Some of them are insane. Many are never sober. Long ago, they made Corktown their home. And a lot of people here wish they would just go away.

Here they were, the neighborhood’s homeless people, gathered once again at Manna Community Meals, a soup kitchen in the basement of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Corktown, eating free soup and sandwiches. Some lingered long after their meal was eaten, standing in clusters, making small talk with each other before heading out to wander the streets alone.

7 short stories about Corktown

“They don’t have a lot of people they can talk to during the day, so this is a social place for them, where they can connect with other people and feel comfortable,” said Marianne Arbogast, 62. For almost four decades she's run this soup kitchen, which is open five mornings each week. “They’re ignored or pushed away wherever they go. There are just so few places where they feel like they’re welcome, and I think that’s something that we can do. It’s a really important thing for everyone to feel like they belong somewhere.”

Father Tom Lumpkin, seated, supervises the free morning meal at Manna Community Meals soup kitchen in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood, on Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2018. Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press

Next to her, sitting serenely on a stool against the wall, was Father Tom Lumpkin watching over them all. This is his flock. And in more ways than just his title, he is their father.

“He’s the best man. I love him to death,” said Darryl Dudley, 57, who’s homeless. “He walks like Jesus walks. He helps the community more than anyone else.”

Father Tom’s the one who feeds them and gives them money when they need it, the one who defends them when people complain how irritating their presence is, the one who listens to them when nobody else will. The one who treats them like people. And because of that, the homeless are fiercely loyal to him.

Out of house and home The homeless of Corktown don’t have houses, but Father Tom Lumpkin still thinks this is their home. And he hopes they can stay after Ford arrives. Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press

“One time a guy knocked Father Tom down, and Father Tom had to get up off the floor and throw himself on top of this guy to keep people from stomping the lights out of this guy,” said Dave Odom, 63, a once-homeless veteran who now comes to the soup kitchen to help out. “Everybody out here knows him, and everybody would take a bullet for him.”

You’d never guess by the small, thin, 79-year-old priest’s calm demeanor that just moments before he’d stepped in to break up a fight that began when a mentally ill woman who has a habit of speaking loudly to herself began shouting too energetically for one man’s liking, and that man shouted back, and she reacted by picking up a metal folding chair and trying to smash him with it. Father Tom approached her, she calmed down in response to a few quiet words from him, and he convinced her to leave peacefully.

“I would say easily half the people here have significant mental health issues,” he said. “Some of them, it’s more obvious than others. And it’s probably also a factor that, even if they have family, they probably can’t stand to have them in the house.”

Show caption Hide caption Fletcher Harrell of Detroit rests on a table outside of St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood on Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2018. He and... Fletcher Harrell of Detroit rests on a table outside of St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood on Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2018. He and a few dozen others had just eaten a free meal at Manna Community Meals soup kitchen in the basement of the church. Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press

A lot of people can’t stand to have them in the neighborhood, either.

Now that Ford Motor Co. is moving in, bringing up to 5,000 employees and potentially a ripple effect of secondary economic development, some people here think the homeless and their services are better off somewhere else in the city. Who needs bums loitering outside the trendy restaurants and bars along Michigan Avenue, scaring off customers? Why should residents have to tolerate crazy people roaming the blocks near their houses?

Father Tom saw this hostility before, about a decade ago, when an earlier wave of new residents tried to get the soup kitchen closed. The anti-homeless sentiment climaxed with a resident beating a homeless man with a baseball bat.

But the priest thinks that poor and homeless people, along with the organizations that serve them, have as much right to be in this neighborhood as the hipsters and the Ford people and anyone else. After all, they were here first.

“The people that we know as homeless are not as transient as homelessness may seem,” Father Tom said. “They do not have a room or a building to stay in, but a lot of the guys that are homeless that we see are familiar with this neighborhood. This is where they’re homeless, and it would be displacing them to go to another place in the city. I think that’s significant. This is their home in a way, even though they’re homeless.”

* * *

“I’m going to tell you more than you probably want to know,” the priest said to the four young, well-dressed students from a local Catholic high school. They were at the soup kitchen that morning, helping feed the homeless as part of their school’s service requirement. At the end of each morning, Father Tom gathers volunteers like them and distills his life’s work into a short speech.

He told them how the soup kitchen began at this spot in 1976 because hobos from around the country would hitch rides on trains into town, jump off at the Michigan Central Station and go to the churches in the area asking for help. The churches responded by opening a soup kitchen near the train station.

