Written by Carla Godwin, executive director of the PERIS Foundation
On one night in January every year, the Minnesota Interagency Council on Homelessness participates in a nationwide Point-in-Time count of people experiencing sheltered and unsheltered homelessness.
The 2024 report published in October, found that in Minnesota “9,182 persons were counted overall, a 9.4% increase from the previous year.” The report further noted that the number of people in families experiencing homelessness increased by 41% over two years and that racial disparities in homelessness persist.
While a 9.4% increase in Minnesota is problematic, it is approximately half the national increase of 18.1%.
Indeed, the count quantifies a visible and felt tragedy unfolding for Minnesotans across our state that compels response and demands that we ask hard questions and move toward action. What would it take to solve homelessness in Minnesota? To create humane solutions to encampments? To provide effective and comprehensive housing support to Minnesotans who need it most? To lead on effective solutions that could impact homelessness nationwide?
These questions came into sharp focus for me three years ago when I took on the executive director role at a start-up housing non-profit called the PERIS Foundation. PERIS is dedicated to creating effective housing models for youth aging out of foster care. I see first hand the obstacles to housing stability young people encounter and I navigate the challenges of creating responsive and sufficient solutions to those obstacles everyday.
For the past year, I’ve participated in a coalition of Minnesota housing providers—developers, operators, service providers, and funders—that have met to discuss a mounting sense of desperation in the sector and the need for an effective response. I also participate in a sub-coalition of supportive housing providers focused specifically on issues impacting permanent supportive housing and the tenants it serves.
It’s worth pausing here to briefly define affordable housing and supportive housing. Affordable housing is meant to serve those with incomes below the area median income, by providing homes with below market rents. Supportive housing provides access in the form of case management, healthcare, or substance use support. Supportive housing pairs deeply affordable, minimal barrier housing with support services and has proven to be one of the most effective interventions to homelessness.
In these coalitions, I’ve listened as providers articulate challenges like staffing shortages, underfunded service costs, rising rent loss, soaring insurance rates, high acuity in tenant mental health and addiction, escalating security costs. Housing providers across Minnesota are facing strapped operating budgets and insufficient reserves that threaten the existence of essential affordable homes in Minnesota.
The coalitions have worked together to propose legislative and policy solutions to these sector-wide challenges. We’ve noted the need to evaluate and evolve longstanding underwriting assumptions, based on outdated data, to address current societal pain points and financial demands. Solutions have focused on recapitalization with expanded uses to include preservation of existing buildings and services funding.
Yet even while the housing sector fights to preserve essential homes, the 2024 homelessness count demonstrates an increase in people falling through gaps in our housing system. While the steps we’re taking to preserve current housing and develop new housing are essential, we must also move to address gaps in our system and continuum.
The report begins to illuminate these gaps stating,“unsheltered homelessness grew more than sheltered homelessness across the state.”
People are increasingly unable to find, maintain or are opting out of shelter.
“This data suggests this population may not be adequately served by shelter, raising an urgent concern about how the State and local jurisdictional partners can support their housing and service needs,” according to the Interagency Council on Homelessness.
These compounding conditions have led to cities that are less safe, not only for the homeless community identified through the Point-in-Time count, but for all of us. Residential owners and tenants and local business communities also bear the harsh brunt of unsheltered homelessness and are seeking relief through new policies or actions. We need effective and compassionate solutions for all Minnesotans.
As I’ve listened to community, legislators, tenants, and providers over hours of meetings and collaborative conversations, I’ve begun to wonder if a primary point of both potential impact and strain on the system can be found in the current permanent support housing model through which we hope to house Minnesotans who face the highest obstacles to housing stability.
Permanent support housing is a highly effective tool to create stability and address homelessness, but it is often underfunded and inadequately staffed, which creates a gap in our housing continuum.
It is that gap into which people facing homelessness often fall, sometimes refusing shelter beds and transitional housing for the sake of community – in whatever form they have built it on the streets – despite evidence that shows that “people who are unsheltered are more likely to be exposed to violence and trauma and to be engaged more often by police and emergency services than persons who are in shelter.”
Hennepin County’s Single Room Occupancy housing strategy, Minnesota Department of Human Services Housing Stabilization Services, and other efforts have sought to address that gap, but a coordinated and systemic approach is needed.
Finland began a nationally coordinated shift in 2008 from a shelter system to a robust, permanent supportive housing first approach to homelessness, becoming globally known as a leader in solving long-term homelessness. I became curious about their model because it addresses the very niche of the housing continuum to which we’re seeking solutions.
Through the PERIS Foundation, I have begun a conversation with the Y Foundation, the largest non-profit housing provider and landlord in Finland and a key partner in that successful transition. They are committed to connecting visitors with local sector professionals to share strategies and learnings and are excited to welcome a delegation from Minnesota.
Minnesota has long led the nation in housing solutions. Hennepin County’s Continuum of Care and Heading Home Hennepin investments in the Adult Representation Services department, are held up as examples nationally for their outreach work, low-barrier shelters, and efforts to fund permanent supportive housing.
This same innovative thinking has been activated by the current escalation of need and has led housing leaders to wonder if a rethinking of the systemic fragility of current permanent supportive housing and shelter models will have the most significant impact on stabilizing the housing sector as a whole and creating homes for all Minnesotans. To support and facilitate that rethinking, a small group of Minnesota housing professionals and I are travelling to Helsinki, Finland to learn more.
We hope to forge strong relationships with inspirational organizations like the Y Foundation, uncover new methods and strategies for developing more sustainable permanent supportive housing models, and generally inspire new thinking about housing solutions for the most vulnerable Minnesotans so that our approach to affordable and permanent supportive housing and shelter can evolve to meet the moment.
Our initial delegation will be actively learning and sharing what we learn, both in articles here and in a final report, with the hope of inspiring new thinking and an enthusiasm for a larger, more representative delegation to return to Finland. Not only to strengthen our collective understanding of what it would take to really solve homelessness in Minneapolis, but also to fuel our optimism for the future and further bolster our resolve for change.
Stay tuned.
