Minneapolis Native leader says permanent homeless encampments is 'the absolute wrong way'

NINA MOINI: In Minnesota, Native Americans experience homelessness at a much higher rate than other racial or ethnic groups. Many native people experiencing unsheltered homelessness in Minneapolis live in encampments, which have been criticized as areas rife with violence and drug use. What to do with encampments, whether to close them has become a divisive issue in Minneapolis. It's an issue that's risen to the forefront again following a shooting earlier this month at a homeless encampment in South Minneapolis that left one person dead and six others injured.

Joe Hobot is the CEO and President of the American Indian Opportunities and Industrialization Center, or OIC, in South Minneapolis. He has a doctorate in education from Hamline University, and he's here to share his perspective now. Thanks so much for your time this afternoon, Joe.

JOE HOBOT: [INAUDIBLE]. Happy to be here.

NINA MOINI: I wanted to talk to you. You and I have talked before, but after you wrote this op-ed in the Minnesota Star Tribune last week in the aftermath of that shooting that we talked about, which was on private property, we should mention in this case, but they've been all over the city in different areas. Would you tell me a little bit about why you decided to write this piece, and just essentially what your main point was?

JOE HOBOT: Essentially, it was in response to a previous piece that had been submitted by readers that was advocating for the development and placement of infrastructure within these encampments, which we believe from an organizational perspective and from a community perspective, the absolute wrong way to address this issue. These encampments are what we refer to them as unsanctioned gatherings, are really a collection of open air crime, drug dealing, prostitution, fighting, and of course, we've seen the gun violence.

They are not safe for the people who inhabit them, and also they are not safe for the communities that live around them. And so making them permanent really is just the wrong way to go about it. And so seeing that piece, I felt obligated to respond with the perspective from one of the local nonprofits within the Indigenous community that provides services and shed some light about what we've been experiencing, and maybe elucidate the points about why that's the wrong approach.

NINA MOINI: And this idea of permanent too, I've talked to some people who've said, well, it's somewhere for people to be because who knows where they would be otherwise until the proper housing or situation for them is available. There are others who say encampments need to be essentially shut down and closed before they even begin to grow in numbers of tents and individuals.

And we had Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara back in April when they had adopted a policy of essentially closing them down pretty much immediately. And at that time, he had said that it had been successful in the terms of how many encampments were popping up. But again, you don't know where exactly everybody ended up.

You are working with the Minneapolis Police Department to clear encampments. Tell me a little bit more about your partnership with them and then what you think about that. When is the appropriate time to take action?

JOE HOBOT: So the American Indian OIC is an organization plus a collaborative that we're part of the Metropolitan Urban Indian directors group, which is a collaborative of over 27 other Indigenous nonprofits, are working very closely with Mayor Frey's office, as well as the Minneapolis Police Department. We have the opinion that these encampments are dangerous, so we do not want to see them spring up in any capacity.

So our immediate response is to make sure we can prohibit their creation, and if we see them starting to germinate, to tear them down immediately. What we've come to learn over the previous years is, yes, that is an easier spot for our talented teams that do harm reduction and outreach to locate folks that are unsheltered. But their talents, they can identify and define today's folks wherever they are. They're very talented at navigating the systems and the community.

What we have learned is that once these unsanctioned gatherings start to germinate and create space, it becomes a beacon for those criminal elements looking to profit off the human suffering there from our unsheltered relatives who are in dire straits due to their addiction.

We see immediately, like moths to a light gangbangers, drug dealers, pimps, and John seeking prostitutes, et cetera, all just coming directly into these encampments, which is essentially a bazaar for illicit activities that really have done no good and created additional harm for the least among us in our community.

So our attitude and really working closely with the other organizations, getting feedback from our community and working closely with Mayor Frey's office and the Minneapolis Police Department, who have been reflexive and responsive to the desires of the native community, listening to what we were proposing and providing assistance. They're not telling us what to do, they're actually being very responsive. We've been moving to eliminate the safety risks that these camps really inhabit.

