Copyright Star Tribune. I have a subscription and this story was published
with the ability to forward via email. So I'm doing so.
Advice welcome. St Paul has a somewhat similar situation with some
encampments along the Mississippi River that recently were "cleared." - And
we have a huge waiting list for truly affordable housing.
Margaret Hastings, Paul Williams and Sue Watlow Phillips have worked on
these issues for decades. Khalique Rogers
<https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2020/02/10/davis-a-hidden-problem-youth-homelessness?fbclid=IwAR0rpjQqQqT1-3E7cst6CrwLL168PjX6Y8Rl0JFk0SLjLa0RepEi13u_eK0>
experienced homeless as a young man, has now graduated from St Paul
College, is close to graduating from Univ of Mn, and helped convince Mn
Legislature to allocate $20 million per year for the next 6 years to help
reduce homelessness being experienced by children, youth and families.
These funds will be distributed on a formula basis through counties
starting in 2023.
Special salute to them, their insights, and hard work.
Advice welcome,
Thanks Joe Nathan, St Paul, co-convenor, United for Action: Housing for
Youth and Families
<https://www.facebook.com/United-for-Action-Housing-for-Youth-and-Families-119119812824115>
A Minneapolis community's relentless struggle with homelessness
Phillips residents have seen so much homelessness in recent years that many
have a nuanced grasp of the challenge, even as long-term solutions remain
elusive.
*By Susan Du <https://www.startribune.com/susan-du/6370761/> Star Tribune
AUGUST 13, 2022 — 6:00PM
:
Connie Galt has lived in Phillips more than 50 years and refuses to move
despite her son's pleas.
Twice homeless camps have appeared across the south Minneapolis alley from
where Galt lives. Strangers linger on her front porch in the daytime and
have sex on the sidewalk late at night. A cryptic message scrawled on the
neighbor's garage door read, "I will kill you in your dreams." It
frightened her.
"I'm 81 and I am reluctant to get into any sort of scrape with anybody. I'm
not one of the people that go out and scream," said Galt. "I just want it
to stop. I think it must be miserable for them. I would not want to be
homeless. But I can't support them. I'm retired. I live on Social Security."
Encampments have become endemic to the working-class Phillips community,
occasionally spilling into neighboring yards and the storefronts of small
businesses. When friction between housed and unhoused boils over, the city
evicts, the bulk of the camp regroups nearby, and the long-term solutions
to everybody's problems remain out of reach.
Phillips neighbors feel frustrated and helpless. Some are scared to talk
about their experiences for fear of drawing the ire of encampment advocates
from outside the community.
St. Paul's Lutheran Church on 15th Avenue decided as a congregation to
offer public access to its water spigot this summer, unable to bear the
thought of people living on the street without water. But that's created an
uptick in people using drugs and having sex behind the building — a dilemma
for their youth summer camp, said Pastor Hierald Osorto.
"I serve a predominantly Latino congregation, and they love the Phillips
neighborhood. They constantly remind me that we don't want to be this
problem that the world continually perceives to be fixed," he said. "We
want to be able to support in the best way, but the level of fear and
insecurity that we're now experiencing makes it hard to make sense of how
to do that."
One day after city crews swept a crowded tent city from 28th Street and
14th Avenue, another one emerged just 400 feet east, at 29th Street and
Bloomington Avenue beside the Midtown Greenway.
It's a maze of about 40 tents staked in rows, comprising many of the same
people displaced from the last encampment after neighbors blamed them for a
three-house inferno on July 20. The subsequent investigation found that the
fire started inside the vacant house at 2817 14th Av. S., but because its
total collapse prevented a detailed examination, the cause remains
undetermined.
*A whack-a-mole response*
"We've been playing whack-a-mole," said Mike Goze of the American Indian
Community Development Corporation, which operates the Homeward Bound
emergency shelter and a detox center. "We've been doing it since 2019, and
it hasn't worked. In fact, it's created more homeless."
Last legislative session, AICDC requested $6.5 million to acquire a 30-bed
residential treatment facility with outdoor space for ceremonies and a
sweat lodge. Despite a $9.2 billion budget surplus, legislators could not
agree to a bonding bill.
