Homelessness down by a third in state’s largest county since 2020 high

Hennepin County is making progress addressing its homelessness problem, but maintaining those hard-fought successes faces growing financial uncertainty.

Overall, unsheltered homelessness is down 33% since its most recent peak in 2020, according to county data. There also has been a similar drop in families needing emergency shelter after last year’s spike, which was largely driven by an influx of immigrant families.

Leaders of the county’s housing stability work credit a multipronged approach that costs about $190 million annually to keep homelessness “rare, brief and nonrecurring.”

It includes emergency help for struggling renters, a rapid-response team to get people off the streets and an ongoing push to build and maintain affordable housing. But housing officials say they really started seeing success when they focused more closely on the personal histories and challenges of the people they are trying to help.

“It’s not an accident that the housing outcomes started improving significantly in 2022 and each year since,” said David Hewitt, housing stability director. “I think you can trace many system improvements and point to that moment, coming out of the pandemic, and say this is the point when things really started hitting.”

But the funding that supports this work is increasingly at risk. Pandemic money is gone, and a lot of the federal resources that back housing stability programs are in question as the Trump administration slashes federal spending.

“We go after every resource we can,” said Hewitt. “We know what it costs to prevent an eviction. If there are fewer dollars, you can prevent fewer evictions.”

In January, government workers, nonprofit groups and volunteers fanned out across the county and found 427 people who were unsheltered, a 33% decline since 2020 when numbers last peaked. The annual PIT count also found a 30% reduction in families needing shelter compared with last year.

Hennepin County has a “shelter all families” policy and saw demand spike in January 2024. The jump was driven by the expiration of the pandemic eviction moratorium and an influx of new immigrants, which drove the county five times over its typical family shelter capacity.

Immigration policy changes that began under former President Joe Biden and escalated under President Donald Trump have dramatically slowed the number of people crossing the border.

County officials and housing nonprofits don’t ask people’s citizenship status, so it is unclear whether all those new immigrants are still in the area. But housing workers point out 96% of the people they’ve helped since 2020 remain in stable housing.

Social workers acknowledge the PIT count is an imperfect system that misses people. But they say the regularity with which it is done every year provides valuable information that’s backed up by other county data.

It can be tricky to match someone with housing without understanding their background and specific challenges. Social workers say it is important to understand their backstory, their support system and any circumstances that might keep them from maintaining stable housing.

County staff and housing nonprofits are increasingly relying on this type of information about their clients that’s kept in the HMIS database. Anytime someone swipes their community card at a shelter or interacts with a social worker it’s entered in the database.

“It is truly a game-changer,” said Danielle Werder, a senior housing stability administrator. “We’ve created the system to work as a care coordination tool, rather than just a data dump.”

Tenzin Banari, a supervisor in the county’s coordinated entry system, says the approach is important to clients’ long-term success. “It is not just about getting people into housing. We want them to thrive and sustain that housing,” she said.

Steve Horsfield, executive director of nonprofit Simpson Housing Services, agrees that having a repository of information to help social workers better understand their clients’ needs makes the system feel less disjointed. It also keeps people from having to repeatedly retell their traumatic experiences.

Housing stability workers worry their recent successes could be short-lived. Homelessness is at its core an economic problem, and they see big challenges with coming changes to the social safety net.

Tens of millions of dollars funneled to the county during the pandemic has been spent. State lawmakers approved $1 billion in 2023 for housing stability and homelessness prevention, but much of it was one-time funding.

More affordable housing is being built in Hennepin County, but there is still a deficit of about 34,000 deeply affordable homes.

Now, local officials and advocates say the Trump administration has put a “perpetual storm cloud” over federal funding across multiple agencies, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Communities across the nation have sued the administration over what they claim are unconstitutional restrictions Trump’s executive orders have put on funds already approved by Congress.