In a Tumultuous Year, COVID Puts Homeless Crisis Front and Center

*Editor’s Note: Some of the homeless persons in this article agreed to speak with only limited attribution. Others are highly vulnerable individuals. As a result, the editors decided to identify all only by their first names.

The tents appeared the second week of July. Six of them—red, green, burnt orange—plus a brown one tall enough to stand up in marked “Medical.” They occupied a strip of grass below the trolley tracks across the street from the Lake Harriet Bandshell. The sight startled me. It was one thing to read about encampments in neighborhoods associated with poverty, where you might expect to see them, and quite another to encounter the tents in my Linden Hills neighborhood, up the street from our house on Lake Harriet. 

They put homelessness—and all it represented—in my face. I could not look away. I must get to know my new neighbors, I thought. So I stopped by one morning with my dog.

The tents straddled the water pump. The concrete slab served as the encampment’s patio, with a pair of park benches and a large blue tent marked “Food” on one side. Michelle Smith, a woman with cornrows down to her waist and pink fingernail extensions, stood talking to two women from the neighborhood about the lack of adequate housing. She turned out to be the camp’s organizer, the first individual in the city to be granted a permit by the park board. The board provided a hand-washing station, two beige portable toilets, and a half dozen trash and recycling bins. “I came here to get the wealthy folks’ attention so they’d help us,” Michelle told me.

One of my neighbors offered to send me a link to the Google Drive spreadsheet where she posted Michelle’s requests for the camp. 

Though Michelle, 62, stays at the camp, she has a studio apartment in a subsidized building downtown. But she was once homeless. After a second marriage ended in divorce and money ran out, she ended up in shelters. She applied to the county for assistance but had to wait five years. “God got me out of it,” says Michelle, who wears her Baptist upbringing like a campaign button. “He found me a way to Section 8 housing.”

That was about two years ago. This is her way of giving back, rooted in the volunteer work she’s done with churches over the years. An acquaintance from Freedom From the Streets asked her to help set up the Powderhorn camp. After that, she moved to Lake Harriet. “I really wanted to be a missionary,” she says. 

I returned later that afternoon with some cold cuts, ground beef, pasta, marinara sauce, and other items from the list. Michelle, preparing dinner behind a large grill, remembered me by my hair even though I’d been wearing a baseball cap. “Look at those white curls,” she said with her big laugh.

While we chatted, a teenage boy walked by and said to her and some men on the bench, “Have a good night.” She explained the teen worked at Bread and Pickle across the street, and employees had been dropping off food for them. “You, too,” she said to the teenager. “God bless.” 

In its most recent study of Minnesota homelessness, a survey from a single night in October 2018, the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation counted 11,371 people experiencing homelessness statewide. More than a third were in Hennepin County. Since the researchers were not able to talk to everyone without a home, Wilder estimated 19,600 people experienced homelessness in Minnesota on any given night in 2018, with a total of 50,600 for the year. The study also found a significant increase—62 percent over Wilder’s previous study—of those who were homeless but also “unsheltered”—staying under bridges and in public transit stations, riding trains, and so on.

But we’ve never seen anything like this summer. In Minneapolis parks alone, there were people living in an estimated 309 tents among 20 parks as of September 25, with another 49 tents along the Greenway and smaller encampments elsewhere. (St. Paul has seen a tenfold increase in unsheltered homeless people this summer over last, though this article will focus on Minneapolis.) In July, the largest outdoor encampment in the metro area’s history, at Powderhorn Park, had 560 tents with an estimated 800 people.

While the exact number of people experiencing homelessness at the moment is unknown, those once hidden have become visible. The coronavirus has constrained space in shelters and prompted many to pitch tents rather than risk contagion indoors. The governor’s emergency response shut down spaces that once harbored the homeless, from libraries to trains—where as many as 160 a night sought shelter. The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board’s resolution in June to provide refuge in the parks along with a volunteer movement to supply tents, food, clothing, and other support suddenly made the parks the focal point of a housing crisis long in the making. 

We are in the midst of a historic confluence driven by a pandemic and social unrest in response to systemic injustices. These events have laid bare issues that have long plagued our society and forced a reckoning. 

