Judge denies request to throw out city suit against owner of land used for encampment
Property owner says he's consider a counter suit
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While Minneapolis mayoral candidates debated under stage lights how best to address unsheltered homelessness last month, Misty sat cross-legged outside a bakery on 17th Avenue and Lake Street. It was getting chillier as the sun set, so she wore her hood up.
In that spot, tucked away from the constant flow of traffic on the main road, she held a cardboard sign: “lost everything after encampment shooting. Anything helps.”
Misty was among the dozens of people who had been living at the encampment on real estate developer Hamoudi Sabri’s private lot — the one that is now at the center of an ongoing legal dispute between the city and Sabri.
In the latest move, Sabri’s attorneys argued in court Thursday that the city can’t proceed with the lawsuit because they didn’t include people who had been living at the encampment as a necessary party. Though the judge denied that motion, if the courts had agreed that would have made people like Misty — who did not agree to use her full name in this story but whose full name is included in court documents — crucial to the lawsuit.
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“They treat us like we’re the suspects instead of the victims and it don’t make any sense,” she said of the city’s response after the shooting. “If it’s supposed to be evidence, then why did you destroy everything we own? Why can’t we come back and get our things?”
The shooting occurred the night of Sept. 15. One person — 30-year-old Jacinda Oakgrove — was killed and six others were injured. Afterward, Misty said she went back to the encampment expecting to be able to get her stuff back — but it was being trashed.
Thanks to the city, she said, she lost her ID, her social security card and her EBT card. Her fiancé lost his tribal paperwork. They had an expensive bike that was tossed, too — not to mention the paperwork related to their efforts to get housing.
She said there was a woman who had been working with them, but she doesn’t know how to find her or remember her full name. All of that was on the paperwork that’s now gone. The couple have been trying to get inside since July, after they moved here in search of her fiancé’s son, but “it’s all full.”
“It’s funny how it’s all full when everybody is still out here getting pushed around like a herd of cows,” she said. “We don’t even know where anybody is or, for Christ’s sake, we don’t even know who got hit or not.”
Last week — after MPR News spoke with Misty — more than 100 new shelter beds were opened in Minneapolis, including 54 at a women’s shelter in Longfellow. That boosted the average number of beds available at 7:30 p.m. to 16, though those are not necessarily spots that accommodate people who are coupled, have pets or are dealing with addiction.
MPR News was unable to reach Misty again and find out if she was able to land a spot.
The right to exist
Sabri’s attorneys argued that at stake in this case is “the right to simply exist in this City as an unhoused person.”
“Under Mayor Jacob Frey’s administration, the City of Minneapolis has effectively banished unhoused people from public spaces through aggressive policing and encampment evictions,” the motion to dismiss filing reads. “Now in this case, the City seeks to prohibit people with nowhere else to go from being allowed to remain on private land as they pursue more stable housing opportunities.”
In Minneapolis, there is a no camping ordinance. The number of encampments in Minneapolis has decreased this year, as the policy has shifted from clearing encampments to having police dismantle them as soon as they start forming.
On the ground, advocates and people who have slept outside say that’s led to people being pushed into less public and more dangerous places out of view — obscuring but not alleviating the root of the problem.
Enrique Velázquez, director of regulatory services — the city department that includes the four-person homeless response team — said the team is still working to meet people where they’re at.
“The homeless response team has adapted its approach to continue meeting people in all the spaces unfit for human habitation,” he said during a presentation to the City Council over the mayor’s proposed 2026 budget. “This means engaging with unsheltered residents on the banks of the Mississippi River, in wooded areas, in vehicles on city streets and in private parking lots.”
In response to the motion to dismiss filing, the city’s attorneys cast the move as an “attempt to inundate the Court with highly disputed and irrelevant allegations about the City’s and Mayor’s policies on homeless encampments.”
They argue that this is a straightforward case about a public health nuisance — and that the move from Sabri’s attorneys turns this into a referendum on homeless response policy. In the courtroom on Thursday, they also argued that to include former encampment residents as a party would necessitate suing them — which the city does not want to do.
A spokesperson for the city added that Minneapolis is one of the few major cities to see a decrease in unsheltered homelessness since 2020 and that “while there’s still more work to do, we’ve made significant progress.”
Currently, there’s a court injunction blocking Sabri from opening another encampment on any of his properties for the time being. The city is seeking permanent relief, which Sabri’s attorney Claire Glenn argued proves that the lawsuit is not about a specific public health nuisance but a broader approach of keeping people from camping on private land.
Now that the case is proceeding, Glenn said that they are considering filing counterclaims, which would allow Sabri, as a defendant, to also go on the offense within this case.
Neighbor apprehensive but not opposed to using the site to help unhoused residents
For many neighbors in the area, even those with compassion for the situation, the Longfellow encampment was something they wanted out of their neighborhood.
Steven Christen, who lives about a block away from where the encampment had been, said he has three children at home and worried about their exposure. He’s part of a neighborhood patrol group that would bike around and check that people were not overdosing or in need of other help.
“A lot of man hours just making sure the neighborhood is safe at night up until five in the morning every night all summer long,” he said. “It’s just not fair. I’m not getting paid for that. I’m just doing that for the sake of everybody else.”
Christen watched a press conference at that site of the old encampment last month, as Sabri opened up a daytime pop-up hub for unsheltered people in the area. The idea was to have a spot where people could connect with outreach workers and rest freely — though no tents or overnight stays would be allowed.
Christen was apprehensive but not opposed. Though the hub was short-lived, on the day that it was first in place, 50-year-old Terysa Graves sunk into a chair as she ate a blueberry Belvita biscuit — her favorite — provided at the hub.
Graves had been living at the encampment in the same spot. She said she wasn’t a fan of the location — she raised three children, who are now grown, and didn’t like that it was beside a school.
But it was nice to have a spot to return to.
Graves has been homeless for six years now and it’s been hard to find places to be, whether its shopkeepers turning her down from the restroom (even the Lake Street Community Safety Center, a resource hub by the light rail that the city funded for half a million dollars, has a bright orange “no public restroom” sign) or police moving her along on the sidewalk.
“I mean all you can do is stand and walk,” she said. “Walk around. Walk around.”
This report was produced as part of a collaboration between Minnesota Public Radio News and The New York Times's Headway Initiative, focused on covering housing in Minnesota. This reporting is supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with the Local Media Foundation serving as fiscal sponsor. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication.
