After deadly encampment shooting, Hennepin County weighs supportive housing efforts

NINA MOINI: Homelessness has again been top of mind for many leaders in the Twin Cities metro area in recent weeks. Last Monday, seven people were injured in a shooting at a homeless encampment in South Minneapolis that was on private property. Since then, one person has died from their injuries. It's raising questions again about how to best prevent and respond to homeless encampments.

We wanted to check in with leaders at the county level to learn more about the types of services they provide and the work they do surrounding homelessness. So David Hewitt, Hennepin County's Housing Stability director, joins me now to tell me more about all of this. David, thanks for your time this afternoon.

DAVID HEWITT: Yeah, good afternoon. Thanks for having me on. So yes, I'm the director of Housing Stability at Hennepin County. I lead our efforts to make homelessness rare, brief, and non-recurring. So the county supports a number of efforts to stop people falling into crisis in the first place, for instance, eviction prevention, assisting more than 3,500 people to avoid eviction last year with a main funder of homeless shelters in our community and support a large portfolio of nonprofits that operate supportive housing and other kinds of housing interventions because we believe that housing and homelessness.

NINA MOINI: And this is a year-round work that you all are working on and have been for many years. I think that when we talk about individual cities, perhaps our listeners don't how the interaction works between Hennepin County. At the county level you're overseeing obviously other cities outside of Minneapolis within the county as well. Would you tell us a little bit, David, about how your services, I guess, work together or differ between the county and the city level?

DAVID HEWITT: Yeah, absolutely. So we do work across Hennepin County, of course, with potentially any of our 1.3 million residents that are in need of our services. There is a heavy concentration and the partnership with the city of Minneapolis, as this is where a lot of the folks most in need of our services reside, and this is also where a lot of, in particular the emergency shelters that we work with operate.

But to your point, we work year-round, and this is year-round work. Every single day we have shelters. Just last night we would have had about 1,700 children, women, and men staying in county-funded and supported shelters to avoid sleeping outside. Today, we will have folks ourselves, county staff, and our partner nonprofits out on the streets working with people to get them into temporary solutions, but more importantly, to them into permanent housing. And year-round we are helping person by person individuals exit homelessness and move into permanent housing.

NINA MOINI: When you zoom in to Minneapolis, because that's just kind of what we've been talking about the past week or so with the tragic incident over there, last week, we had a city leader, Enrique Velasquez on from the city who estimated there were about 170 to 200 people in Minneapolis who were experiencing this chronic homelessness, that they would be maybe moving from one encampment to the other. Does that line up with what you're seeing at a county level? Do you have a sense for specifically how big the issue is in Minneapolis?

DAVID HEWITT: Yeah, so we track this issue in a number of different ways, and we serve a number of different populations throughout the year. We have a by name list of the folks that we're working with in unsheltered settings. Currently, our streets, the housing team, our team that are going out daily to engage with people at encampments, people on the streets, people in other unsheltered settings, are working with a few over 300 people. But a lot of those folks will come in and out of homelessness and then there are a smaller group that, as you say, are more entrenched.

And we also have a lot of movement through shelters as well. Like I say, the number of people who actually use shelter is much larger than the number of people who are unsheltered, and many of them may be experiencing chronic homelessness in terms of long-term homelessness as well. And we've really focused our efforts on those longer term folks in both settings, trying to reduce chronic homelessness because those folks have the most barriers to getting back into housing. But what we also see is when we're able to get somebody out of chronic homelessness into housing, they are typically successful. We believe everyone is able.

Just in July, for instance, at street outreach providers in Hennepin County moved 52 people out of unsheltered settings and into housing. And that kind of work is happening month after month after month. And we see about 95% of the folks that move to permanent housing do not return to homelessness. So we're tracking it in different ways. We're following it in different ways. We are focused on those experiencing chronic homelessness, but even those with higher barriers we see can be housed and can be successful.

NINA MOINI: One of the things that happened after this shooting of several people that occurred, David, as I'm sure you know, is a lot of people published op-eds in the newspapers. There was a lot of back and forth between community leaders and housing advocates, the city, city council members, the mayor, the county. There are so many stakeholders here working together.