In the early weeks, every time I stopped or drove by, I saw Michelle out front talking to someone. There was a bit of Barnum in the way she worked her audience. “No drugs, no drama, no violence,” she promised. She kept the area neat and clean. She even asked to borrow my lawnmower since the park crew stopped mowing once the tents went up. She initially described the camp as a place for families and expectant mothers, but I never met one. People came and went, but no families. By early October, there were nine people living there: Don, Dre, Sam, Chris, N.O. (short for New Orleans, where he’s from), Santana, Joey and his wife Anastasia—and, of course, Michelle.

Nextdoor lit up with complaints. The posters expressed fears about increased crime. They called out neighbors making donations as enablers. They said the homeless should go to shelters, where there was plenty of room (due to COVID). One woman thought Michelle was playing us, preying upon sympathy and guilt.

But sentiment seemed to run higher in support. A steady stream of people dropped off cash, food, and supplies, whether prompted by the “Donations” signs posted on trees or Michelle’s Google wish list. The camp grew with folding chairs, card tables, coolers. A France 44 employee delivered bags of ice daily. A couple of televisions appeared along with a stack of DVDs. Someone donated a generator that residents recharged at Bread and Pickle. St. John’s Episcopal Church, up the hill, donated a shower. Cases of bottled water and Gatorade were stacked inside the food tent. Loads more food and clothing were piled into the storage tent. 

Michelle was particular in what she’d take. She wanted double queen air mattresses, “the [better] ones because some people have back problems.” She accepted only new blankets and clothing: “I don’t take used because of sanitation.” She turned down home-cooked food unless prepared by someone she knew. And she was pleased with the quality of what was received, telling me the large brown security tent cost $580, the medical tent (where two nurses stopped by twice weekly) cost $545, and her tent—a rust-colored Hikergarden bigger than a minivan—cost $340. Yet she was quick to express her gratitude: “These people have been so generous to us.”

One group picked up laundry and washed it in their homes. Michelle complained about the last batch. “They did a lousy job folding it, and the hoodies were dingy,” she told one of the volunteers.

Chris, 28, came to the Lake Harriet encampment in early September with everything he owned in a backpack. He told me his story one afternoon. He wore a black flat-bill cap set backward over short dreads, a Marvel Comics T-shirt, cranberry-colored jeans, and a pair of black Sport shoes that Michelle secured. 

In January Chris completed treatment for alcoholism and mental health issues in River Falls, Wisconsin. When COVID shut down the college town in March, he lost his assembly line job at Best Maid Cookie Company. Unable to afford rent, he returned to Minneapolis, where he grew up. After high school—he dropped out before his senior year but got his GED—he had bounced around from his mom’s place to his grandmother’s to the streets. There, he snatched brief stretches of sleep in abandoned places or on public transit while managing to stay employed, at one point balancing jobs at The Home Depot and McDonald’s. 

When I spoke to him, I learned he was receiving government assistance—enough to pay the bill on his cell phone—but wanted to find a job. First, he needed to replace his identity card and social security card, which he lost in Wisconsin. He helped out with whatever small tasks Michelle asked him to do around the camp, but the days became tedious. “It’s the same thing every day,” he said, “just sitting around and building on the stress.” 

There’s not a template for someone who ends up homeless, but the Wilder study does identify trends. Sixty-four percent of homeless people in Minnesota suffer from a serious mental illness. The three most common—major depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and bipolar or manic depression—have increased significantly over the past two decades. Fifty-seven percent have a chronic physical health condition, such as severe chronic pain, high blood pressure, asthma, or diabetes. Twenty-four percent have a substance problem involving alcohol and/or other drugs. Half of the respondents, like Chris, have two or more of these conditions. Perhaps surprisingly, the Wilder study found not all are unemployed: three out of ten adults had a job of some sort; 13 percent worked at least 35 hours a week.

Wilder reports adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)—such as violence, abuse, neglect, loss of a family member to suicide, substance abuse, parental separation, or family members in prison —put individuals at higher risk for homelessness. The majority of homeless adults, almost three out of four, had experienced at least one of these. Fifty-nine percent reported multiple ACEs. For each ACE, the average age someone becomes homeless drops. Chris’s father had been in prison; Chris was first homeless in his late teens.

