Minneapolis and St. Paul

Beginning in the early 1980s, retail merchants, workers, and residents of Minneapolis and St. Paul [Page 388]began to notice increasing numbers of homeless adults in the downtown business districts. Independently but almost simultaneously, both cities convened task forces to investigate. In 1984, each task force commissioned a survey of homelessness, which found that most homeless individuals were adult males, often chronic alcoholics, and that their numbers were slowly increasing due to the demolition [Page 389]of low-cost hotels and flophouses. At the time, family homelessness was virtually unknown, largely because homeless adults with children were able to receive immediate vouchers for temporary accommodations from the emergency service departments in both cities.

Beginning in 1985, the Minnesota Department of Economic Security began to conduct quarterly counts of persons living in emergency shelters. The first count, conducted in August of that year, found 538 homeless individuals using shelters in Minneapolis and 254 in St. Paul. Approximately half of those were adult men, one-quarter were adult women, and one-quarter were children. Twentyeight children were reported as homeless and on their own, unaccompanied by any adult.

The first face-to-face surveys in homeless shelters, conducted by Wilder Research Center in St. Paul and the Hennepin County Office of Planning and Development in Minneapolis, found that more than half of all shelter residents were white, 25 percent were American Indian, and 16 percent were African-American. Only 8 percent of shelter clients were married, and only about 5 percent of residents had children with them.

In sum, during the mid-1980s the average homeless shelter user in the Twin Cities was thirty-five years old, white, and male, whose most recent fixed address was in Minneapolis or St. Paul. Only 15 percent of shelter users had moved from another state. About 15 percent of homeless adults were employed, and less than 5 percent had substantial part-time or full-time work.

During this time, homeless shelters were considered unsuitable for families by both county and private agencies. Typically, they diverted families to other accommodations—providing vouchers for a night at a hotel or small-scale family emergency housing, for example. Nonetheless, faced with families' rising demand for emergency shelter in the last half of 1983, Minneapolis created the area's first ongoing accommodation specifically for homeless families.

The St. Paul survey, first conducted in 1984 and repeated in 1986 and 1989, asked additional questions about physical and mental health. The 1984 study found that 43 percent of those surveyed had chronic physical health problems and 30 percent reported mental health problems, including 19 percent who had been hospitalized for mental health conditions. In addition, 30 percent reported chemical [Page 390]dependency problems, and 43 percent had been in a detoxification center within the past six months. This paralleled a similar finding in Hennepin County, where some 40 to 45 percent of homeless men were chronic alcoholics.

On the heels of these surveys, the initial task forces made several recommendations. These included an increase in the use of public/private partnerships to develop housing projects, including more transitional housing, the employment of outreach workers to help homeless adults apply for public assistance, the development of employment assistance programs based in drop-in centers and homeless shelters, and better access to basic health needs such as bathing and shower facilities and medical outreach assistance.

...