Whenever you hear about an encampment ‘sweep,’ first ask: Where will the people go?

Unfortunately, unsheltered people living in tents have become a defining image of post-COVID city life. Camps of people with next to nothing to lose remain an ongoing national tragedy, concentrated in our urban centers. On top of that, a drug use epidemic is boiling, emerging all the time in Twin Cities places like the transit system, downtowns, Uptown Minneapolis, St. Paul’s Midway and a handful of specific core city neighborhoods. 

Solving this problem is both necessary and the most politically thankless task facing government. Instead of solutions, local governments have turned to clearing encampments, forcibly removing the homes and possessions of people living on public land. 

Minneapolis, under Mayor Jacob Frey, has been doing this for years. This month, St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her announced a similar policy for reasons that are hand-wavingly attributed to public safety. After some contentious public meetings this week, clearances of St. Paul’s largest encampments are set to take place. 

Related: Minnesota Native groups expand efforts to protect unhoused women

Two things can both be true. The first is that people with nowhere to go deserve refuge and to be treated with dignity. This is a matter of basic morality. The first question we must ask is, “Where will people go?” If there’s not a good answer, these government actions are irredeemable. 

It’s also a fact that core cities and their residents should not bear the fiscal and personal costs of widespread poverty. People persisting in haphazard camps in Minneapolis and St. Paul today have come from all over the Upper Midwest. They end up on marginal land in the core cities because of the density of social services, social networks and transit access, making urban camps an obvious place of last resort. In other words, people in rural or suburban areas are part of this equation whether they recognize it or not. 

For core cities, encampments generate hundreds of emergency calls per year, not to mention secondary issues around disinvestment or quality of life. These broad social costs are borne specifically by central cities, in their exploding budgets, vacant properties, nuisance crimes and the like. The people of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and their respective counties, should not be singled out to pay for a regional plague of poverty. 

Unfortunately, squaring this circle is impossible. The correct solution to ongoing poverty, addiction and a crisis of affordable housing should be a national program of some kind. COVID-era federal funding, somewhat unintentionally, proved that widespread federal programs can actually solve problems in the United States.

Related: Legislature passes housing bill amid feds’ threat to strategy to prevent homelessness

Drawing on that support, Ramsey County offered a particularly laudable example of moving unsheltered people into housing. Federal financing through programs like the expanded child tax credit proved that reducing poverty is a relatively straightforward equation of resources and distribution. 

Yet these programs were one-time flashes in the pan, disappearing almost as soon as they made an impact. (It sadly reminds me of the plot of the 1990 Robert DiNero/Robin Williams tearjerker, “Awakenings,” only for government.) 

Instead, today’s federal government actively exacerbates these same social problems. For example, the unconstitutional rescinding of healthcare funding and the removal of food aid subsidies both shift costs onto local governments, widening budget crises. Policy decisions amount to the weaponization of poverty against blue cities, in particular. Of course, during the recent occupation of Minnesota cities by federal agents, this latent conflict became far more literal, direct and damaging.

Local governments can’t solve this problem, and the federal government won’t, which means the only meaningful solution to encampments has to come at the state level. The next Minnesota governor and Legislature should make housing a priority, and that doesn’t just mean programs to build more market-rate housing, though this is also important. Proposals must include statewide funding to alleviate the desperate needs of our unhoused population. 

The most pragmatic solution is a “housing first” model, funded at the state and regional level. A recent article in Slate by housing policy experts Daniel Denvir and Yonah Freemark points to examples of public or social housing done at the state and local levels. It is possible to think about solutions that bypass the broken federal government.

Related: Using fencing to curb homelessness in the Twin Cities is an insult

In the short term, solutions also exist, such as the recommendations of city leaders like St. Paul Council Member Molly Coleman. Improving quality of life in encampments is possible by providing services, safety measures and connecting desperate people to existing resources. Yet both Minneapolis and St. Paul are facing significant budget deficits next year, on top of a tax-base crunch stemming from longer-term real estate changes. This is why advocates and allies pushing back against the displacement must also include calls for state funding. 

For anyone other than direct neighbors of informal settlements, clearing encampments will not improve things on the ground in either Minneapolis or St. Paul. Instead of two or three larger camps, St. Paul will have two dozen smaller ones, in more places. People will still be living scattered in alleys, vacant lots, on escarpments, or elsewhere at the margins of formal urban life.

There are no good solutions to this problem at the local level. For mayors, it’s a catch-22 game of whack-a-mole, kicking the can to the next least worst site. Minnesota needs a progressive state government to fund solutions to these problems. Until that happens, all the clearances in the world will not create anything but strife. 

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