From your vantage point at the county, what would it take to stop these reoccurring encampments that will oftentimes be cleared by the city? The city will determine that. And then will pop up maybe a couple of blocks later. And then most recently, as I mentioned earlier, one popped up on a private property because an individual decided to try to help those people, and that's created a lot of problems too. What is needed to make a dent in these encampments?

DAVID HEWITT: So what I would say, I mean, the first thing I would want to highlight is that the majority of people experiencing homelessness, at least in our community and at least in this city, are not going to encampments. The numbers actually making use of emergency shelter, for instance, are much larger. But of course, encampments are the visible issue, and when we have a tragic incident like last week, it is going to be at the forefront of everybody's thinking.

These are very complicated issues. Relatively speaking, unsheltered homelessness in Hennepin County, as a share of our population, is a little bit less than half the national rate and it's about 1/10 the rate of other major cities across the US. So we're certainly able to look at other communities and see that we don't want to be heading in that direction where these issues become greater and greater. But still, one person outside is one too many, and a tragedy like last week really focuses everyone's mind.

These are complicated issues. We do know, particularly in these settings, it would be naive to suggest that there isn't an intersection with the opioid crisis and with other issues challenging our community. Our role is, in some ways, simple, and we stay focused on it, which is we know we can get individuals out of these settings into permanent housing, and that's our work each day. We can help individuals, person by person, exit these unsafe settings to safer settings. And that's really what we're focused on and what our partners are focused on and trying to have the biggest impact we can that way and reducing the numbers of people who are in these vulnerable situations.

NINA MOINI: Does the county have a say in when an encampment is deemed so unsafe that it needs to be cleared, or is that a city decision?

DAVID HEWITT: So we don't make decisions for property owners as to the disposition of their property, whether it's the city or anybody else. But we are a human services agency, which means we also, in terms of the delivery of our services, don't care whose property it is. We only care that there are vulnerable people there. And that is enough of a signal for us to be able to go and try and connect those folks to other services. And similarly, our partners, the nonprofits operating shelters, are agnostic as to where people are coming from in terms of accessing their shelters. So our job is to make these kind of services available to the fullest extent possible, wherever people are staying.

NINA MOINI: In April, we had Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara on the show, and he said that there was a new policy allowing police to essentially shut down encampments really before they begin to grow, as long as there's a reason to legally do it. And he said that that was really successful. Do you have a sense for how that policy has impacted the work you're doing at the county level?

DAVID HEWITT: We've seen a difference this year in terms of the number, the size, the frequency of encampments, for sure. Our work at some level, we adapt to changing circumstances, but it doesn't fundamentally change. We are connecting with people wherever they are, if that's an encampment or if it's on transit, or if it is through a drop in center that they're using, if they were walking all night. So our work, we adapt to the needs of the people that we need to serve, but that doesn't fundamentally change what we do, if that makes sense.

NINA MOINI: It does. So we have about a minute left and I want to make sure we talk about some solutions that I know people are working really hard on, David. The county has a supportive housing strategy aiming to support the development of 1,000 new housing units over the next decade. There is a crisis of affordable or deeply affordable housing. How is that goal coming along?

DAVID HEWITT: Yeah, absolutely is a crisis of deeply affordable housing, and housing fundamentally is what ends homelessness. And whatever other issues people may be struggling with, we believe that having the safety, the dignity, the security of a home positions them to be better able to deal with those challenges as well. We believe in housing as a fundamental need, not on its own, you need support services as well, but when the two are paired together, people can be successful. We are on track with our supportive housing strategy.

And more broadly, we are increasing the number of people exiting homelessness to permanent housing every single year. Pre-pandemic, the number was about 1,500 for 2019 in terms of human beings that move from homelessness to permanent housing. That has increased in each of the last three years as we've implemented new strategies and funded new housing options, to the point that last year it was 2,526 human beings moving from homelessness to permanent housing.

And running alongside that, our annual point in time count of unsheltered homelessness has decreased by 33% while nationally it's gone up 21%. And in other cities, Denver, Seattle, others, it's gone up 70%, 80%, 90%. So while the crisis remains very visible, the invisible successes, and they are, by definition, invisible, if somebody is in their home, something that's really important that we amplify and we show how these investments are making a difference in people's lives.

NINA MOINI: Progress being made. David, thanks so much for your time. I appreciate it.

DAVID HEWITT: Thank you.

NINA MOINI: That's David Hewitt, Hennepin County's Housing Stability director.