Hennepin County is unique in comparison to most other jurisdictions across the country and state because it invested almost 40% of its pandemic recovery funds into homelessness prevention. The effort was critical in helping the county address homelessness in the years following a 2020 record high, David Hewitt, director of housing stability, told MinnPost.
Now the county is facing a new challenge. American Rescue Plan funds used to build out a robust homelessness prevention program 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 $20 million deficit.
This means the county’s homelessness response team has one year of needed funding for its first-in-the-country program — which was recognized last year in a documentary by national nonprofit Invisible People — before an alternative must be found.
This funding is not going to come from the state. The county already tried to go to state lawmakers to pass further policy to fund the program and failed to get a majority of buy-in, Hewitt said.
“While (not getting more state funding) is disappointing and certainly contributes to a challenging environment, we have no desire to go backwards,” he added.
Now, Hewitt’s department is looking to its partners to help find a sustainable solution, 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 said. That’s what makes finding sustainable funding for this kind of work difficult. 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 said. “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 investment have produced speak for themselves, Hewitt added.
During its 2025 Point in Time (PIT) count — a federally mandated count of sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness conducted nationwide — Hennepin County found 2,651 people staying in shelters and transitional housing programs and 427 people experiencing unsheltered homelessness. Those are 21% and 14% decreases, respectively, since 2024.
The number of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness was at its peak during the 2020 PIT count, when workers counted 642 people sleeping in unsheltered settings, according to the county report. The 2025 count showed a 14% decrease in unsheltered homelessness year-over-year, and a 33.5% decrease since 2020.
While Hennepin County has already published its PIT count findings for 2025, not all jurisdictions have done so yet. The final report compiling all counts across the country will be released at the end of the year.
But looking back at 2024, nationally, the rate of unsheltered homelessness was about 1 in 1,300 people, Hewitt said. In Hennepin County, however, the rate of homelessness was about 1 in 2,700 people, less than half the national average.
Comparable metros like Portland, Seattle and Denver have seen the opposite shift occur. In Portland’s Multnomah County (which has already reported its 2025 PIT count numbers), the estimated homeless population in 2025, per the PIT was 14,400, a 26% increase from the 11,400 counted in 2024. In Seattle’s King County and Denver’s Denver County, sheltered and unsheltered homelessness has been reported to be at record highs.
The difference between the Hennepin County numbers and those seen in other jurisdictions comes down to investment, Hewitt said. Over the past five years, millions of county dollars through the American Rescue Plan have been spent on things like preventing evictions, providing case management work and preservation of affordable housing.
For example, in 2024 alone, the county awarded $17 million to create or preserve 1,500 units of affordable housing, with 40% of those units affordable to people with incomes at 30% or less of the area median income. The county also provided emergency rental assistance to more than 2,000 households, with fewer than 2% of those households entering homelessness. This required investment in case workers and social workers. Now nearly 200 people work on the homelessness and housing stability team.
Though the long-term sustainability of this programming 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 most impactful thing to do and the right thing to do while we were able to invest,” he said. “We believed that it would show its value in a way that would allow us to make the case for continued investment at the state and now in other spaces.”
An eye on Minneapolis homelessness
A few 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 17 encampments from forming due to the order, according to a Minneapolis Police Department news release.
Frey told media outlets in March that the number of people in homeless encampments in the city was down to 32 from nearly 300 in the fall.
The mayor has said this reduction of unhoused people sleeping outside is the result of the city’s continued practice of breaking up large encampments, along with ramping up outreach to unhoused. But in April, the Minnesota Star Tribune followed up on the mayor’s report, noting that while many unhoused people became less visible over a short period of time, many are still on the streets but now out of sight.
This is where it becomes important to understand the methodology used to collect numbers when looking at the broader picture of area homelessness.
A look at both PIT count data and the city’s numbers — as well as the differences in methodology used to collect the data — paints a more robust picture of what’s going on.
The data the mayor referred to is not collected in the same way as PIT count data. From day-to-day, the city is collecting numbers based on 311 calls reporting people experiencing unsheltered homelessness, the most 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 311 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 said.
“It’s far easier to count sheltered homelessness than unsheltered,” Hewitt explained. The difficulty lies in visibility.
In a statement to MinnPost, Enrique Velazquez, director of regulatory services for the city of Minneapolis, said 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 breaking up camps, Velazquez wrote, “The city of Minneapolis has made significant progress in preventing encampments from forming and connecting individuals to shelter and housing.”
Update: This story has been updated to reflect the county originally miscalculated the number of people staying in shelters and transitional housing programs posted on its website. The number counted was 2,651, marking a 21% reduction year-over-year.
This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
