Warm-Hearted, Tough-Minded Compassion: An Interview with Bob Coté

Next month I’ll lay out my upcoming book on homelessness, but the book will only make sense if you understand the process of Step 13 and Springs Rescue Mission that I’ve laid out in this first quarter of the year — so here’s part of an interview I did with Bob Coté 16 years ago.

Olasky: Does the step-by-step process to moving upstairs and getting a better room really work?

Coté: They want to get up there. I have 12 full-time employees, but really I have 52, because I have 40 people with a year or even two years of residence and they take ownership of Step 13. They’ll say, “Hey, we don’t write on the walls here,” and the one time they did, I nailed all the bathrooms shut and told them to walk to the Greyhound Station.

Olasky: Nailed the bathrooms shut?

Coté: That was 21 years ago, and let me tell you this: I’m a man of God, and knock me out of this chair, there hasn’t been so much as a pencil mark anywhere on that building since.

Olasky: They need to see quick payoffs for their efforts, not just something that might produce dividends down the road?

Coté: Yup, immediate change and not just the offer of a better life a year or two later. It’s not surprising that guys who live on the streets day by day, intent on their next meal or night’s sleep, lack executive function.

Olasky: They stop relying on government payments?

Coté: The first day of the month, when entitlement checks come, is the worst day of the month. More ambulance runs, more beat-ups, and more robberies.

Olasky: But at Step 13 people work and save?

Coté: They go from a dorm to a single room, and if they’re doing well, I’ve made an agreement with the bank that they can get a bank account and checking account on my recommendation. They can also get a credit card with $500 secured so they can start building up their credit. I have them pull up their credit rating and it’s terrible.

Olasky: What do you say to those who want to help the homeless by giving them money?

Coté: First of all, the word “homeless” is a generic term. Some are physically disabled, mentally disabled, people who have lost their jobs and apartments. Some are lazy.…They’re out there using you and they laugh at you.

Olasky: Really?

Coté: I’ve been around the campfires where they brag about it: “I thought she was going to give me $5 and she gave me $15.” It’s a game. Especially during the holidays, if you give someone a $5 or $10 bill and they go buy two bottles of Mad Dog…

Olasky: Mogen David wine…

Coté: Right. They’ll get drunk, get hit by a car, or maybe freeze to death.

Olasky: But some people truly need help, right?

Coté: Truly, especially now. You have the new breed: You see a man and a woman with two children who have been working for 10 or 15 years, no place to go, and they see drunks getting free housing, through Housing First.

Olasky: You don’t like the federal program’s idea that the street environment leads to drinking and drugging, and if you take them off the street they’ll stop.

Coté: Rich people get cranky when they go to Starbucks with out-of-town guests and see someone bathing in the Platte River, another one urinating on their car, a guy sleeping on the porch — so they get them off the street and don’t care if they’re fixed or not.

Olasky: Some say you’re mean-spirited?

Coté: Sure, because I don’t want to give them an apartment for nothing, but any system that takes responsibility away from a capable person dehumanizes that person, and God didn’t mean it to be that way.

What I learned from Bob helped me to understand the long debate among Christians as to how those with God-given means should help those stuck in mean lives. While researching poverty and abortion at the Library of Congress from 1989 through 1991, I occasionally walked half a mile to the Gospel Mission. There, late in the afternoon, homeless men checked in and washed off dirt. Staff members then served them dinner and ushered them into a required evangelistic service.

I appreciated the Gospel Mission’s intentions, and was sorry to hear about its close about a decade ago. But facts are facts: Some men slept through the preaching and drunkenly sung hymns. After that came quiet time and lights out. Early the next morning, servers slung hash and then slung the destitute onto the streets. It was like that in New York, Chicago, and other cities I visited. The common practice among Christian shelters was to let people in at five o’clock or so, preach at them, feed them, bed them down, feed them at seven and thrust them out on the streets. There was, and is, a better way — and Easter points us to it.