Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey vetoed an ordinance Thursday that would have mandated the city provide portable bathrooms and handwashing stations for large homeless encampments and, in most cases, give those living there at least one week’s notice before the camp is shut down.
The vote on whether or not to override the veto will be taken up by the new council in January — which includes four newcomers. The current council will not be able to take action on this veto unless the mayor calls a special session.
A spokesperson for the mayor said Frey does not plan to do so.
In his veto letter, Frey said the ordinance would encourage encampments to grow and make it harder for the city to intervene “before a small, newly formed encampment becomes a large, established, dangerous one.” He said it would “fail the very people it claims to help.”
The ordinance was authored by Aurin Chowdhury, Jason Chavez and Aisha Chughtai, a trio of council members who have pushed for a reimagining of the city’s policies addressing homelessness. The council members said their ordinance aimed to create a more humane and public health-centered approach to addressing encampments.
The ordinance requires the city to provide a fire extinguisher, first aid kits and overdose reversal medicine at encampments with 20 or more people, within 10 days of the camp forming. It also requires the city to provide free storage for people when encampments are shut down. Some critics of the ordinance have said that would rack up costs that had not been budgeted for.
“It’s not controversial to provide public health services,” said Chavez, one of the authors. “It’s not controversial to provide storage. Like, in what world is it okay to throw people’s belongings away? It just doesn’t make sense to me. It’s just inhumane.”
Chowdhury said she agrees with the mayor that encampments are “not a safe or dignified place for people to live,” but that the city needs to tackle public health issues that emerge in a reality where homelessness exists — as well as have a mandatory standard approach to encampments.
“If you aren't giving a pre-closure notice, which isn't unheard of, people are left to be surprised. It increases trauma for unhoused people. It makes neighbors feel more anxiety when they see a closure happening and they weren't aware that it was going to happen,” she said. “Service providers also rely on notice, and that's something that we baked into the policy.”
The city has internal guidelines over how to address encampments, including a goal of providing a three-day notice to residents before a closure and employing a homeless response team to try and connect people to services before and after that notice.
“Our team has a compassionate and collaborative approach to engagement, which is bringing favorable results toward ending homelessness,” said Enrique Velázquez, director of regulatory services for the City of Minneapolis. That’s the department that includes the four-person homeless response team.
As it stands, the only codified policy is a police order to break up encampments before they form. That directive points to laws around trespassing and damage to property as grounds for citations and arrest.
That policy has led to a reduction in the number of encampments that are in Minneapolis.
Between March and September this year, the city closed just one large encampment.
That was the Longfellow encampment that real estate developer Hamoudi Sabri allowed to form on his private lot this past summer, which was eventually shuttered after a shooting.
Frey pointed to fires, violence and “increased crimes of opportunity” that have occurred at encampments, punctuating his veto letter with the statement that “we will not support policies that knowingly push vulnerable neighbors into dangerous conditions.” He pointed to Minneapolis’s reputation as a leader in housing and has been a proponent of investing in more affordable housing.
But critics of Frey — including those providing direct outreach to people who are living outside — say the city’s current approach on unsheltered homelessness has pushed people into the shadows and into more dangerous living conditions to navigate alone.
“Our current policy hasn’t addressed the fact that routinely we see people under overpasses on Franklin Avenue or Cedar on the south side. That still exists,” Chowdhury said, adding she has seen people hiding behind dumpsters or fleeing to the suburbs and ending up in jail.
Naomi Wilson, a community organizer and volunteer for Sanctuary Supply Depot — a collective that helps provide tents, gloves and winter jackets to people experiencing unsheltered homelessness — said people are still seeking out survival supplies because they have nowhere else to sleep but outside.
“We work with a lot of people who would like to get housed and there’s just not enough opportunities for everyone who is experiencing unsheltered homelessness,” she said. “Our main goal is just to keep people alive and I would hope that our city can move in a direction that keeps people alive and healthy and safe, rather than having to hide in the shadows.”
