Star Tribune
As Minneapolis officials discussed homeless camp strategies, camp residents feared closure
While the Minneapolis City Council prepared to hear a report Tuesday about the city’s response to homeless encampments, occupants of a sprawling camp in the East Phillips neighborhood of south Minneapolis began packing after getting verbal warnings of imminent closure.
For 28-year-old Ivy Elliott and her partner, Julio Cerenio, 31, that meant rolling up the tent they had staked beside the eastbound on-ramp to Hwy. 55 for nearly two years.
“The people that are here, maybe they could just allow us to stay here until we are able to get into housing, and then we’ll all slowly just move out of here,” Elliott said.
The camp at E. 24th Street and Cedar Avenue, on Minnesota Department of Transportation property, was the latest to resurge in the footprint of the Wall of Forgotten Natives encampment over the last five years. It has grown from a handful of tents to more than a dozen over the past two months and had an estimated 50 occupants at its height.
It was not closed Tuesday. But another Minneapolis encampment of fewer than 10 people, near Bassett Creek and Cedar Lake Road on city and railroad property, was closed after its occupants were notified Friday.
Volunteer Nicole Perez frequently visits the camp at 24th and Cedar, just on the other side of the sound wall from Little Earth of United Tribes where she lives. In East Phillips, chronic homelessness is tied to generational trauma and addiction, she said.
“People think a lot of people want to be out here,” Perez said. “There’s services to get them into treatment, outreach workers that take them to detox and this treatment center and that treatment center.
“What people don’t realize is that addiction is a lonely place. … On top of that, a lot of people have burned bridges, and so it’s like they don’t have family.”
Elliott and Cerenio said they were used to moving from one encampment to another. Despite harsh winters, they’ve avoided emergency shelters because they want to stay together and they chafe under the rules that shelters impose. They said they have a caseworker through Hennepin County who is trying to find them an apartment they can hold down.
Cerenio said they may try to move across the street to East Phillips Park. If they got kicked out there, they would try to reconvene with their former neighbors from 24th and Cedar elsewhere in the area in hopes that the number of residents would forestall the next closure.
Report on encampments
Meanwhile at City Hall on Tuesday, a cross-departmental team of city officials made a presentation on overall encampment strategies and the costs of closing them, in response to questions the City Council asked in November.
Regulatory Services Director Saray Garnett-Hochuli showed photos from recently closed encampments, including stockpiles of bikes and propane tanks as well as three rifles confiscated from a heavily populated camp that formed at E. 28th Street and Bloomington Avenue last summer.
She said the city will not supply encampments with handwashing stations or other sanitation services because doing so conflicts with an ordinance prohibiting camps and “normalizes” camps.
“Encampments are a danger to people occupying them and the surrounding communities — whether from drugs and human trafficking, property damage, rodent infestation, defecation in public spaces, or used needles left on the sidewalks and in our parks,” Garnett-Hochuli said. “Romanticizing homelessness encampments does not save lives, but a collaboration in the community can.”
Enrique Velazquez, the city’s director of Inspection Services, highlighted four encampments that have cost the city $40,000 to $256,000 to close, not counting financial impacts on the surrounding neighborhoods, private business owners and homeowners who may be cited if they don’t stop camps from spilling onto their properties.
Budget Director Amelia Cruver said the biggest variable in cost was the number of police officers needed, which Minneapolis Police Lt. Troy Carlson said depended on threats of potentially violent protests.
Garnett-Hochuli recommended moving the city’s response from “reactive” enforcement to addressing the root causes of homelessness with the help of the Health Department, which recently got a new commissioner: Damōn Chaplin, former co-chair of the Greater New Bedford Opioid Task Force in New Bedford, Mass.
Some City Council members criticized Tuesday’s report, grilling staffers for several hours about how closing encampments reduces homelessness and why the presentation didn’t include the experiences of homeless people who have lost documentation and connections with housing caseworkers in the process of moving from one camp to another.
“I don’t know a single person in the city who finds the conditions that we see in the encampments ‘romantic,'” said Council Member Jeremiah Ellison, urging staff members not to evade accountability as Minneapolis residents ask about the effectiveness of the city’s approach.
Council Member Robin Wonsley said the city’s policies have not been humane.
“We’ve seen many city leaders defer responsibility to everyone else but themselves, and it’s been very clear the public, housing organizations and unhoused residents themselves have asked this body to step in and stop brutal evictions that have shown to be completely ineffective in everything except traumatizing people,” she said.
The departure of several council members eventually forced Committee of the Whole Chair Linea Palmisano to adjourn the meeting before its agenda could be completed.
Star Tribune
Watch Moorhead collide with Class 2A, Section 7 rival Elk River in Star Tribune Game of the Week
NSPN.tv’s livestream of Saturday’s high school boys hockey showdown, which will impact section seeding, begins at 7 p.m. on startribune.com.
Read the original article
Star Tribune
Downtown Minneapolis’ Wells Fargo Center sells to trio of investor groups
“Pairing state-of-the-art amenities with timeless design, the Wells Fargo Center is well-positioned to attract tenants seeking a premier building in a dynamic urban environment,” the release said.
The overall office vacancy rate for downtown Minneapolis at the end of the third quarter was 23.4%, up a percentage point from the same quarter a year ago, according to brokerage firm Colliers.
These vacancies, far higher than before the pandemic, are forcing some building owners to sell at significantly discounted prices. In September, a pair of office towers known as the Forum sold for $6.5 million, a more than 90% discount from to 2019, when they sold for nearly $74 million.
Star Tribune
Homeless Memorial March participants brave cold in Minneapolis to honor those who died
After returning to the church from the march, attendees took turns placing their signs with the names of people who died at the altar with hundreds of candles. They listened while speakers including Rev. DeWayne Davis, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, Simpson program manager Mary Gallini and others. Gov. Tim Walz did not attend, but Flanagan attended on his behalf to present an official proclamation of Dec. 12 being known as “Minnesota Homeless Memorial Day.”
Some speakers such as Cathy ten Broeke, assistant commissioner of the Minnesota Interagency Council on Homelessness, said they hope the memorial won’t be necessary in the future if there is work done to end homelessness.
“They are all of our relatives, and I hope that we recommit ourselves tonight to the work to ensure that we no longer have to have a memorial service remembering any one of our relatives experiencing homelessness when they die,” she said.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings