Supreme Court homelessness ruling: What it means for Minnesota

Local shelter providers working to combat homelessness in Minnesota worry that a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision will create more barriers for people struggling with homelessness and disproportionately affect communities of color.

The Supreme Court ruled last month that it’s not unconstitutional to enforce laws that penalize people for sleeping outside on public property. The ruling, which has raised alarm bells across the country, clears the path for cities to ticket, fine and jail people who sleep outside, even if there are no shelter beds or housing available.

The ruling is “disappointing” because it grants more control to cities and targets homeless people who struggle to keep up with constant relocations, said Zachary Wolfgram, street outreach program manager at The Link, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit that provides supportive services and housing for youth.

Minneapolis and St. Paul city officials have stated that the ruling won’t impact their responses to homeless encampments, but a few cities in Minnesota are looking to pass ordinances banning sleeping on public property.

At the national level, the ruling doesn’t automatically make sleeping outside on public property a crime; such penalties are dependent on local governments passing their own ordinances. But the ruling reinforced that cities can continue to evict homeless encampments, said John Tribbett, service area director for Avivo, a nonprofit that provides chemical and mental health services, housing support, career education and employment services.

Last week, Camp Nenookaasi, a homeless encampment in south Minneapolis, was evicted for the fourth time this year. The latest eviction involved three separate locations associated with Camp Nenookaasi, which is dominated by Native occupants. Camp organizers and occupants said the city didn’t give them notice about the eviction ahead of time.

One organizer expressed concerns about whether the Supreme Court decision factored into the city’s actions; the city said the encampments were cleared because of public safety risks to camp occupants and surrounding neighbors.

“I think this has to do with the Supreme Court ruling, that you can criminalize homelessness,” Nicole Mason, a Camp Nenookaasi organizer, said during the eviction last week.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, after a group of homeless people sued the city, arguing that the city was violating their Eighth Amendment rights by restricting their ability to camp outside on public property and park overnight at parks.

The city’s ordinance bans camping on public property and parking overnight at city parks. Police officers are allowed to enforce fines for first-time violators and issue a temporary ban at a park for repeat offenders. People who violate the temporary ban face a maximum sentence of 30 days in jail.

The June 28 ruling won’t affect current funding and legislative priorities in Minnesota that address homelessness, said Cathy ten Broeke, executive director of the Minnesota Interagency Council on Homelessness, which is composed of 13 state agencies, the Metropolitan Council and the governor’s office.

“We cannot punish people for a lack of housing when we don’t have enough housing in this nation for people in the first place,” ten Broeke said. “Bottom line is, this gives just extra passion to focusing on solutions and we’re going to continue to do that.”

Travis Earth-Werner, chief program officer for the American Indian Community Development Corporation, said the ruling could disproportionately impact the Indigenous community. The American Indian population is 28 times more likely to be homeless than the white, non-Latino population, according to the Minnesota Interagency Council on Homelessness.

“The American Indian community and people of color, we’re overly represented,” Earth-Werner said. “It can also put a target on the backs of those that are currently experiencing homelessness and it could be devastating.”

The majority opinion in the Grants Pass case argued that policymakers need access to a wide-range of tools, including laws that penalize sleeping on public property, to tackle the complexity of homelessness.

Luke Grundman, litigation director at Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid, said calling penalizing sleeping on public property a tool is “ironic,” because such laws are “just a way of trying to sweep it away, sweep it out of their jurisdiction.” Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid helps elders, people with disabilities and low-income residents in central Minnesota with legal matters.

Several local housing service providers said they haven’t heard of people being arrested in Minnesota for sleeping outside on public property. But related offenses, such as loitering, trespassing and public urination, have been “easily used” in the past by different cities to shuffle around people who have nowhere to go, Tribbett said.

Minnesota cities pass, entertain camping bans

A few cities in Minnesota have proposed their own version of camping ban laws similar to the Grants Pass ordinance. A camping ban ordinance was passed in Rochester on February 5 to deter homeless encampments; police officers are allowed to arrest or fine people with a misdemeanor crime for camping on public property.

The Rochester Police Department urged local officials to implement the ordinance after facing a growing number of encampments in the area.

Rochester City officials have said that arrests and fines would be enforced as a last resort. The ordinance states that officers must first give a warning and help homeless residents find a safe place to go before arresting them.

There is no statewide law governing encampments on public property, Grundman said, adding that different city ordinances are often arbitrary and vary in terms of their enforcement practices. Brainerd and Baxter, Minnesota, have proposed ordinances similar to Rochester’s.

