Homelessness in Minnesota rose 10% from 2023 to 2024, while the national average increased about 18%, according to the 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report.
The Hennepin County Point in Time (PIT) Count, a community survey meant to determine the breadth of homelessness, reported that the county found about 3,370 people staying in shelters and about 500 experiencing homelessness in 2024.
Among the increase in homelessness locally was a spike in families experiencing homelessness, leading to an increase in shelter usage, according to the PIT count. Shelter use in the county increased by around 30% in 2024 and about 79% in 2023.
Council Member Elliott Payne (Ward 1) said Minneapolis is fighting this increase with its Housing First program, which helps people get stable housing and then provides additional help for issues like mental health or outstanding warrants.
Payne said a problem with Minneapolis’ current policy of evicting encampments is that when outreach workers in the Homeless Management Information System build trust with homeless people and their encampment gets evicted, they are often unable to find that person.
“As a unit becomes available for housing or a place in a treatment center becomes available, the outreach worker would go to the encampment to find the person that they know would be a good fit for that next step in the continuum of care,” Payne said. “If that encampment (has) been evicted and the residents of that encampment have been scattered across the neighborhood into other encampments as a result, you lose track of that person.”
On Friday, Payne said the City Council also passed $100,000 of emergency contingency funding to support the Minnesota Indian Women’s Center. The center created a warming hub for those in need and a navigation center to allow a more direct connection with Hennepin County to access more permanent housing solutions.
To contribute to the homeless work Minneapolis is doing, members of the City Council are working on the Humane Encampment Response Ordinance which would give more accurate data around costs and resources needed following encampment evictions, Payne said.
“Our theory on City Council is that evicting an encampment doesn’t change the number of people struggling outdoors,” Payne said. “It just uses a bunch of city resources to move the problem around the city in a whack-a-mole way.”
Payne said the City Council does not decide whether to evict encampments but can dictate where the city’s resources are going and how much.
Jason Urbanczyk, a Minnesota Coalition for the Homeless community outreach fellow, said he experienced homelessness six years ago and is now writing legislation to help solve unsheltered homelessness through the process of clearing encampments.
“I lost everything I own numerous times over. When I mean everything I own everything except the clothes on my back,” Urbanczyk said. “We did the best that we could trying to keep law enforcement out of the actual process. So they’re still there, but we took them out of the legislation and we were taking it out of there. We’ve defined what encampment is inside the legislation.”
Urbanczyk said that once signed into law, the coalition will be able to store belongings left behind by people after encampment clearings. The legislation is currently at the state research office, where its final language is being drafted before they begin looking for support from other nonprofit homeless advocacy groups, Urbanczyk said.
Open Your Heart to the Hungry and Homeless Executive Director Jessica Mathias said she attributes the rise of homelessness to the increased cost of living, possible chemical dependency and mental health issues.
“There’s a huge gap between the amount that people can make an income and what the cost of rent is and rent has continued to go up year after year while income has remained stagnant and it’s that simple,” Mathias said. “I think it’s even people that aren’t necessarily on those poverty thresholds right now who in the past few years have really been struggling to just maintain their livelihoods.”
Open Your Heart is an organization that helps fund organizations who do “boots on the ground” work to give resources to the homeless, Mathias said.
Mathias said it is important to highlight barriers homeless people deal with daily.
“People are really at this point of one job loss, one sick kid, one of those life-altering events away from becoming homeless,” Mathias said. “There’s a huge percentage of people that don’t have that safety net, they don’t have savings, so just really being mindful that everybody that’s unhoused is somebody’s child, it’s somebody’s sibling, somebody’s friend and these are humans that need our help and are not to be looked at as a problem.”
