What does the City of St. Louis owe two neighbors who for four years had to put up with a homeless couple living on their sidewalk?
A city jury answered that question today: $36,500.
Everyone on both sides of the lawsuit brought by Tower Grove South residents Steven McClanahan and Richard Baumhoff agrees that the situation outside their home on South Spring Avenue was bad: A homeless couple from Sudan laid claim to the space in 2020 and stayed there with an increasingly large and malodorous footprint for four years. The couple constructed a makeshift shelter from tarps and shopping carts, using a crude system of buckets and a sewer drain for their personal hygiene. The imposition on the neighbors living on the street only increased from there. The man at one point used some plastic chairs as an improvised porch, which extended out into the street. He got into an argument with a child and threatened that child with a brick. He used McClanahan and Baumhoff’s fence to dry his tarps…