Goze believes the principle that getting people housed first allows them to
better tackle other issues like mental health and employability. But he
also views addiction as the primary cause of chronic homelessness in his
community, with expensive habits that cost more than $100 a day to maintain
driving burglaries and the sexual exploitation of Indigenous women.
How a low-income community is supposed to take on the opioid epidemic is an
open-ended question.
Janessa Banks has lived in a tent at 29th and Bloomington going on three
weeks. She keeps to herself, carrying everything she owns in two bags slung
over each arm when she goes on walks through the alleys. At age 31, she has
been homeless since 18, she said, addiction thwarting her ability to
maintain stable housing and custody of her two sons.
She needs "somebody that can explain things to me and show me where to go
and what to do," Banks said.
Street outreach workers cycle through, offering assessments as the first
step to matching individuals with suitable housing.
Jade Gale said she took the initiative of reaching out to a caseworker last
month and was soon placed in an apartment. She packed her belongings the
morning of Aug. 4, ecstatic for her intake appointment that afternoon.
"I feel like I'm at the end of my addiction," said Gale, who aims to
reunite with her three sons. "I'm ready. Nothing can get in between having
my apartment and getting my kids back."
For Banks, the encampment provides a helpful respite and safety in numbers.
Gale credits a skinny, curly-haired man everyone calls "King" — Deanthony
Barnes — with keeping the peace and coordinating donations.
King, who has moved from camp to camp following multiple evictions, said he
prefers to "live free," untethered to a 9-5 job, owing no taxes.
As de facto leader, King picks up needles and deals with neighbors who show
up looking for missing items. Sometimes he manages to track down all or
parts of bikes and other items for them.
"Violence comes to us too, and we have to just deal with it," King said.
"We're not the ones stealing cars and stuff like that. We have to deal with
that shit, pulling up to the camp, making us look bad, bringing the heat."
*No easy fix*
Mahamed Cali, the founder of Somali American Radio and the manager of
Madina Mall on 13th Avenue, periodically goes to the encampment on behalf
of shoppers who have had wallets stolen out of their cars. He tries to
relate to camp residents, telling them how his 35 small-business owners are
refugees of war.
"We see the conflict with them. Some people are not happy with what some
other people are doing," Cali said. "When we show them [the security
footage], they say, 'We can get that for you, please give us time.'"
The business owners don't want to fight over shoplifting, but customers are
dwindling, Cali said.
When Vinny Dionne, co-director of the American Indian Movement Patrol,
drives through Phillips, he constantly runs into old friends struggling
with addiction, which reminds him of all the loved ones he's lost to
overdoses.
Dionne grew up in Little Earth and worked there as an adult, juggling
several jobs while trying to manage pain from a knee injury. Prescription
painkillers led to an opioid dependence that led to meth. He alienated
himself from positive relationships and gravitated toward other addicts,
losing his job, selling drugs to buy drugs and eventually serving six years
in prison.
Treatment cleared his mind. He dreamt of giving back to the community, but
when he got out in 2019, the explosion of addiction in the community came
as a heartbreaking shock.
For the past two years, he's worked as a street outreach worker with AICDC,
offering blankets, addiction treatment assessments and housing referrals. A
lot of the people he visits in the streets are people he's known for a long
time.
"The main thing I see honestly is a lot of people stuck in active
addiction, and they're not ready yet," Dionne said. "What I needed for me
personally was to get off drugs, and after that I was able to start
changing my life."
Encampment sweeps complicate his job as an outreach worker because they
scatter his clients, making them harder to serve. But as a father of three
who also lives in Phillips, he resents the drug dealers who follow camps,
and the needles everywhere.
"It's not an easy fix because I get it from both sides," Dionne said.
"There are good people there, and those are the ones I'm always trying to
do my best to help, but there's also a criminal element that's in
encampments, selling drugs and preying off our people."
On June 30, City Council Members Jason Chavez and Aisha Chughtai issued a
notice of intent to develop an encampment response policy
<https://lims.minneapolismn.gov/File/2022-00700> Details have yet to come.
*Susan Du* covers the city of Minneapolis for the Star Tribune.
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