NINA MOINI: That idea of drug use that's going on, the opioid crisis that's going on, and we know hitting the American Indian community among the hardest. What do you see as helpful in that realm? Because sometimes I feel like that becomes an afterthought to the encampment conversation when it seems like it's actually really central to the encampments.

JOE HOBOT: It really is. I mean, one of the two major drivers of this crisis are addiction, particularly to opioids, which is a whole different animal to previous addictions within our lifetimes related to alcohol or others. So the treatments are much more intensive and time consuming. The after effects of being in addiction are much more devastating to the individual.

Also, we see unaddressed mental health issues. These are the two main drivers that are pushing our unsheltered relatives into these unsafe positions. What we do know to be true is that through the fantastic work of many of our native organizations that are part of mud that do outreach and harm reduction, we have been incredibly successful in moving a lot of folks off of the streets, stabilizing their lives, and having them return to society in a good way.

An example is our organization. The American Indian OIC has an existing contract with Hennepin County, so initially referred to as homelessness to homes. And we're a little bit upstream in a continuum of services that begins with street outreach. The individuals removed from these encampments or off the streets, they are brought into safe places, working with case managers, stabilizing the individual, getting them sober when ready for job search and education.

The county then refers them to the American Indian OIC, starting with Native American clients and then allows. This contract has been renewed a couple of times for our organization, and the amount of referrals has increased to our organization. So this tells us two things.

One, the continuum of services working in partnership with the mayor's office, the Minneapolis Police Department and the county, these interdiction services are working. We are removing folks off the streets. But it also tells us that who continues to be in these unsanctioned gatherings are really the hardest of the hard to serve. And so our usual strategies and tactics for outreach and engagement don't work anymore. We need to come up with different strategies for this type of engagement.

What we're learning is that these folks that are still out on the streets, the level of addiction is so deep and profound, or the level of mental health issues is so deep and profound that we really need to have a different approach to their engagement because right now, they're just refusing, refusing to get the help that's offered and refusing to engage with those that are lending out a helping hand. And so, we're in a way, victims of our own success because now we're confronted with a population of unsheltered that the usual strategies aren't working.

NINA MOINI: And the past few weeks, we've been looking at this topic because we don't want it to fall off the way it sometimes does until there's another tragedy. We've had folks on from the Minneapolis regulatory services, we've had folks on from Hennepin County who said that their latest estimates are that there are perhaps like 170 to 200 individuals who are in these situations of the chronic homelessness and living in different encampments and moving to different encampments once the one they're at gets cleared.

And one thing everybody agreed on was just the need for more housing solutions and more wraparound services, which it sounds like your organization is a part of when somebody's ready to look for a job. But what do you see as the need for housing? I know you're saying some people are not ready to accept help, or they don't want to accept resources, but what do you think on the housing end of the spectrum?

JOE HOBOT: Well, punching above my weight class here because that's not my area of specialty, we do believe that an increase in affordable and available housing is part of the solution. But really, ultimately, it's a few steps down the road where we have initial steps that need to be addressed, which is the addiction rates, and as well as the mental health issues. And really, what our community has been calling for, for multiple years are space availability that with a culturally contextualized approach to addiction recovery, specializing in the opioid crisis.

Much of the research suggests that we need roughly 180 days of inpatient services, or more. If you're not sober, if you're in the throes of an opioid addiction, it doesn't matter how much affordable housing is available to you, or how many job opportunities are provided for you or stand before you. If you're not lucid and capable of maintaining that lifestyle, it's a losing effort.

So we have to begin at the very baseline, which is let's treat the addiction and let's treat the mental health crisis. But really, what we know to be true is we need to do it in a way that is culturally affirming with our Indigenous values. And it's not unique to the native Americans, but we are disproportionately represented in the homeless community.

We also see many other unsheltered folks that are not from our community. So this has broad applications that we feel that we're leading the way in this issue. But other communities can learn from what we're doing, and they're going to need their own culturally contextualized approaches to addiction recovery.

NINA MOINI: Joe, thank you so much for your time and your perspective and coming by Minnesota Now. Really appreciate it.

JOE HOBOT: Happy to be here. Thanks for the opportunity.

NINA MOINI: That was Joe Hobot, the president and CEO of American Indian OIC.