On July 30, Mayor Jacob Frey sent out a weekly update that claimed, among 0ther things, that “Under Mayor Jacob Frey’s leadership, Minneapolis is seeing meaningful progress in addressing unsheltered homelessness.“ The update went on to tout the lower costs to the City in encampment closures and a reduction in 911 and 311 calls (85% and 87% respectively) involving encampments. Overall, the Update painted a rosy picture of homelessness in Minneapolis under Mayor Frey’s leadership.
I doubt many Alley readers agree with Mayor Frey’s message. Yes, the City has cracked down on encampments, reducing many problems associated with encampments. But the problems associated with homelessness … well, those are still with us. The crackdown has simply scattered encampment dwellers to other parts of the neighborhoods. And the problems have moved with them.
I don’t need to belabor the point. Anyone who lives or works in Ventura Village, Phillips West, Midtown Phillips, or East Phillips knows how homelessness is affecting this part of the City. Homelessness hasn’t ended, but it has shifted. With the City fencing off so much of its own land, it is sending those with nowhere else to go onto private property.
I’m not sure what the Mayor thought the crackdown would accomplish, other than providing a few favorable statistics that he could trot out to bolster his own reptation. Surely he didn’t think the homeless were staying in the encampments for fun, and that they would move back into their comfortable, middle-class homes and go back to their jobs when the encampments ended. He can’t have thought that telling people to move along would solve the problems with the Coordinated Entry system to the emergency shelters and provide enough affordable housing to get everyone off the streets. Maybe he really did believe that ending the encampments would provide the stability that people need to overcome alienation from their families, addiction, a lack of income, mental health challenges, cultural trauma, and everything else that led them to the encampments to begin with.
I have invited the Mayor to come on a walking tour of the neighborhood with me so that I can show him all the people who aren’t homeless in our neighborhood. I doubt he will accept the invitation, but if so, I hope he can move from the La-La Land he seems to be living in to the real world.
by Marti Maltby, Director Peace House Community – A Place to Belong
This article originally appeared in “The Alley,” the newspaper for the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis.