Homeless encampments in city parks
The U.S. city of Minneapolis featured officially and unofficially designated camp sites in city parks for people experiencing homelessness that operated from June 10, 2020, to January 7, 2021. The emergence of encampments on public property in Minneapolis was the result of pervasive homelessness, mitigations measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic in Minnesota, local unrest after the murder of George Floyd, and local policies that permitted encampments. At its peak in the summer of 2020, there were thousands of people camping at dozens of park sites across the city. Many of the encampment residents came from outside of Minneapolis to live in the parks. By the end of the permit experiment, four people had died in the city's park encampments, including the city's first homicide victim of 2021, who was stabbed to death inside a tent at Minnehaha Park on January 3, 2021.
The encampment crisis grew out of civil unrest following the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, while under arrest by a Derek Chauvin, a White officer from the Minneapolis Police Department on Memorial Day on May 25, 2020. A period of intense protests, riots, and property destruction from May 26 to 30, 2020—largely concentrated on East Lake Street in Minneapolis—resulted in the deployment of the Minnesota National Guard and nightly curfews to keep demonstrators off the streets. Though homeless people were exempt from curfew orders, volunteers helped about 200 unsheltered persons take up residence at an unoccupied Sheraton Hotel in the city's Midtown neighborhood. After several overdoses, one death, violence, and fires, occupants of the hotel were evicted by the hotel's owner, and volunteers helped establish an encampment in the city's Powderhorn Park. Growth of the Powderhorn Park encampment and several safety issues resulted in controversy, and by July 2020 the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board established a permit process to restrict the size of camps.
By mid July 2020, the situation was described as having grown out of the control of park board officials, as encampments spread to unpermitted park sites and other locations throughout the city. Like the camp at Powderhorn Park, many other camp sites had shootings, rampant drug use, sexual assaults, sex trafficking, and other safety issues. The city's social programs attempted to connect people experiencing homeless with services, including establishing three new shelters, but shelter beds remained available during the project. City officials adopted a de-escalation for disbanding camps due to the ongoing civil unrest, and when they attempted to remove tents at non-permitted sites, they faced opposition from a sanctuary movement and protest groups.
Encampments appeared at 44 park sites during the summer months, according to the park board, or at as many as 55 park sites, according to news media reports. Park board officials set a deadline to close all encampments by October 2020, and then shifted the deadline to before the onset of freezing temperatures brought on by winter weather. Fifty-three tents, however, remained at three encampments by early December 2020 as some encampment residents declined available shelter space. It was not until January 7, 2021, that the last official encampment, at the city's Minnehaha Park, closed.
Background.
Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board.
The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board is an elected, semi-autonomous local agency that governs the city's park system. Residents in the city elect nine park board commissioners, from six park districts and three at-large, to four-year terms. In 2017, voters elected Chris Meyer (District 1), Kale Severson (District 2), AK Hassan (District 3), Jono Cowgill (District 4), and Steffanie Musich (District 5) to district seats, and they elected Meg Forney, LaTrisha Vetaw, and Londel French to at-large seats. The commissioners elected Cowgill as their board president and Vetaw as their vice president. In 2019, the park board commissioners selected Al Bangoura as the park's superintendent to lead a staff of 580 full-time and 1,500 part-time employees, manage an annual budgetary resources of $125 million, and oversee the Minneapolis Park Police Department, a separate law enforcement entity from the Minneapolis Police Department. By the 2020s, the Minneapolis park system had been consistently considered among the most well-regarded in the United States.
Homelessness in Minnesota.
A study by the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation, a Saint Paul-based non-profit organization, counted 11,371 people in Minnesota were experiencing homelessness on one night in October 2018. Wilder also estimated that nearly 19,600 people experienced homelessness on any given night in the state, and that a total of 50,600 experienced homelessness in Minnesota at some point during 2018. Black and American Indian people were disproportionately affected. Approximately 66% of those homeless in Minnesota were estimated to be People of Color. Hennepin County estimated in 2019 that it had 10,000 experiencing homeless with 4,000 of them in its largest city, Minneapolis, and it had as many as 800 people living on the street in the county. A report by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism said by that January 2020 there were 642 people who were unsheltered in Minneapolis, an increase from 603 the prior year and five-fold increase from 2015.
COVID-19 pandemic in Minnesota.
The first confirmed case in Minnesota of SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing the coronavirus disease, was reported on March 1, 2020. After detecting the first confirmed case of community spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the state, Governor Tim Walz announced the first of several executive orders to address the COVID-19 pandemic in Minnesota. On March 16, 2020, Executive Order 20-04 closed all non-essential businesses and services until March 27, 2020; subsequent orders required state residents to shelter in place and extended the timeframe for statewide closures for schools and non-essential services. On March 23, 2020, Executive Order 20-14 suspended home evictions during the pandemic. On May 13, 2020, Executive Order 20-55 prohibited sweeps or disbandment of homeless encampments.
Civil disorder in Minneapolis.
Protest emerged on May 26, 2020, in Minneapolis as a response to murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man who died on May 25 after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck for several minutes during an arrest. Over a three-night period from May 27 to May 29, Minneapolis sustained extraordinary damage from rioting and looting—largely along a stretch of Lake Street south of downtown—including the demise of the city's third police precinct building, which was overrun by demonstrators and set on fire. By early June 2020, approximately 1,300 properties in Minneapolis were damaged by the rioting and looting, of which nearly 100 of which were entirely destroyed.
