Speeding toward oblivion

Another homeless encampment pops up in south Minneapolis. A story on KSTP TV-5 caught my attention over the weekend. The latest update,

City leaders, residents, advocates discuss next steps for Minneapolis homeless encampment

It doesn’t sound like the meeting reached any conclusions, but perhaps it was a start.

As the station explains, the encampment is on Bloomington Ave. South at the intersection with 25th Street. It sits on a corner lot formerly occupied by a gas station/convenience store. I visited the site this afternoon.

[To be clear, this in a different encampment than the one I visited last week.]

The original KSTP story focused on the encampment’s impact on the hardware store located adjacent to the abandoned lot. Other than the hardware store and a halal market across the street, the area is primarily residential in character.

KSTP quotes from a statement issued by Ward 9 city council member Jason Chavez. I’ll reprint one sentence from Chavez,

If we don’t have adequate shelter space that’s effective for people and they have nowhere to go, they will be living outside in the community.

The key word is “effective.” From KSTP’s reporting and direct observation, these camps appear to be populated predominantly by habitual drug users. Campers don’t want to stop using in order to enter into local shelters or want to enter into treatment programs.

To their credit, KSTP tried to interview camp residents, who asked the reporters to leave. One observer who agreed to be quoted suggested that campers were also living outside for cultural reasons.

The new development in these south Minneapolis encampments is their more frequent appearance on private property.

The above lot and building changed hands most recently last year, at a price of $400,000, below the $550,000 figure used as a market value for assessing property taxes.

According to county property filings, the owner of record for the address is a company, Sharia Funding LLC, of St. Louis Park.

The owner has been paying property taxes to both the city and county. Total tax on the property approached $24,000 last year. They are not getting the protection they’ve paid for.