We don’t need a think tank. We need Housing First.

In the past several months, there has been an uproar in Minneapolis over unsheltered homelessness, and in particular with regard to encampments. Housed residents with opposing viewpoints have shown up to community meetings, before the City Council and even in the streets. Mutual aid groups provide unhoused residents with food, water and basic survival supplies. On the other side of the spectrum, housed folks have joined together to forcefully evict unhoused residents from various empty lots in the city.

After a particularly heated community meeting, Andrea Jenkins, the council member for Ward 8, decided to form a think tank to discuss the issue over a series of three two-hour meetings. Community members chosen by Jenkins and her staff will work together to come up with a solution to the "problem" of encampments. Anyone could apply to be a member of the think tank, meaning that many of the members of the think tank are housed Minneapolis residents with neither lived experience nor any professional qualifications. Meanwhile, other City Council members have been working on ordinances to support unhoused residents for months, and these ordinances are in the process of going through committee and heading to the full council. Although these ordinances are supported by extensive research, Ward 13 Council Member Linea Palmisano and her constituents are pushing the council to delay voting on them until the results of the six hours of "think tank" are released.

The real problem is that we already have a solution, and Mayor Jacob Frey and the executive branch of the city are the main roadblocks to making any genuine progress. Hennepin County is a Housing First county. Housing First is a solution to homelessness that has been proven to work in multiple studies, in multiple countries. The gist of Housing First is that the cheapest and best way to end homelessness is by getting people into dignified housing and providing them with wraparound support services to keep them housed. These services can include recovery services, mental health support and much more. Hennepin County even participates in Built for Zero, a program committed to measurably ending homelessness. To that end, the county helps fund a number of Housing First-focused nonprofits and has drastically reduced certain populations of chronically unhoused people.

Hennepin County's annual Point in Time Count website notes that homelessness is up in the county, and lists the reason — housing costs are increasing. This conclusion lines up with all reputable scholarship on homelessness. Even so, Mayor Frey recently called into a radio show to claim that fentanyl is at the heart of homelessness in Minneapolis, referring to encampments as "open-air drug markets" and claiming the city has sufficient shelter beds and housing. This is easily disproved; advocates' phone calls to Adult Shelter Connect on days of encampment evictions often reveal that there are few shelter beds available, and never enough for all the encampment residents.

The most straightforward solution to the issue of encampments would be for Frey to join the City Council in actively pursuing solutions that work. Rather than funding dozens of encampment clearances, miles of fencing and rubble drops, he should push for funding the construction of affordable, permanent supportive housing units so that the city is able to house all of its residents. As it stands, the city is wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars to chase residents around the city, dollars that would be much better spent to simply house them.