He told them that many poor people are intoxicated because their existence is miserable and they want to numb themselves. “When somebody gets heavy into drugs or alcohol it’s because for one reason or another they don’t like their everyday life, and they’re doing this as a way of trying to escape from it. If you understand that, it’s not surprising that a lot of poor people get addicted.”

He told the volunteers one major thing separates them from the people they just served. “The difference between them and you is that most of the guys who come here don’t think they have any future, whereas you do.

And this, he told them, fuels their hopelessness.

“At this point in life, life has gotten narrowed down to one choice: I could get clean, I could get sober, and if I did I probably could get a job that would pay enough to have a cheap apartment in a rough area of the city … and faced with that a lot of guys say, ‘What the hell, it isn’t worth it. I’m just gonna stay high. I got nothing to live for.' '”

Father Tom wasn’t always this familiar with poor people. He grew up in a nice neighborhood in northwest Detroit, chose to become a priest and spent four years in France and Belgium as part of his studies. Postwar Europe was still in ruins, and he saw poverty he hadn’t encountered in his stable, middle-class world.

“Without even realizing it, I had lived a very sheltered life,” he said. “It really sensitized me to people not having much, to the point that in my last year of studies I was measuring my food out, I was so sensitized to people not having enough to eat.”

Someone introduced him to the progressive Catholic Worker Movement, founded in 1933 in New York City as independent pacifist communities dedicated to feeding and clothing the poor. It became his spiritual home and cemented his lifelong connection to those living in poverty.

“He’s kind of soft-spoken and slender, but he’s really one of the giants in the city,” said Father Norm Thomas, 87, the pastor of Sacred Heart Church in Eastern Market, who's known Father Tom for decades. “He’s a very, very spiritual person, but down to earth. And whenever there’s something to do with poor people or those considered on the margins of society, Tom shows up. He’s there. And sometimes just his presence — sometimes he doesn’t have to say anything, ‘cause his presence says it all. He’s kind of the real thing.”

When Father Tom returned to Michigan, he was assigned to one suburban church after another, tending to well-off parishioners. “I was very happy, but for whatever reason I just felt like I was in danger of becoming too comfortable,” he said.

He kept asking the Archdiocese of Detroit to assign him to churches in the rougher parts of the city. “I tried to make it as palatable as possible. I said, ‘You don’t have to pay me any salary. I won’t take any health insurance. I’m going to live as a poor person. Let’s just try it out for a year.’ ”

Show caption Hide caption Father Tom Lumpkin raises his hands in prayer before the Eucharist, in this case a slab of pita bread, during an informal Mass at The... Father Tom Lumpkin raises his hands in prayer before the Eucharist, in this case a slab of pita bread, during an informal Mass at The Day House, a shelter for homeless women in North Corktown, on Sunday, Sept. 9, 2018. Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press

For half a century since, he's tended to poor people by working at the soup kitchen, overseeing a homeless shelter for women, celebrating Mass every Sunday at the Wayne County Jail, holding services for the former parishioners of a closed east-side church, and living not just among the poor, but like them, too — in a small bedroom at a homeless shelter, which he outfitted like a monk’s cell with only a few religious articles, some books, a small bed and a couple photos of his deceased parents.

“The homeless guys, they teach me patience, they do,” he said. “I’m amazed sometimes at their attitudes. I will be in the soup kitchen some mornings … guys come walking by me to get the soup. You know, ‘Well, how’s it going?’ And a guy, you know, who has nothing, who is homeless, will say, ‘Oh, I’m blessed. I woke up this morning. I’m blessed.’ And ‘I fed some birds,’ ‘I helped calm down a guy who was irritated,’ ‘I’m here to eat.’ And the little they have — I get emotional about it — I’m impressed by that.”

“Some of the guys, it’s just amazing — they have what you and I consider to be nothing, and they’re ‘blessed.’ They feel blessed. But you don’t see that if all you just think of is, here’s a homeless person you see walking down the street. You don’t see some of their personalities. You have to get to know them a little bit.”

* * *

Now here comes Ford to the neighborhood, whose plans dwarf the area’s developments of the past decade or so. And if there’s a forewarning in the revitalization of other parts of the city, such as Midtown and downtown, life’s about to get tougher for homeless people in Corktown.

“I’m still processing what effect the move of Ford to the train station will have on the people I deal with,” Father Tom said. “After thinking about it, I do have a concern that … poorer people will be displaced.”

He was sitting on a sofa at Day House, the shelter for homeless women founded in 1978 in an old duplex he and a few others bought for $2,400. Once there were four people from the Catholic Worker Movement helping run this place, but over the years they moved on, leaving him solely in charge of a house full of nine women. Some were there escaping domestic violence, others were fleeing life on the streets.

Back around 2010, long before Ford’s announcement, he said, there were efforts to make the homeless in this neighborhood go elsewhere.

There was the time a resident removed all the benches from Dean Savage Park so they couldn’t sleep there at night anymore.

Father Tom Lumpkin I think this probably comes out of faith more than reason, but I think that a mixed community is a benefit to everyone,” he said. “There certainly are irritations, but I think it enlarges your vision. You see they’re not as scary as you thought they were, you know? Quote icon

There was the North Corktown resident who beat a homeless man with a baseball bat as he slept in the doorway of a local church, and was accused of trying to rope him to the back of his pickup to drag him off before neighbors caught him. Despite being charged with attempted murder, he was sentenced to mere probation.

And there were the new restaurateurs along Michigan Avenue who were fed up with the homeless in the area and brainstormed ways to get the shelters and the soup kitchen closed. They branded themselves “The Conquistadors” of all things. “Like moving into the native land here and we’re going to civilize it,” Lumpkin said of the name. “They were making a fuss.”

Now there are signs of such opposition again. After Ford’s announcement, the benches that had been in Roosevelt Park — the grassy area in front of the train station — vanished one day. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but those are the benches where some of the homeless people have long slept at night.

“People don’t want poor people in their neighborhood,” Arbogast said. “And our question is, you’re coming into their neighborhood — it’s full of people, and some have homes and some don’t. And is there a way for people to move into an area without displacing the people who are already there?”

Show caption Hide caption Father Tom Lumpkin, 79, picks up trash outside St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood on Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2018 after serving meals to... Father Tom Lumpkin, 79, picks up trash outside St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood on Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2018 after serving meals to the homeless at Manna Community Meals soup kitchen in the basement of the church. Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press

Yet not everyone in Corktown is hostile to homeless people, Father Tom insisted. After the benches were taken from Dean Savage Park, a group of residents rebuilt some of them. When that homeless man was attacked with the bat, several prominent figures from the neighborhood wrote a letter to newspapers reaffirming their support for the homeless in the area. And after the campaign by “The Conquistadors” came to light, neighbors held a meeting with them.

“They realized that … all the neighbors didn’t mind having the homeless guys be there,” the priest said. “And, I mean, it just evaporated. The opposition evaporated. They thought that the residents, their neighbors, the neighborhood that they were just moving into would also not like the homeless guys. But they didn’t. So I really admire the Corktown residents.”

Father Tom knows nobody wants homeless people roaming their neighborhood. And if someone invests money to open a restaurant in a dead part of town and homeless people use their property as a toilet or hound their customers for money, it can be frustrating. “I don’t know if I’d like it if people were defecating in my alley,” the priest admitted.

But how many times, he asks, can homeless people be shuttled from one part of the city to another? Why not set the example, he suggests, and take care of them right here in Corktown? If more people lived alongside them, he believes, they might be more inclined to help them instead of ignoring them or chasing them away. But he knows he’s advocating an ideal that few others would embrace.

“I think this probably comes out of faith more than reason, but I think that a mixed community is a benefit to everyone,” he said. “There certainly are irritations, but I think it enlarges your vision. You see they’re not as scary as you thought they were, you know? You see them, maybe if you live with them for a while, you get to know them as human beings, not just as kind of objects, homeless people as a category, not a person. And you get a deeper sense of your common humanity.”

Outside the window behind him, visible through thin, lacy curtains, was Trumbull Avenue. A homeless man walked past on the sidewalk. Moments later came a bearded hipster walking a little dog on a leash. A woman staying at Day House stood at the bus stop across the street, waiting for a ride to her new job at a drugstore. A few doors down, union workers smoked cigarettes outside Teamsters Local No. 337. For a long time, North Corktown has been one of the most diverse, integrated places in the city. And despite the big changes coming, Father Tom hopes it can still be a home to all kinds of people. Even those without a home.

“I would prefer, the best solution, the ideal solution would be that people who’ve been living here for a good portion of their life not be displaced, even as ‘better,’ more wealthy people, more affluent people are moving in,” he said. “People shouldn’t be displaced if they’re familiar and comfortable. If this is what they call home, why forcibly move them out?”