Black people and Native Americans are overrepresented among the Minnesota homeless population. More than one-third of the adults in the Wilder survey were Black (37 percent), higher than any other race or ethnicity, while only 6 percent of the state’s adult population is Black. Native Americans—who make up at least 12 percent of the homeless adult population, compared to 1 percent of Minnesota’s total adult population—are 21 times more likely than whites to be homeless, according to Minnesota Interagency Council on Homelessness data. (The Wilder study found the white subset of the homeless population to be 34 percent.)

Beyond these characteristics are often commonalities. Michelle Decker Gerrard, who has been one of the Wilder study’s authors since its debut in 1991, mentions a Black mother she interviewed, who was heartbroken she could not afford a birthday present for her son. “There’s a tendency to think homelessness only happens to some people,” Gerrard says, “but over the time I’ve been doing these counts and hearing people’s stories, it strikes me every time there’s always one similar to my own.”

James was about my age, mid-50s, with black-frame glasses and a good heart. He said he tried to help people best he could, giving them rides in his van to wherever they needed to go. He had owned a house on the other side of the lake, at 47th and Colfax, but a motorcycle accident wrecked his back. He couldn’t work. The medical bills put him under. He lost his house and wound up on the streets, and eventually in the Lake Harriet camp. He’d been happy to cut the grass the first time I dropped off my lawnmower, and I sometimes saw him riding his bike around the lake. But then he was gone. Michelle told me he stormed off after getting a parking ticket in the park district pay lot across the street where he’d left his van overnight.

Another time I dropped off my lawnmower, a man named Jimmy helped me unload it. A short guy with shoulder-length, shiny black hair, he excitedly told me he’d just been approved for subsidized housing. But a day or two after he’d cut the grass, he slapped his girlfriend, and Michelle called the police to have him removed. “No violence,” Michelle said. “I can’t tolerate that.”

Don is an early riser. Often on my morning walks, he was the only one I would see awake and dressed for the day, smoking a cigarette. About six feet, slender, hair cut short, beard trimmed neat, he was the one Michelle entrusted with the key to the supply tent when she was gone. Don, 40, shared the large tent marked “Security” with Chris and helped defuse disputes when they arose, a role that belied his mellow temperament. 

In September Don and a couple others had to chase off a young man brandishing a short machete, but most days followed the same tedious routine. “I want to find a job,” Don told me. “Sitting around all day is depressing.” He lost his job at the Bloomington Walmart three months earlier when someone stole his car and he could not get to work. It wasn’t long before he ended up in a tent.

Dre, the camp comedian, punctuated conversation with comments like, “My name is Andre, and I approve this message,” and, “I don’t make the news, I just report it.”

He got a degree at Dunwoody College of Technology and later trained as a chef. He told me proudly that he has made eggs Benedict and lobster bisque at the camp, even baked Don a birthday cake in the gas grill. Dre, 54, worked at Ruth’s Chris Steak House downtown, making $19.75 an hour, and lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Richfield with two fish tanks and a large flat-screen TV. He had saved up six months of living expenses, but when the pandemic shut down Ruth’s Chris, he lost his job. 

I ran into Dre one afternoon when he was already a couple of drinks in, a clear plastic cup with some lonely ice cubes in hand. He was in a philosophical mood. “It’s frustrating, but you’ve got to keep a positive attitude,” he said about his current situation. “Got to turn obstacles into opportunities.” The Lake Harriet camp was better than others where he’d stayed, but not where he wanted to be. “Nobody grows up saying, ‘I want to live in a goddamn camp,’” he growled.

There are many factors that can lead to homelessness: job loss, domestic violence, a medical catastrophe, work hours reduced, eviction or foreclosure, losing childcare. “Usually it’s not just one crisis but one plus another—the pile-on effect,” Gerrard says.

This year has contributed additional factors. The George Floyd uprising displaced some people when their homes or neighborhoods were destroyed. Despite an eviction ban, people not named on leases did lose housing. Also, those staying with friends or extended family were asked to leave when crowded housing no longer seemed safe in a pandemic.

The common denominator? Lack of affordable housing. 

“Everyone [on the park board] is in agreement that people that are unhoused deserve housing and that living in a park is not a dignified housing space.”