Timeline.
"Camp quarantine".
In early April 2020, several people experiencing homelessness took up residence at a small encampment of about a dozen tents in Minneapolis under the Martin Olav Sabo Bridge, near Hiawatha Avenue and the Midtown Greenway bike and pedestrian trail. The encampment garnered the nickname "camp quarantine" as residents felt safer from the coronavirus by living outside on public property than staying in crowded shelters, and they preferred to hang around the camps as the places they had previously visited during the day, such as libraries and public buildings, were closed under the state's public health mitigation of COVID-19.
With fears of the coronavirus on the rise, and 40 cases being reported in homeless shelters, the encampment grew to approximately 100 residents by May 2020. An initial emergency executive order by Governor Tim Walz emboldened those dwelling at the encampment as it prohibited local government agencies from closing camps. To limit growth of the camp, Metro Transit officials erected a fence around it, but declined to clear the camp fearing that action might pose greater health and safety risk. Officials also wanted to avoid repeat of the "Wall of the Forgotten Natives," a sprawling encampment in 2018 along a Hiawatha Avenue sound barrier that had near-daily occurrences of overdoses and violence. Walz's revised executive order in early May 2020 allowed encampments to be cleared if they "reached a size or statutes" and posed a health and safety risk to people living there.
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, died while being pinned to the ground by Derek Chauvin, a White Minneapolis policer who knelt on Floyd's neck as he pled for his life and lost consciousness. Video of Floyd's murder quickly circulated in the media. Protests that emerged on May 26 were initially peaceful, but devolved into widespread rioting and looting, largely concentrated on East Lake Street in Minneapolis over the next several days. Many businesses closed and boarded up their windows and doors to prevent looting and property destruction.
On May 28, 2020, Governor Walz activated the Minnesota State Patrol and the Minnesota National Guard, in what would becomes its largest deployment since World War II, to restore order in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. On May 29, 2020, Walz imposed a metropolitan-wide curfew to keep people off the streets from the hours of 8:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey issued an overlapping city curfew to align with the governor's order. Those breaking curfew faced fines of up to $1,000 or 90 days in jail. Curfews were enforced with mass arrests, including of several journalists, and groups of demonstrators were fired upon by state patrol officers with less-lethal rounds. The curfew orders were originally intended to last two nights, but were extended due to continued unrest. As until nights grew calmer, the curfews finally ended on June 5, 2020.
People experiencing homelessness were exempt from curfew orders, but worries grew that residents of encampments could be swept up in the unrest and potentially shot at with rubber bullets and tear gas. A non-profit organization helped approximately 70 people from the Hiawatha Avenue encampment move to a hotel outside Minneapolis, but some residents remained behind in the encampment, many of who eventually made their way to an activist-led shelter at the Sheraton Midtown Hotel.
"Sanctuary hotel".
In 2020, the Sheraton Minneapolis Midtown Hotel was a four-story, 136-room hotel on Chicago Avenue in the Midtown neighborhood of Minneapolis, abutting the Midtown Greenway bike and pedestrian trail, and located a block north of East Lake Street. Owned by Jay Patel since February of that year, the hotel was a franchise of the international Sheraton Hotel chain.
Activists occupy hotel.
As protests and riots spread in Minneapolis after Floyd's murder, including widespread property destruction along the East Lake Street corridor and destruction of the nearby third precinct police station, Patel evacuated guests from the hotel the night of May 30, 2020, as his insurance company would no longer cover the hotel building if people continued to occupy it.
Activists who worked with unhoused people, and who were also backed by donations of an anonymous person, negotiated to buy a block of rooms for people displaced by the unrest. In agreeing to pay for the rooms, they suggested to Patel that he convince the insurance company that the hotel was taken over by activists without permission. They also said they would help protect the building from arson and looting that had occurred in the area the previous nights. After receiving approval from Patel, the hotel quickly filled to capacity with approximately 190 people who had previously been staying at encampments. As many as 150 volunteers worked shifts to serve food, clean rooms, and operate the hotel, and they gave they project the monikers "sanctuary hotel" and "share-a-ton".
Many volunteers knew each other from prior housing advocacy work in the area. It was reported that though they were excited for the experimental project that was free of government restrictions, though it was established during a chaotic period of time in Minneapolis, and volunteers were concerned that managing the project would be challenging. Some organizers believed that eventually government agencies would take over the project. The volunteers at the hotel were considered a group of mostly White, middle-class activists, but included social service and health care workers. Many of the hotel residents suffered from addiction or mental illness.
The sanctuary was both a place of refuge for unsheltered people for displaced by the riots on East Lake Street, as well as an attempt at police abolition—volunteers believed that residents could police themselves without traditional law enforcement. At the height of the sanctuary hotel's occupancy, the police abolition movement in Minneapolis had taken hold. Several local agencies, including the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board on June 3, had formally dissolved their relationships with the city's police department. Nine of the thirteen members of the city's council pledged at a large rally in Powderhorn Park on June 7