friends,” he said. “We’re constantly talking to them. We tell them in the morning, ‘Hey, ya’ll don’t straighten up your act, place is going to get shut down. Then where you going to eat?’ We’ve built up a type of rapport.”

Gordon said there’s little they can do to address complaints away from the church property. Some neighbors have hired private security, he said. Others have not. Public streets and sidewalks are public.

“What you have to understand is that these people have as much a right to be here as you do,” Gordon said. “If they step out in the street, we can’t do nothing. They’re not on our property.”

The doors to the breakfast open at 6:45 a.m. and close down an hour later.

People filed in orderly and walked to the sinks to wash their hands. Breakfast began with Kraus reciting a prayer.

“Pray in the name of the Father, the Son and Holy Spirit,” he began. “We ask that you help us find what we need to follow your path … Lord, we ask your special blessing today upon our brothers and sisters who live on the streets, who are hurting, who are ill, or who are loving them …”

Then he called out, “Women first,” who went to the front of the line, along with people in wheelchairs and with disabilities.

Then, for an hour, 180 people sat and talked and ate. Mary Anderson came from Independence with her friend, Dewuan Hargrove. Neither are homeless, although Anderson has been in the past.

“It’s the riffraff,” she said, who are causing issues. “Not the ones who are really trying. Then, you know, who am I to judge?”

Everyone goes through hard times, Anderson said.

“I’m 18 years clean,” she said proudly.

Homeless people aren’t the only people who come to the kitchen. A father showed up with his daughter. He brings her for breakfast each morning before taking her to a nearby Crossroads Academy charter school.

Anthony Stewart, 62, was there. He’s also not homeless, but was a decade ago and used to come to the breakfast when it was held near the cathedral. Now he comes to support others. These days, he’s been helping two men, Patrick Erickson, 55, and his uncle, who have been homeless for five years. He sometimes gives them a place to stay and does their laundry.

“It’s where I got my support to get off of homelessness,” Stewart said of the ministry.

“This place? This means a whole lot,” said Erickson, who comes every morning. “Everybody wakes up, they look forward to this.

“The atmosphere is holy.”

©2024 The Kansas City Star. Visit at kansascity.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.