The Duluth City Council voted on July 29 to pass an ordinance that limits fines to $200 for sleeping on public property. The council also voted to remove language from the ordinance that would have made such offenses a misdemeanor crime.

In early August, Brainerd will hold a public hearing about its proposed ordinance, which would go into effect in September if it is approved.

Brainerd City Council Member Kara Terry said the proposed ordinance is the result of the homeless population growing more visible, prompting negative reactions from residents and concerns about housing. Law enforcement also needed “a response that they could hold us accountable to,” she added.

Terry described the visibility of homeless encampments in the community as a “double-edged sword.”

“Brainerd always had a homeless population,” she said. “It’s just never really been talked about and or really sort of seen.”

Earth-Werner said there should be measures in place to help private property owners who are affected by encampments on public property, and the crime that crops up around them, often due to substance abuse among the unhoused. However, he doesn’t believe criminalizing public camping is the answer.

In most cases, he said, people are not homeless by choice. Affordable housing with supportive services is key to addressing homelessness, and needs more investment, he added.

Where Minneapolis and St. Paul stand

Minneapolis has an ordinance that makes homeless encampments illegal, but it does not include fines or arrests for people who are in violation. However, city officials have authority to forcibly evict encampments that are deemed public safety risks, and have used it repeatedly, including with Camp Nenookaasi.

Enrique Velázquez, director of Minneapolis Regulatory Services, handles the city’s encampment responses, and said that the Grants Pass ruling has no impact on how the city responds to homeless encampments. The city does not have a loitering ordinance, but does have a trespassing ordinance that officers can enforce, he added.

Velázquez said city ordinances are “pretty binary,” and aren’t able to capture the nuances in addressing encampments. Velázquez said he understands the “interest and the desire” some cities have in enforcing camping bans, but that he has concerns about their utility.

One potential advantage of a camping ban ordinance is that it might encourage people to stay in shelters instead of returning to camping outside, which could help service providers find others who need housing services, he said.

Minneapolis’ response to encampments has drawn accusations that it hasn’t fully coordinated with housing providers to support the unhoused, and criticism for its practice of dumping concrete rubble onto city lots to prevent future camps. Critics have also said that the city’s evictions force encampments to continue relocating to different lots, perpetuating the problem and causing residents to lose important personal documents and belongings in the process.

The city of St. Paul has ordinances on initiating, notifying and clearing encampments that operate similarly to Minneapolis. The city’s policies set a higher bar than Minneapolis for posting a notice to evict homeless encampments.

Both cities have a 72-hour notice requirement for posting a vacate sign at encampments, but Minneapolis allows more exceptions to override the requirement and evict without notice.

Minneapolis policy says the city can skip posting a notice if there are threats to city employees, the encampment is preventing normal operations of nearby facilities or there is an increase in crime and illegal activities. St. Paul’s policy does not list those conditions as reasons to evict without notice.

The two cities have homeless response teams that make visits to encampments and help occupants access services. The criteria for evicting an encampment are the same for both cities, including unsafe weather conditions and environmental hazards.

St. Paul Deputy Mayor Jaime Tincher said staff in the city’s Homeless Assistance Response Team work to get homeless residents into stable housing. The response team also tracks data and publishes a weekly update that is shared with people who live near encampments. Tincher said the reports generally help persuade those residents to show patience as service providers work to find housing for encampment occupants.

“Unless it was some sort of imminent danger or something like that, we don’t just spring a closure on folks. We like to give notice,” Tincher said. “We like to tell service providers when there’s a date that a closure would happen, we try to make sure that everybody’s ready to provide supports.”

‘Not a sustainable trajectory’

Local shelter providers say ordinances like the one in Grants Pass don’t solve anything because they simply push the unhoused into nearby cities that don’t have similar ordinances.

“That’s just not a sustainable trajectory,” St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter said, adding that homelessness is best addressed with a coordinated regional and statewide approach.

The cost of evicting encampments and putting people in jail is expensive, Tribbett said, and cities should consider those factors before passing camping ban ordinances.

“If all we’re doing is pushing that person to a new location, we haven’t really solved anything,” Tribbett said. “I would encourage local governments to really think about what is going to solve these problems long-term.”

Even if ordinances similar to the one in Grants Pass are enacted in Minnesota, Earth-Werner said, there will still be people living outside until the housing infrastructure meets their needs.