One of the largest and most visible homeless settlements ever seen in Minnesota is finally getting smaller, as public agencies intensify their push to find people housing ahead of a deadline for clearing out the site.
Hennepin County officials and nonprofits said Saturday that more than 60 people, including individuals and families, have moved out of the large homeless camp along Hiawatha Avenue and into their own homes or apartments in the past three months. On Friday alone, nearly two dozen people moved into their own homes — the largest one-day exodus from the camp since large numbers of homeless began arriving in late summer.
A sprawling tent city that in September was the temporary home of approximately 300 people has shrunk by more than half and now has fewer than 120 homeless inhabitants, county officials estimate. Local agencies and nonprofits plan to close down the encampment and move the remaining residents to a new, temporary shelter — consisting of three large, heated tents with support services — by mid-December. The Minneapolis City Council approved $1.5 million for the new shelter, which is being constructed nearby on land owned by the Red Lake Nation.
Coordinated effort
The recent advances in finding people housing are largely the result of a massive and highly coordinated campaign to bring social services to the camp, located on a narrow strip of land near the Little Earth housing project. Since late August, city, county and American Indian agencies have organized teams of outreach workers to talk to residents, connect them with landlords and sign them up for state housing assistance.
"This shows that our partnerships are working, and we are achieving really significant results for an extremely vulnerable group of people," said David Hewitt, director of the Hennepin County Office to End Homelessness. "It's still an ongoing challenge but happily, in many cases, people are moving into stable housing."
From the beginning, Minneapolis city and Indian leaders made a strategic decision to embrace the encampment as part of a wider effort to combat homelessness, and to avoid punitive measures that would only drive people further into the shadows.
In other major cities, officials have responded to large homeless camps with sweeps, raids, arrests and ticketing. Forced dispersals of camps only make the problem worse, advocates argue, causing people to scatter and become more isolated from their families and support networks. Sweeps also tend to destroy the relationships that outreach workers build with camp residents, creating a further barrier to finding permanent housing, according to a 2016 study by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.
"We said from the beginning that everyone here is family and we're not going to leave anyone behind," said Maren Hardy, health services coordinator with the American Indian Community Development Corp., which operates a large warming tent across from the camp.
