Hennepin County homelessness is down compared with national numbers, but there’s a catch

Homelessness is continuing to decrease in Hennepin County at a rate that defies national trends but the funding originally used to help make this decrease happen expired in December Hennepin County is unique in comparison to preponderance other jurisdictions across the country and state because it invested almost of its pandemic recovery funds into homelessness prevention The effort was critical in helping the county address homelessness in the years following a record high David Hewitt director of housing stability explained MinnPost Now the county is facing a new challenge American Rescue Plan funds used to build out a robust homelessness prevention campaign expired in December resulting in a fiscal cliff As a temporary Band-Aid the Hennepin County Board budgeted for an additional year of funding There s a catch to the county choosing to shoulder this expense It was a decision that came with the commitment to take on an estimated million deficit This means the county s homelessness response gang has one year of needed funding for its first-in-the-country operation which was recognized last year in a documentary by national nonprofit Invisible People before an alternative must be discovered This funding is not going to come from the state The county already tried to go to state lawmakers to pass further approach to fund the campaign and failed to get a majority of buy-in Hewitt commented While not getting more state funding is disappointing and certainly contributes to a challenging ecosystem we have no desire to go backwards he added Now Hewitt s department is looking to its partners to help find a sustainable method but details of what that could look like are still unclear A closer look at Hennepin County The responsibility to do homelessness response work falls on no one entity at least not legally Hewitt declared That s what makes finding sustainable funding for this kind of work demanding It s a choice rather than an obligation If anybody says it s the county s job or it s the city s job or it s the state s job technically it is not anybody s job from the lens of who has statutory responsibility Hewitt commented Hennepin County has as a board direction made the choice to step into and invest in this area of work The numbers the county s capital have produced speak for themselves Hewitt added During its Point in Time PIT count a federally mandated count of sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness conducted nationwide Hennepin County revealed people staying in shelters and transitional housing programs and people experiencing unsheltered homelessness Those are and decreases respectively since The number of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness was at its peak during the PIT count when workers counted people sleeping in unsheltered settings according to the county review The count revealed a decrease in unsheltered homelessness year-over-year and a decrease since function use strict window addEventListener message function a if void a material datawrapper-height var e document querySelectorAll iframe for var t in a details datawrapper-height for var r i r e i i if r contentWindow a source var d a evidence datawrapper-height t px r style height d While Hennepin County has already published its PIT count findings for not all jurisdictions have done so yet The final analysis compiling all counts across the country will be issued at the end of the year But looking back at nationally the rate of unsheltered homelessness was about in people Hewitt disclosed In Hennepin County however the rate of homelessness was about in people less than half the national average function use strict window addEventListener message function a if void a material datawrapper-height var e document querySelectorAll iframe for var t in a input datawrapper-height for var r i r e i i if r contentWindow a source var d a statistics datawrapper-height t px r style height d Comparable metros like Portland Seattle and Denver have seen the opposite shift occur In Portland s Multnomah County which has already announced its PIT count numbers the estimated homeless population in per the PIT was a increase from the counted in In Seattle s King County and Denver s Denver County sheltered and unsheltered homelessness has been broadcasted to be at record highs The difference between the Hennepin County numbers and those seen in other jurisdictions comes down to outlay Hewitt revealed Over the past five years millions of county dollars through the American Rescue Plan have been spent on things like preventing evictions providing event management work and preservation of affordable housing For example in alone the county awarded million to create or preserve units of affordable housing with of those units affordable to people with incomes at or less of the area median income The county also provided exigency rental assistance to more than households with fewer than of those households entering homelessness This required financing in incident workers and social workers Now nearly people work on the homelessness and housing stability group Though the long-term sustainability of this services is unclear Hewitt emphasized that he believes every penny was worth it We invested in this on the basis that we believe that it would be the majority impactful thing to do and the right thing to do while we were able to invest he commented We maintained that it would show its value in a way that would allow us to make the situation for continued financing at the state and now in other spaces An eye on Minneapolis homelessness A meager months back Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey touted drastically lowered city numbers of unhoused people within city limits More specifically the mayor was talking about encampments which have been targeted for more aggressive police disbandment since a January special order issued by Police Chief Brian O Hara empowered officers to break them up From the onset of the January order to March police prevented at least encampments from forming due to the order according to a Minneapolis Police Department news release Frey recounted media outlets in March that the number of people in homeless encampments in the city was down to from nearly in the fall The mayor has stated this reduction of unhoused people sleeping outside is the development of the city s continued practice of latest up large encampments along with ramping up outreach to unhoused But in April the Minnesota Star Tribune followed up on the mayor s statement noting that while countless unhoused people became less visible over a short period of time numerous are still on the streets but now out of sight This is where it becomes major to understand the methodology used to collect numbers when looking at the broader picture of area homelessness A look at both PIT count figures and the city s numbers as well as the differences in methodology used to collect the information paints a more robust picture of what s going on The evidence the mayor referred to is not collected in the same way as PIT count facts From day-to-day the city is collecting numbers based on calls reporting people experiencing unsheltered homelessness the preponderance visible of whom are in encampments These numbers are more city-specific than the PIT which covers the entirety of Hennepin County not just Minneapolis But the PIT count also uses a far more robust process to find people experiencing unsheltered homelessness beyond what can be collected solely from calls It includes a count of people sleeping in vehicles people sleeping on transit people who are walking all night without sleeping at all and people who may be staying in very secluded and hard to access and hard to see areas Hewitt stated It s far easier to count sheltered homelessness than unsheltered Hewitt explained The difficulty lies in visibility Source Minneapolis Homeless Response Unit dashboard In a report to MinnPost Enrique Velazquez director of regulatory services for the city of Minneapolis noted the latest PIT count numbers reinforce what we ve seen on the ground that the human-centered approach Minneapolis and Hennepin County are taking to help individuals exit unsheltered homelessness is working The city is not only latest up camps Velazquez wrote The city of Minneapolis has made considerable progress in preventing encampments from forming and connecting individuals to shelter and housing The post Hennepin County homelessness is down compared with national numbers but there s a catch appeared first on MinnPost