Jono Cowgill • Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board President

According to the University of Minnesota’s Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, about one in four of Minneapolis’s households earns less than 30 percent of the area’s median income ($28,300 for a family of four), which is the benchmark for those eligible for public assistance. “A huge concern in Hennepin County is the gap between the cost of housing and incomes is very large,” says David Hewitt, director of Hennepin County’s Office to End Homelessness. “We estimate around 74,000 households are below [the area median income], but we have only 14,000 units of housing they can afford, so there’s a 60,000 gap.”

A collaboration funded by the city, county, state, and Minneapolis Public Housing Authority will open approximately 110 new units of affordable housing through February 2021. The city and its partners have closed on financing for an additional 290 units and will begin development in the coming year. Those 400 units, though, are a long, long ways from the 60,000 needed.

One afternoon, Joey told me the story of a camp intruder. He talked while filling a plastic gallon jug with water from the hose behind the pump and walking back to his tents, where he poured the water into a large bladder attached to a tree. His wife Anastasia, who has short brown hair, transferred a plastic tub of soapy dishes—plates, cups, a French press—from atop a green wooden wagon to under the tree and rinsed them with a hose suspended from the bladder. Later on, after she was done, they would cook their dinner on a Coleman stove, like they do most nights.

They have two tents, one for sleeping, one for lounging. Joey told me about waking at 5:30 one Sunday morning when a shadow from the lounge tent crossed his face. Realizing the intruder had taken Anastasia’s backpack, he gave chase on his bike and caught up with the thief by Bde Maka Ska. Joey—who is built like a fireplug and has a convincing temper—pulled a knife. The thief dropped the backpack and fled. Joey found a small bag inside that did not belong to his wife but had, among other items, a check stub with a Linden Hills Boulevard address. He rang the bell at the house and returned the items to a surprised couple roused from their sleep. “I wanted to do the right thing,” he said.

Joey, 38, had been working in Denver, earning cash for removing asbestos. That work dried up with the arrival of the coronavirus. He and Anastasia, 40, hitchhiked around Nevada and California until a government check came through. They rented a car and drove to Minneapolis, where his mother lives. “We’re self-sufficient,” he said. “I can’t stay with my mom.”

They kicked around several of the encampments before stumbling upon Lake Harriet. Michelle let them stay. He’s been doing odd jobs when he can find them—fixing gutters, laying carpet, a demolition job for a neighbor—but when the weather turns cold he wants to head south. “I’d like to buy a small trailer,” he said. “Maybe my sister will let me hitch it to her truck.”

The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board (MPRB) has faced its own reckoning in the wake of the pandemic and uprising. As Lake Street burned in late May, a loosely organized group of mostly white activists calling itself the Minneapolis Sanctuary Movement arranged shelter for the homeless at the ex-Sheraton hotel on Chicago. But within two weeks, the situation had disintegrated into a disaster—the hotel overrun with rampant drug use and sex trafficking. When the owner did not receive payment, he deactivated the room access cards, so people with belongings locked in rooms busted doors and windows. County outreach workers found indoor shelter for many who had been staying there. Members of the movement abandoned the hotel and led some folks to Powderhorn Park, where they pitched 10 tents. MPRB superintendent Al Bangoura, fearing the same problems would inhabit the park, called for their removal, but the governor’s office intervened, claiming Walz’s executive order prohibited disbanding the encampment.

As Powderhorn swelled and inspired smaller encampments across other parks, Bangoura and the nine park board commissioners found themselves in a tough spot. Their mission is to provide space for recreation and preserve the land, not shelter the homeless. None of the MPRB staff had training in housing and support services. They scrambled to find partners with knowledge and resources to deal with the health and safety challenges and relied more heavily on existing partners. On June 17, when the MPRB declared the parks a refuge for people experiencing homelessness, it did so with misgivings. “Everyone [on the board] is in agreement,” MPRB president Jono Cowgill told me, “that people that are unhoused deserve housing and that living in a park is not a dignified housing space.”

The Minneapolis Sanctuary Movement complicated matters. It coordinated volunteers to serve food, pick up trash, and provide supplies like toiletries, clothing, and tents. Some commissioners, most notably Londel French, helped out. Others believed members of the movement, though well-intentioned, were doing more harm than good. MPRB vice president LaTrisha Vetaw branded them—and like-minded liberals—“white saviors.”

