Humane encampment response ordinance (2024-00113) Considering an ordinance amending Title 11 of the Minneapolis Code of Ordinances relating to Health and Sanitation, adding a new Chapter 237 establishing provisions of a humane encampment response policy.
Action Taken: Adopted
From the Minneapolis City Council Regular Meeting on December 11, 2025
Phillips Neighborhood “hosted” over 40 encampments from 2020 to Jan. 2025. It was no less than urban terrorism for the neighbors surrounding these encampments, which were no more than places for abused trafficked women to do business, dealers to sell their drugs to the inhabitants of the camps and places to get high with no consequences. Once again, the police will not be allowed to enter, no matter what is going on in those places and the low-income, working-class neighborhoods will once more take the brunt of the city council’s bad policies concerning the unsheltered addicted. We need a drug court again, where the addicted stood before a judge and were given the decision to go to treatment or go to jail. This system worked in the 1990s and could work again if we had a city council with no tolerance for crime and the destruction of neighborhoods, who were just as willing to hold law-brakers accountable, as they are of the MPD. What a relief it was for my neighbors and me when police were finally allowed to go in and trespass the enablers setting up the yurts and providing firewood. For the past year, a high percent of the unsheltered addicted found low-bar shelter and/or treatment and our city was free of crime camps. With that said, much more needs to be done. We could start with a drug court again and full funding for treatment facilities, and no tolerance for open air drug markets and public using.
According to the ordinance the City can order an encampment closed with 7 days notice but cannot actually remove it.
City staff can only “Notify encampment residents that they must begin vacating the encampment site.” Under this new law, the City would have already been required to provide porta-pottiess, hygiene products, handwashing stations, and secure and accessible free storage of personal property with a photographic inventory for the stored property.
What would this cost?