Two camps, and neither one is a plan. One says: housing first, no conditions, and anyone who suggests otherwise is cruel. The other says: clear the encampments, and anyone who objects is naive. Meanwhile the number of people sleeping outside in Minnesota doesn't move, the money keeps going out, and the same programs get the same contracts year after year regardless of whether anyone actually got housed.
I come at this the way I come at fraud: follow the money, and measure the results.
What's true on both sides
The "housing first" people are right about the core thing: you cannot get someone stable while they're sleeping in a tent. Treatment for addiction or mental illness doesn't work on the street; a person needs a door that locks before anything else can take hold. The evidence for getting people into housing fast is strong, and the "earn your way to a bed" model fails most of the people it's aimed at.
The "clear the camps" people are right about something too, and it's often dismissed: a permanent encampment on a public trail or under a bridge is not compassionate to the people in it or the neighborhood around it. It's dangerous, it's unsanitary, and it's frequently where addiction and predation flourish. "Leave them alone" isn't kindness; it's abandonment with better PR. And a city that has no answer for public space loses the public's patience for the whole effort.
My position: housing and accountability, funded by outcomes
Rapid shelter and housing, without a waiting-list purgatory. Get people inside quickly. That part the housing-first side has right, and the state should fund it.
Paired with real engagement. Housing comes with case management and, where addiction or mental illness is the driver, treatment that's actually offered and actually followed up on. Not a coercive "sober first" gate — but not a key and a shrug, either. The goal is a person staying housed, and that takes more than a lease.
A real answer on public space. Encampments get resolved — with shelter offered first, every time, and then with the expectation that the public trail is a public trail. Both halves matter.
And here's the part that changes everything: fund outcomes, not inputs. Right now we pay providers for beds, for programs, for "services delivered." Pay instead for the only number that matters: cost per person housed and still housed a year later. Publish it, by provider. Turn the money toward the organizations that hit it and off the ones that don't. That's not hostile to nonprofits — the good ones will thrive, because for the first time their results will be visible. It's hostile to the contract that renews itself every year on the strength of a grant application rather than a housed human being. There's a nonprofit-industrial complex in this space, the same way there was in the programs the fraud scandals exposed, and the cure is the same: sunlight and results.
The honest concession
To the housing-first side: outcome funding will feel like it punishes providers working with the hardest cases, and that's a real risk — so the metric has to be risk-adjusted, so a program serving the chronically homeless isn't compared to one serving families with a job. To the enforcement side: resolving an encampment without a shelter offer just moves the tent, and you know it. And to everyone: this costs money up front. Fast housing is expensive. It's also far cheaper than the emergency rooms, jail nights, and cleanup crews we pay for now — but I'd rather say the number than hide it.
What I'd actually do
Fund rapid housing and end the waiting-list model.
Attach engagement — case management and treatment — to every placement.
Pay for outcomes: cost per person housed and kept housed, risk-adjusted, published by provider, with money that follows results.
Resolve encampments with a shelter offer first and the public space returned second.
Fund results, not the nonprofit-industrial complex. Compassion that can't show its outcomes isn't compassion — it's a budget line.
First the facts. Then the fix.
Sources
This is a policy position. The evidence base for rapid placement ("housing first") and its retention outcomes is summarized in the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness and HUD research literature; Minnesota's point-in-time and Wilder Foundation homelessness counts document the state's population. The cost comparison between chronic homelessness and its downstream public costs (emergency care, incarceration) is documented in multiple cost-of-homelessness studies. The outcome-funding model draws on pay-for-success and results-based contracting frameworks. Cross-reference to this series' articles on fraud and program oversight.
Minnesota's current homelessness counts and per-placement cost figures were not pulled to a primary line this pass and are described in general terms. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.