Minneapolis city workers clear homeless encampment in the median of Franklin Avenue

Minneapolis city workers arrived early Tuesday to clear dozens of tents that had been staked in the median along congested East Franklin Avenue near Cedar Avenue South.

Police directed traffic as yellow-vested regulatory services workers used Bobcat loaders to scoop up a crush of bicycles, clothes and furniture into dump trucks. They encountered no protesters, a contrast with the failed effort to clear another encampment on the Near North Side in March that led to a violent clash.

The encampment at Franklin and Cedar had been growing since about July, said City Council Member Jamal Osman. Both streets are county roads, so despite constituents' daily complaints about sanitation and people wandering into traffic, the city's attorneys opined that the city couldn't evict without orders from the county, according to Osman's office.

County spokeswoman Carolyn Marinan disputed that the city needed the county's permission to close the encampment because even though the median is within the county's right of way, the county considered it a city-managed area.

"The bottom line — camping is not allowed," she wrote in an e-mail. "Minneapolis city ordinance, in particular, prohibits tents from being set up on public land."

Ultimately, the city moved to disband the camp.

"It has really created a lot of health and safety concerns," Osman said Tuesday as he oversaw the cleanup. "There have been a few shots here. It's also dangerous for the residents, who go walking in on the freeway, right here on the roads."

The encampment was adjacent to a Volunteers for America alternative school for at-risk youth, which went virtual because of the perceived risk to students from the encampment. A proliferation of drugs also posed challenges for the American Indian Community Development Corporation, which had built an affordable housing complex to serve residents of the Wall of Forgotten Natives tent city that popped up along Hiawatha Avenue three years ago.

"There's an incredible amount of needles that were left behind, and the cleanup on that is staggering," said Osman's policy aide Sean Broom.

"This ended up being a solid six-figure cost just to deliver the service tent, in the last 10 days to have folks out here, actively coming out, engaging with residents, saying, 'Hey, let's get you to county services.' "

St. Stephen's Human Services and Avivo, a nonprofit that runs a 100-room tiny home community for the homeless, sent outreach workers to help encampment residents plan their next steps.

Justin LaBeaux and Madi McLaughlin of Avivo had been working with residents of the encampment at Franklin and Cedar avenues for months, transitioning people to beds in shelters when Adult Shelter Connect, Hennepin County's shelter collaborative, tells them there's room. On Tuesday, all they could do was touch base with their connections and help them pack.

"The big thing with encampments closing is you lose track of folks, and all [of a] sudden you have to start over in the housing process," LaBeaux said. "All we can do is show up and just help, make sure folks get to keep as much of their stuff as possible and that they have dignity when they move."

A camp resident named Sistah Revalooshun smoked a cigarette as she waited for a friend to return with a pickup truck to help move her remaining property — a grill, a bike and two milk crates of loose belongings. She avoids shelters because she was sexually assaulted in one several years ago, when men were packed onto the same floor with women and children during a particularly treacherous winter night, she said. An old brain injury also makes it difficult for her to live in crowded spaces.

She's not sure where she's going next.

While she helped fellow residents throw their belongings into volunteers' awaiting vehicles at one end of the median, someone took off with her backpack and cellphone.

"Like any family dynamics, we're going to have issues, we're going to have fights, we're going to have disputes," Sistah Revalooshun said of fellow encampment residents. "But we're all we got. We're all we got."