Minneapolis encampments are largely gone. Have homeless people been driven into the shadows?

Driving through the streets of south Minneapolis, the change is clear. For years, homeless encampments pinballed from one vacant lot to another. Now, they’ve largely vanished, leaving behind fenced highway underpasses and barren hillsides.

Mayor Jacob Frey credits a combination of policing and outreach for the new look of the South Side, where only a scattering of small encampments remain.

In January, Police Chief Brian O’Hara issued a special order that, in the words of a news release, “empowers” his officers to break up encampments.

But Frey said the city first had to marshal the staff needed to sweep the largest camps — some numbering more than 100 people — against protesters. That resistance included homeless people and activists. Only once the entrenched camps were gone could police consistently prevent new ones from forming, he said.

“The bottom line is, the strategies we are utilizing are working,” Frey told the Minnesota Star Tribune in a recent interview. “We have seen a dramatic reduction in unsheltered homelessness in our city.”

A number of homeless people and those who help them are skeptical that closing encampments is getting people housed, according to interviews with the Star Tribune. They say it’s pushing homelessness farther to the margins.

Volunteers Tamara Kittelson and Andy Taylor used to deliver brown-bag meals to the camps, but those they help don’t really congregate anywhere now.

Nineteen-year-old Quina Rios said she can’t pitch a tent anywhere “‘cause the cops would come and break it up.”

“We can’t even just stand somewhere,” she said. “A transit or cop car will come down, say ‘y’all gotta move.’ Just every time we see a cop car, everyone’s sprinting.”

Rios said she didn’t know where she would sleep that night, but she knew a few places where she could stay a few days.

“A lot of people find parking ramps, any door that’s unlocked in Minnesota,” said Tea Davis, standing with bulging tote bags near the fence of an affordable housing complex for American Indians, which she is not. “They get in apartments and then stay in laundry rooms, or they stay in the hallways, or they find vandalized abandoned houses. There’s sheds all around here, too.”

Minnesota has many resources for homelessness, Davis acknowledged. But once drugs rewire people’s brains, it seems impossible to move into an institutional shelter with rules against using. With nowhere to lay their heads, people “literally do more drugs to stay up all night,” she said.

In November, homeowner Donna Neste told the Star Tribune she confronted encampment organizers as they erected yurts across the street from her house. Armed with scissors and a steak knife, she tried to cut their tarps down. Volunteers disarmed her and pushed her off.

The police arrived 40 minutes later, advised her against taking matters into her own hands and claimed theirs were tied, Neste said. At the time, she felt the city had not prioritized the drug crisis, with its stranglehold on the chronically homeless.

The Frey administration closed 17 encampments, affecting hundreds of homeless people, in the second half of 2024, Minneapolis’ Regulatory Services Director Enrique Velazquez told the City Council last month.

The city spent more than $330,000 in total, the lion’s share going to police.

Minneapolis adopted its new approach to homelessness after Fourth Precinct Police Inspector Charlie Adams “helped illuminate” how he directs his officers to suppress tent encampments in north Minneapolis as soon as they appear, Velazquez said in an interview.

Sgt. Garrett Parten, a police spokesman, said Chief O’Hara’s approach was not influenced by input from Adams.

These days, 311 and 911 calls near south Minneapolis encampments have decreased by nearly 80%, according to the city.

Gun violence is also down, O’Hara said in a March news release in which he linked 15 fatal shootings last year to “encampment-related violence.”

“The results are clear: fewer encampments, fewer shootings, and safer neighborhoods,” he said.

The Star Tribune requested police reports for the 15 shootings and found multiple cases of encampment residents shot while in their tents or standing in public.

Frey and Velazquez stressed the compassion of the city’s approach.

While encampments were being swept last year, two outreach coordinators spread information about Hennepin County resources. The city’s outreach coordinators aren’t caseworkers, and they lack the ability to track homeless people by name and assess anyone for disability services, addiction care or housing. But they would “surveil the city and look for people,” Velazquez said.

“They are going out to every place where we know of,” he said, “doing engagement with those individuals, having a conversation, having a cup of coffee, doing different things to try and build that trust so that at some point that individual that’s experiencing unsheltered homelessness, those defenses will come down.”

Minneapolis now employs five outreach coordinators.

Comprehensive data on homelessness is hard to come by.

Minneapolis now publishes its own dataset, showing a rough count of people still living in more than a dozen micro encampments. Its methodology includes outreach coordinators visiting known camps and eyeballing the people present at the time.

Velazquez said when the dashboard figure plummeted to 21 people on April 3, the number included those city staff have found living in their cars — just seven. He could not say how many people were living in vacant buildings.

It’s unclear, when the city boasts of a rapid reduction in tents, to what extent its data encapsulates other forms of unsheltered homelessness.

Michelle Decker Gerrard and Rebecca Sales, co-directors of the Wilder Foundation’s Minnesota Homeless Study, said the wider problem of unsheltered homelessness includes people who sleep on trains and live in cars, hide in unheated cabins and condemned buildings, nap in libraries by day and walk around at night. Because some stay in overnight shelters and couch-hop with friends some of the time, it’s best to look back on where an individual slept over a month or more.

Sales said she would “love for it to be true” that Minnesota’s largest city has almost solved unsheltered homelessness.

On April 8, Hennepin County staff presented data from Minnesota’s Homeless Management Information System showing 628 people experienced unsheltered homelessness countywide over the last three months, with outreach workers managing to contact 271 in the last month.

David Hewitt, director of Housing Stability at Hennepin County, wrote: “We have historically estimated 85-90% of the unsheltered count is in Minneapolis.”

In the first week of April, all emergency shelter beds for men were reserved by midday, according to Adult Shelter Connect, the intake hotline.

Decker Gerrard said the city should be commended for championing housing development.

“But, like we said, it is so important to make sure that we’re understanding the depth and breadth of the problem and not just moving it to another spot,” she said.

Billy Pennington remained with his shopping cart full of personal effects. Mobility issues prevented him from scattering with the others.

“The aggression though, on homeless folks, has increased dramatically,” he said.

Encampment activist Nicole Mason still drives through the alleys of south Minneapolis looking for homeless people, shouting out of her van about breakfast cooking at the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center.

Along Franklin Avenue, people wore blankets in doorways, crowded bus shelters and slept in the flower bed in Aldi’s parking lot.

Over pancakes at the drop-in center, a group derided the city’s narrative.