Whose job is it to address homelessness in Minneapolis?

In the same month Minneapolis faced continued scrutiny over its response to city homeless encampments, Hennepin County was recognized for its preemptive response to challenges people face before they become unhoused in a documentary by national nonprofit Invisible People. 

Nationally, the rate of unsheltered homelessness is about 1 in 1,300 people, according to David Hewitt, Hennepin County manager for housing security. In Hennepin County, however, the rate of homelessness is about 1 in 2,700 people, less than half the national average. This was one of the major data points recognized in the documentary titled “America Can End Homelessness: Hennepin County Proved It’s Possible” posted to YouTube by Invisible people on Sept. 27. 

Meanwhile, the conversation happening within the city of Minneapolis is very different. In December, the Minneapolis City Council passed an ordinance declaring unsheltered homelessness a public health emergency. Since then, council members have continued to cite rises in the number of unhoused individuals sleeping outside. For example, during a Sept. 19 meeting, council Vice President Aisha Chughtai, who chairs the budget and finance committee, said there has been about a 17% increase in homelessness in Minneapolis since this time last year. 

At the same meeting, members passed three major ordinances addressing housing and homelessness: a $1.5 million grant for Agate Housing, an ordinance requiring increased data on the impacts of the encampment evictions and responses, and an ordinance that increases pre-eviction filing notices from 14 days to 30 days. 

Tackling the problem of homelessness and reducing the number of people sleeping outside is a multifaceted issue with many cogs turning at various levels of governance, philanthropy and public/private partnerships. 

For Minneapolis, here’s a quick look at who’s working on what between the city, county, nonprofits and the private sector to tackle this issue:

The numbers in context

Each January, Hennepin County conducts an annual count of individuals identified to be sleeping outside as part of a federally mandated count conducted in every community across the country. This count has been happening every year since 2005. 

January 2020: Before the pandemic, Hennepin County counted 642 people sleeping outside

2021: No count was conducted because of the pandemic

2022: 487 people sleeping outside

2023: 469 people sleeping outside

2024: 496 people sleeping outside

So, while the overall count has increased over the last three years, it has technically decreased since prior to the pandemic, though Hewitt noted that this count only represents a snapshot and not breadth of this number throughout the year. 

“And to be clear, I don’t think it means there isn’t a crisis,” Hewitt said. “I think a single person sleeping outside is a crisis. One person outside is one too many.”

The role of the county

County officials and community workers have prioritized working on prevention through early intervention. 

Unique compared to most areas across the country, Hennepin County invested almost 40% of its pandemic recovery funds into homelessness and housing, Hewitt said. 

“And those were discretionary funds that could have gone to any county function, but this is where we felt we could have the most beneficial impact for our community, both immediate and long term,” Hewitt said.  

The documentary by Invisible People focuses on how these investments impacted outcomes for unhoused people in the area. 

What do those outcomes look like? Well, the number of people exiting homelessness to permanent housing has actually increased by 57%. The county’s Homeless to Housing team, a team of 58 county staffers, has housed 917 people since November 2021 with a 94% retention rate. And that’s just through that team’s efforts. Last year, 2,171 individuals, including those helped by the county team, moved directly from unsheltered or sheltered settings into permanent housing.

The goal of the county’s approach has been to prevent evictions. In the 2024 funding round, the county awarded $17 million to create or preserve 1,500 units of affordable housing, with 40% of those units affordable to people with incomes at 30% or less of the area median income. Through this and other initiatives, the county provided emergency rental assistance to more than 2,000 households, with fewer than 2% of those households entering homelessness.

While Hewitt emphasized, again, that anyone living outside is a crisis, he said it is true that the area has seen significant improvements. 

It’s easy to forget how things have changed since the pandemic, he noted. For example, in 2020, there was an encampment in Powderhorn Park with over 600 tents, and another encampment on the Greenway with over 100 tents, Hewitt noted. Currently, the total number of tents across all encampments is around 150-200, which is lower than the 2020 levels.

The county is facing a $30 million gap in its proposed 2025 human services budget to sustain the expanded shelter, case management, and other homelessness services funded by pandemic relief dollars.

The role of the city 

The role of the city when addressing homelessness is quite front-facing. Specifically, the city is charged with the dispersal of encampments. 

Enrique Velasquez, director of regulatory services for Minneapolis, oversees the city’s homeless response unit. The city’s approach to addressing homelessness involves community reporting of encampments, which are then evaluated based on property type and location, he said. The process works differently depending on if an encampment is on land owned by the city, a private company or individual, or other entities like the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT).

Related: Why is there a fence blocking a Minneapolis sidewalk under I-35W? 

The process to disperse encampments involves multiple departments, including the police, he noted. 

This unit also works closely with the county, nonprofits and the private sector to find housing and funding to address a growing need for affordable housing, Velasquez said. 

“It takes every sector, public sector, private sector, nonprofit, NGOs, it’s gonna take all of us to find a sustainable solution,” he said. 

The role of nonprofits 

The city recently passed a $1.5 million grant to Agate Housing’s shelter and transitional home, a 137-bed shelter at 510 S. 8th St. This was matched, per the requirement that the grant be unlocked, by an anonymous donor. However, there was contention over if it was appropriate to reallocate funds the way the council did to make this possible. 

But this is an example of the nonprofit sector’s role in helping address homelessness. It’s also an example of the challenge facing many nonprofits across the state and country as leaders say they’re facing limited resources available to compensate for rising demand for services.  

The pandemic and its aftermath have posed a heightened challenge for shelters across the Twin Cities, Virginia Brown, vice president of external relations for the nonprofit organization, told MinnPost last week. Not only has there been a struggle to maintain funding streams, more people are becoming unhoused and straining the region’s existing resources. And infrastructure is aging, as is the case for the 510 Agate building.

Since the pandemic, other shelters have come online to help provide resources and low-barrier housing to people. This includes Avivo Village, a 100-unit tiny dwelling shelter and one of the county’s lowest barrier shelters. In Avivo’s case, this means people can come and go as they please. There’s no curfew. 

A key to the success of places like Avivo is access to resources to find permanent housing. In its recent push to focus on moving people into permanent housing, the county identified that it needed to double down on providing case management where people needed it most within the community. Case managers work to get people out of shelters or out of outdoor encampment and into permanent housing. 

The county doubled down with nonprofit partners to build out case management capacity but also built out its own team to go into shelters, encampments and other outdoor unhoused settings to help house people. 

This didn’t really exist before the pandemic, Hewitt said, noting one shelter program had a 1 to 80 case management ratio. Now, 75% or shelters are open 24/7 so people can stay during the day to work with case managers. 

The role of for-profits

Public-private partnerships happen most noticeably in development of affordable and deeply affordable housing, especially as housing costs rise drastically across the nation. 

There are also cases where private support networks partner with governing bodies to provide joint funding to nonprofit projects. For example, Catholic Charities Endeavors, a supportive housing program that began in 2019 and opened in 2022, rehabbed a nursing home through a unique public, private partnership with Hennepin County. This location specifically provides respite care for people recovering from surgery with nurses on site to assist them.

The project was only possible through a total of $75 million in investments from public and private entities including public investments from Hennepin County, Minnesota Housing Finance Agency and the City of Minneapolis and Minneapolis Public Housing Authority; and private investments from donors like the Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation and Mary and Gene Frey, as well as the pro bono development by Dominium. Sunrise Banks and U.S. Bank also contributed new market tax credits for the project.

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