The Arthur Street Hotel helps people transition from living on the streets to moving into permanent housing. LPM News’ Roberto Roldan and Louisville photojournalist Jon Cherry spent several months this year reporting at Arthur Street, documenting the lives of its guests and learning about the challenges they face.
LPM’s Amina Elahi spoke with Roldan and Cherry about their project, Redefining Hospitality. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Jon, how did you learn about the Arthur Street Hotel, and why did you want to cover it?
JC: The winter of 2022 around Christmas, we had a terrible deep freeze for a couple of weeks. That led me to ask the question, “What's it like to be out on the streets during a deep freeze like this?” Which then led me to going on ride-alongs with the folks from Feed Louisville, [a nonprofit that provides meals to people experiencing homelessness]. And it was somewhere around that same time that they made the discovery that if you put people into hotels, their lives changed drastically, because now they have a place to stay and they can start working on some of the other issues when they're not dealing with the explicit trauma of being out on the streets.
Roberto, would you talk a little bit about how the story unfolded for you? You were newer to Arthur Street when you started reporting there.
RR: We knew from the start that we wanted to have this project really center around all of the folks that were living at Arthur Street. We knew that we had to narrow it down to a handful of people we thought had compelling stories. And I know it's maybe sort of a faux pas in journalism, I guess, to say that you sort of develop a real relationship with your sources. The people that we featured ended up featuring in the story were people whose housing journeys we really got invested in.
What did you learn about Louisville through working on this?
RR: There are a lot of things that I learned about my community and the community that I live in now, which is that there are a lot of systems in place that are really seemingly designed for people to fail. There are times during this project when I got really down, when you see people struggling to navigate the system, who you want to see get better, and you know that it's not their fault. It's sort of a system that is in their way. But then you sort of also come away with some hope that there are folks who genuinely care for these people and are really trying to be the helpers.
I felt that the people who are going through the housing process that you highlighted in your stories really embodied hope as well in their own ways. Why was it important to include that aspect in your storytelling?
RR: We were talking to people who had been through so much hurt and trauma, but they were in this transition of moving onto a new chapter of their lives. In the case of Bonnie and Clayton, they actually did move back into housing during the time that we spent with them. You know, there's challenges that come along with living alone, reintegrating into the larger community, but I think our portrayal of hope had a lot to do with sort of just the reality of the project, which is that people were in a more hopeful point in their lives.
JC: I think that hope is one of the essential binding materials of the human spirit in general, and it's really hard to do this kind of work without hope that the people that you're working with are going to make it out relatively unscathed at some point.
Of course, we'll continue to cover Arthur Street, but what will you be watching for from the organization, community members and of course, the people you met there?
RR: What I'll be looking forward to at Arthur Street is: How do they make it long term? Arthur Street is really unique — its priorities, its model, the people who run it — and I think all of those things are possible because of the funding model that they've had, where there has been a company or a foundation willing to foot the bill while they kind of figure out what works and what doesn't.
JC: First and foremost, the feedback that we have gotten from the community is something that I have been keeping close eye on and will continue to monitor. With that being said, I’m interested in hearing any response from city officials, from folks that make decisions about what happens in these folks’ lives on a daily basis, not just the processes for them for finding housing, but for encampment clearings or criminalization of their existence. Essentially, this new legislation living on the streets is considered illegal, essentially. So you know, what kind of pushback or feedback will we get that's based off of all of these factors combined, the reality of the situation that this piece is a response to?
