New encampment at Minneapolis Wall of Forgotten Natives a statement against sweeps

Four years after its closure, Minneapolis' most visible homeless encampment has returned to a stretch of Hwy. 55 near the East Phillips neighborhood — filling up with residents who say they've been chased out of other encampments around the city.

The Wall of Forgotten Natives opened in 2018, attracting unsheltered people from across the city and beyond.

Coordinated efforts by multiple agencies housed enough of the camp's occupants that it was disbanded in 2019. But in the years since, encampments spread across Minneapolis, along with local government efforts to shut them down and relocate residents. It's a process that's frustrated both unsheltered people — including many who came and went from a news conference at the Wall of Forgotten Natives — and neighbors in areas where encampments have been persistent.

"When you think about it, in five years, what have we done? We've literally gone around in a … circle," said Keiji Narikawa, who does addiction outreach to homeless friends and relatives around Little Earth of United Tribes.

The challenges of addressing the encampments and assisting their residents have fallen to multiple government agencies. The Hwy. 55 encampment, along with others along highways elsewhere in Minneapolis, sits on land managed by MnDOT. But when MnDOT closes camps on its property, it displaces people onto city land and vice versa, leading to complaints among neighbors of government agencies pushing the problem on each other rather than working together to find lasting solutions.

In a statement, the office of Mayor Jacob Frey, who promised to end chronic homelessness within five years if elected mayor in 2017, said:

"Since the start of his public service career, one of Mayor Frey's top priorities has been affordable housing. Under his leadership, the City of Minneapolis has invested record amounts of money and staff resources into building and sustaining affordable housing programs and initiatives — in addition to partnering with Hennepin County on continuing to build out our response to homelessness."

In a phone call, Frey highlighted that his proposed budget for next year provides for the city's health department to operate a bus that will circulate around the city's encampments and connect occupants to treatment and housing resources. He hinted that announcements will come next week about additional investments in opioid response.

"This is the kind of thing that we want to be doing. We're constantly looking at best practices from other cities around the country," the mayor said.

The new wall formed Thursday after city crews closed encampments at the nearby Bessemer apartments near Franklin and Cedar avenues. Fencing erected there pushed unsheltered people back to the strip of MnDOT land along the highway. A recent count totaled 61 tents, holding roughly 130 people, said organizer Nicole Mason.

Mason and a rotation of other Native community leaders are keeping watch at the entrance to the camp, where a sign painted Monday morning read, "Five Years Still Here." They said they're trying to keep away drug dealers, traffickers and others who tend to prey on homeless people.

"Every time the city evicts, relatives go missing," said Mason. "The services that are offered are undercut by the evictions. Shelter does not help our people because there's not enough room, and shelters can be violent and dangerous."

Tents have periodically returned to the encampment over the years, but organizers of its newest iteration say they are taking a stand. They're asking the city to stop clearing encampments without providing dignified housing, addiction treatment and replication of low-barrier programs that have been well-received by the homeless community, such as the Avivo indoor tiny-home village.

City officials frequently cite record construction of affordable housing under the 2040 Comprehensive Plan as well as investments in public housing, the Stable Homes Stable Schools program for homeless students and Minneapolis Homes program to increase minority homeownership as steps it has taken to fight homelessness.

The city has taken a no-tolerance approach to encampments, with officials this spring explaining they will not provide sanitation services like toilets, handwashing stations and trash pickup for fear of making them a more permanent fixture.

While Hennepin County and nonprofit outreach workers routinely visit camps to connect their occupants with supportive housing and treatment, outreach organizations have blamed the city's process of clearing encampments for making it harder to gain clients' trust and locate them when apartments become available.

No peace for neighborhoods

Where East 31st Street crosses beneath the I-35W bridge in the Central community, encampments tend to reappear on MnDOT land as well as across the street on the city boulevard each time they're cleared. Neighbors near the intersection are at their wit's end with the needles, trash, human refuse, and car and garage break-ins that accompany people seeking cash to feed powerful addictions.

Seventeen-year-old Karen Chauca said she resents the fact that her parents had to install security cameras all over their house and get a large dog "just to feel safe in our neighborhood, and we still don't feel safe at all."

Two weeks ago MnDOT put up a fence to prevent people from sleeping under the bridge. As a result, many of the camp's occupants migrated a few blocks north to the Wells Fargo campus in Phillips West.

Seeing the same people living in miserable conditions, displaced from one end of the neighborhood to the other, has not brought peace, a group of homeowners gathered on the 3100 block of 3rd Avenue told the Star Tribune earlier this month.

"While I'm happy that the encampment is not here and it's just two blocks further, it's just somebody else's problem," said Dragan Čolaković. Neighbors have been unsuccessful trying to get a meeting with the mayor, he said.

Neighbors say they've also attempted to talk other staff members at the city, MnDOT, the Minneapolis Police Department, 311 and their area crime prevention specialist without much success.

David Peel, who has lived in the neighborhood 31 years, said he's moving to Grand Rapids, Mich., because of what he views as the failure of city leadership to address homelessness and addiction in tandem as a public health issue.

"[Frey is] abdicating the responsibility of the city and pushing it onto the property owners," he said.

Back to the beginning

On Monday morning, Vinny Dionne of the American Indian Community Development Corporation led a crew of residents of the Homeward Bound homeless shelter for Native Americans as they picked up litter around the Wall of Forgotten Natives. There are free showers at the trailer behind the Anishinabe Wakiagun building, he told newcomers.

Kat Yanez, who stayed at the original wall in 2018 with her husband, Earl Monchamp has returned to pitch another tent. Living rough became harder after Monchamp died of an overdose in 2019, she said.

Yanez said she hasn't gotten off the streets yet because she doesn't know how to find subsidized housing on her own, and an unreliable phone makes it difficult to keep in touch with the county's housing outreach workers. Yet emergency shelters feel like "confinement" and "assimilation" to her.

"I think a lot of people start to shut down and not care about their lives," she said. "Because this is not where somebody should be, anywhere outside like this."