“They tried to make like it was some type of utopia, but nothing about living in the park says ‘sanctuary’ to me,” says Vetaw, who spent time in Powderhorn, where she got propositioned for sex and saw bees swarm a baby while his father talked distractedly on a cell phone. “If you tell them it’s OK and safe, you have to own this when something happens to them.”

And things did happen. Robberies, rapes, sex trafficking, assaults, drug overdoses, shootings. The incidents in Powderhorn grabbed most of the headlines, but they happened elsewhere, too. Yet some white saviors continued to insist upon self-sufficiency and resist outside interference. Commissioner at large Meg Forney cried when she recounted to me how activists refused to identify the man who raped a 14-year-old girl in Powderhorn and neglected to call paramedics when a woman overdosed in Peavey Park. “She’s lying in the hospital, and she’s brain-dead,” Forney says. “These communities need to realize these people need specific services to help them.”

 The county sent outreach workers into the encampments to help residents find safe housing and medical assistance. But the Sanctuary Movement, eyeing the establishment as part of the problem, refused to cooperate. “There’s enough work for us to address the real problem of homelessness in Minnesota,” one exasperated outreach worker told me. “When we have people creating problems, that makes it impossible for us to do our job and we have fewer people getting served.”

The lines blurred between Sanctuary and rogue activists who seemed intent on exploiting the circumstances. They seized upon the encampments as the embodiment of social and racial injustice. One outreach worker, who did not want his name used, had spent endless hours in the camps and had heard reports of families who didn’t feel safe, threatened by activists if they left, and of others paid by activists to remain in the camps. “These people are using the homeless folks as pawns to bring bigger notice to these problems we have,” he says. “They say they’re working for these people, but they’re actually working against them.” 

On July 15, citing health and safety concerns, the MPRB unanimously approved a resolution to reduce the number of parks that would accommodate encampments to 20 and limit the number of tents. Powderhorn, Elliot, Kenwood, Matthews, and Loring were cleared as a result. By late September, encampments with permits remained in 15 parks. 

One of the early encampments was established outside Theodore Wirth Home, the superintendent’s residence in Lyndale Farmstead Park. The camp has provoked Bangoura’s own personal reckoning. “It’s been hard,” he admits. “I recognize that people are struggling and suffering. It reminds me of the work I have to do every day and to be committed to helping find shelter.” 

On September 5, a group marched from Bryant Park to his house. From inside, he could hear his name in their speeches calling for solutions. Then his 15-year-old son, who was practicing his viola, called out, “Dad, a guy is climbing the house.” A man had scrambled onto the porch roof and spray-painted the security cameras. “I support peaceful protest, but when they crossed the line, I called 911,” Bangoura says. “I was concerned for my family’s safety.”

At best, the encampments were a stopgap. The MPRB does not see them as safe or humane once the weather turns cold, so the impending winter amplifies the urgency to find appropriate accommodation. “This is a crisis, and we need help getting people into shelter and housing,” Bangoura said in late September. “What is the solution going to be in the next month?”

Shelters save lives. So goes the platitude, but we don’t have enough of them. In the 2018 Wilder survey, nearly one in three people (32 percent) said they had been turned away from a shelter in the past three months because it was full—which factored into the 62 percent jump in unsheltered homeless. This past summer, the city, the county, the state, and community partners committed to three new shelters with a combined additional 303 beds to serve specifically women, Native Americans, and the medically vulnerable. The one serving Native Americans is expected to open this winter, but the 30-bed women’s shelter is on hold after neighbors to the proposed site blocked it.

This winter may endanger more lives with both the governor’s eviction moratorium and the availability of federal rental assistance from the CARES Act due to expire at the end of the year. “There’s obviously a great bit of concern about what will happen then,” Hewitt says.

The consensus for an enduring solution is supportive housing, meaning social services that help people maintain their housing. “Supportive housing has been a proven best practice in ending homelessness regardless of circumstances,” says Cathy ten Broeke, assistant commissioner and executive director of the Minnesota Interagency Council on Homelessness.

“It’s hard to . . . learn what’s needed to live in an apartment or house. It can be overwhelming. If you provide space and wraparound services, they will get the help they need.”

