Nonprofit Director Urges East Lansing to Expand Support for Unhoused Residents

Amid ongoing concern about a possible serial killer targeting unhoused individuals on the Lansing River Trail, the director of a Lansing-based organization that aids the area’s homeless community spoke to the East Lansing Human Rights Commission.

Kelsea Hector is the executive director of Punks with Lunch, or PWL, a local nonprofit organization that serves unhoused individuals in the Greater Lansing Area, including Ingham, Eaton and Shiawassee counties. Hector said PWL distributes around 700 to 800 lunches weekly to people experiencing homelessness, a number that is steadily increasing due to a growing need.

At Monday’s Human Rights Commission meeting, Hector recommended steps the City of East Lansing could take to support the homeless population.

Hector suggested a care model that emphasizes housing and provides resources for overdose prevention, addiction counseling and mental health services. She stressed that any real solution will be built with input from unhoused people. Hector recommended the City of East Lansing and the HRC publicly recognize the safety of unhoused people as a fundamental human rights issue and support a pause on encampment sweeps across the region.

“We go where people are,” Hector said. “Our model works because we meet people exactly where they are.”

Many unhoused people in East Lansing grew up in the city and wish to stay, Hector said, but a lack of resources and negative encounters with police are pushing them into neighboring communities like Lansing. At the same time, Lansing is still clearing encampments while local shelters operate at full capacity, and people can spend years on a waitlist before receiving public assistance they need to become housed.

Hector described a systemic Catch-22 in transition programs: individuals who have been on the streets for years may eventually receive subsidies that allow them to secure housing. However, vital support from the government and most nonprofits stop too soon once they become housed, leaving underlying issues unresolved.

“We put them in four walls, and we say ‘good luck’ and then we walk away … and we wonder why people end up back on the streets,” Hector said. According to PWL, individuals routinely return to the streets because their new environments lack community enrichment and long-term support systems.

Currently, East Lansing’s only homeless shelter, Haven House, primarily serves families rather than individuals. Through trust PWL has built within the local homeless community, PWL outreach teams conduct weekly check-ins in East Lansing, tracking displaced individuals and distributing food and supplies to a population Hector notes is very real, but increasingly less visible.

“We’ve seen people panhandling a lot in downtown East Lansing that we’ll stop and provide connections to services [and] make sure we talk to them,” Hector said.

Highlighting the realities of how unhoused individuals interact with local law enforcement, Hector shared an encounter involving an unhoused man named Gary.

“He [Gary] was in East Lansing on a scooter. He had a rotisserie chicken [in] his hand that he was eating because he did not have a plate. He had just bought it, and a police officer stopped him because someone called and told her [the officer] that someone was eating a chicken suspiciously on the side of the road,” Hector said. “She took his chicken away, she threw it in the trash, and then she took him to jail. These are the common stories that we hear. A lot of people will stay away from East Lansing because of the way that they’re treated.”

Lansing drew national attention this fall for a series of violent deaths on the River Trail that have raised concerns a possible serial killer is targeting homeless people in the area. Still, the scary circumstances have not earned the unhoused population sympathy from some.

“In reality, people keep getting swept. We have a lot of murders that have happened in the last year on the [Lansing] River Trail. We continue to see increases of community stigma and violence on our unhoused people,” Hector said. “Because of this, we’ve had people who have experienced threats on the River Trail now. There’s a group of kids going down and harassing people and saying that they’re going to be next.”