The number of homeless encampments in Minneapolis is falling, but activists criticize the city’s current methods of encampment clearings as an ineffective solution.

To clear encampments, the city has relied on the Homeless Response Team and the Minneapolis Police Department.

Last year, the city closed 17 encampments, according to Minneapolis director of regulatory services Enrique Velázquez.

The decline in encampments has coincided with a decline in 311 calls for people experiencing homelessness from 196 last year to 55 calls this year, according to city data.

In January, MPD Police Chief Brian O’Hara issued a special order that allows for Minneapolis Police to stop encampments from forming on city-owned property, vacant lots and public rights of way.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said in a statement the city’s efforts to decrease homelessness in Minneapolis have been a success.

“The City of Minneapolis has been working tirelessly with our government and community partners to move people out of encampments and into long-term housing — and our efforts are paying off,” Frey said.

While encampments are decreasing, some activists and politicians are critical of Frey’s homeless prevention methods and messaging.

Sen. Omar Fateh (DFL-Minneapolis), who is currently running for mayor, said on X on April 2 that the recent decrease is hiding Minneapolis’ homeless population.

“Hiding homelessness doesn’t solve it. We can’t celebrate this data as a win in partnership with our unhoused neighbors,” Fateh said on X. “Sadly this reflects an uptick in MPD aggression that makes vulnerable people more invisible. We need a humane response — not “out of sight, out of mind.”

Frey pushed back against Fateh and said only 27 people were experiencing unsheltered homelessness in Minneapolis.

While data for 2025 is not published yet, the Supporting Unsheltered Homelessness Data Dashboard shows the city’s Homeless Response Team is currently engaged with 36 people who do not live in proper housing.

County-wide, 628 people were experiencing unsheltered homelessness in the last three months, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported.

The current method

Currently, homeless encampments are cleared based on safety, public health, neighborhood impact and availability in shelters, according to Velázquez.

In addition to helping clear homeless encampments, the five-person Homeless Response Team also reaches out directly to the local homeless population and tries to help homeless people find shelters, Velázquez said. The team is expected to engage with homeless people five days a week.

In their first report to the city in March, the Homeless Response Team reported offering 169 individuals shelter or other housing, but only nine accepted their offers.

Velázquez attributes those numbers to the constant need for caseworkers to build relationships and the jarring transition from unsheltered living to housing.

“I celebrate the nine that took advantage of the opportunity and decided that they were ready to move into shelter,” Velázquez said. “It takes a lot of time to form relationships with individuals and I think it takes the repetition of being able to see people and continuously come back.”

Street outreach worker Soren Stevenson, who is also running for City Council for Ward 8, said Frey’s encampment policies are a band-aid to a larger problem.

“It’s effective at making encampments less visible. But it’s having no effect or even potentially a negative effect on people moving from the streets into homes,” Stevenson said.

Stevenson said that while encampments are a bad thing, the current method only makes it harder for homeless people to connect to case managers or to the Coordinated Entry, a database that matches people to housing depending on their needs.

“If people aren’t connected to some kind of outreach worker or some kind of case manager, they really struggle to go through what’s called the coordinated entry system,” Stevenson said. “And that’s the system that the county uses to get people from the streets into homes.”

Christin Crabtree, a Camp Nenookaasi organizer, said clearing encampments can be a traumatizing experience for homeless people.

“It’s really jarring for people and really scary. We see when there are evictions that take place, we oftentimes will see a spike in overdoses as well as residents that go missing,” Crabtree said. “When an encampment is evicted, that creates a lot of instability and vulnerability, And people are just looking for places to get safe, to be able to sit down.”

Crabtree said that after an encampment is cleared, caseworkers who had been working with specific homeless people will have to locate them.

Minneapolis’s homeless approach does not provide homeless people any safety or security, Crabtree said.

“People spend their day in Minneapolis in the community they live in and then spend the night in the suburbs or in St. Paul because they’re unable to lay down and sleep,” Crabtree said.

In response to arguments that the encampment closure is not helping, Velázquez said addressing the homeless is a complicated effort and encampment clearings are just one way the city combats it.

“There’s no one silver bullet that will take care of all of these societal ills. We need to take a collective, collaborative effort towards solving all these other pieces to contribute towards homelessness,” Velázquez said.

Crabtree and Stevenson said they believe greater collaboration between the city and outreach organizations is an alternative way to deal with encampments.

Stevenson said places like Camp Nenookaasi present a good alternative to encampment clearings as their centralized location provides the community safety and caseworkers an easy way to find homeless people. 

Crabtree said she would like to see the city move the responsibility of encampment clearings from the Homeless Response Team to the Minneapolis Health Department and more collaboration with homeless outreach groups. 

“Regulatory services is who you call for a property complaint for somebody not mowing their lawn. And that is saying that we are thinking of our neighbors who are unhoused as being a complaint, as being like garbage that needs to be cleaned up,” Crabtree said. 

While disagreeing on the approaches to homelessness, both homeless advocates and city officials agreed that time, combined efforts and empathy would be needed to truly address the causes behind homelessness.

“I can’t emphasize this enough, that it’s about the relationships and making sure that we are helping every single one of our unsheltered residents because even one person living unsheltered is one too many,” Velázquez said.