John Cole • Director of Align Minneapolis

The support is critical. Most people who have wound up homeless need assistance addressing the issues that landed them there, whether it be job training or mental health counseling. “People on the street learn a whole set of survival skills,” says John Cole, director of Align Minneapolis, an interfaith coalition of 17 congregations addressing homelessness. “It’s hard to unlearn those and learn what’s needed to live in an apartment or house. It can be overwhelming. If you provide space and wraparound services, they will get the help they need.” 

Once someone loses their home, a variety of barriers make it hard to get back into housing. More than half of adults experiencing homelessness in Minnesota are on a waiting list for subsidized housing, with the average wait running over a year. Once they’re approved, there’s no guarantee they’ll find a place to live. Landlords often deny housing, citing reasons commonly experienced by this population—credit problems, lack of references, past evictions, previous arrests, and issues of mental health or substance abuse—sometimes in spite of rules that prohibit it. 

Prejudice also factors into landlords turning away applicants. Every advocate or official I asked about this—at least a dozen—had heard stories to this effect. “It’s hard to prove there is a racial component to it, but we know sometimes there is,” says Don Ryan, program manager at Hennepin County and county lead for unsheltered homelessness.

It’s yet another symptom of the systemic racism that has exacerbated the crisis. “Implicit bias conspires against people of color being able to have equal access to work and wages, and they are denied available places to live because of their color,” Cole says. “Whatever injustices someone already encounters as a person of color are magnified when you’re homeless.”

The Wilder study concluded, “Statewide and in our local communities, we must focus on policies and practices rooted in structural racism that inhibit fair and full access to education, employment, credit, health care, and housing opportunities.”

I asked Vetaw how I and other white people can do this. “Start with your family,” she says. “It’s not just systemic in our workplaces but in the way we’re thinking. Talk about what you’ve been witness to and participated in. Break down some of that systemic thinking and take action.”

One day in early September, Mike Reier looked up from his lunch at Bread and Pickle. Why in the hell is the city allowing people to put up tents in parks? he wondered. These people have done this to themselves and need to get their act together. Reier is a middle-aged white man who’s had a career as an entrepreneur with several tech and health care companies, including Benovate, and lives in Minnetrista. He might have persisted with this mindset if his friend had not commented, “They have nowhere else to go.”

That prompted Reier to cross the street, where he met Michelle. She told him her vision to find a building where she and the others at the encampment could live. And so began the education of Mike Reier. “Those of us out in the suburbs don’t have a clue,” he says. “We have these preconceived ideas without any idea what the critical challenges are.” Reier talked to more than a dozen nonprofits addressing homelessness. He came to understand the multiple forces at work that land someone in a tent and to believe in the need for more supportive housing. 

He assembled an advisory board; put up a website, ProjectBacktoHome.org; and raised money. The goal of the first phase is to raise $90,000, which will provide immediate housing for 12–18 people through the winter. The next phase requires $500,000 to purchase and renovate a building. The third phase calls for more of the above, as well as raising awareness and helping additional nonprofits. He has forged partnerships with St. Stephen’s to offer job training, the American Indian Community Development Corporation to assist with property acquisition, and the Constellation Fund to provide guidance. 

“I know I sound crazy because I think this is possible, but I’ve done this before,” Reier says, referencing his startup companies. “This is no longer a government problem, no longer a nonprofit problem. We’ve all got to jump into this.” 

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How to Help

Suggestions from David Hewitt, director of Hennepin County’s Office to End Homelessness:

Advocate: Join forces with established efforts to increase housing stability in our community, such as Homes for All, Minnesota Coalition for the Homeless, and the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Reach out to your state and federal representatives, as well as city and county elected leaders, to let them know we need immediate funding and action to address homelessness in our communities.

Volunteer: Organizations need volunteers now more than ever. A good place to start is Hands On Twin Cities. handsontwincities.org

Donate: Nonprofits who are providing shelter and essential services to people experiencing homelessness are facing dire financial constraints. 

Educate: In order to take decisive and effective action together, having a sound understanding of the challenges we face is crucial. The National Alliance to End Homelessness is a good resource to help educate friends, family, and neighbors on solutions. And there’s great statistical information at Wilder Research.

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This article originally appeared in the November 2020 issue.