Advocates who work with St. Paul’s homeless residents are sounding the alarm over a plan by Mayor Kaohly Her to shut down the city’s three largest encampments beginning with the Pig’s Eye camp on Aug. 5.
City officials say overdose deaths, fires, reported sexual assaults, an increase in crime and unsafe conditions in the sometimes contaminated sites forced them to act.
“These are not sweeps. This has been a gradual, coordinated effort leading up to the closure,” said Matt Wagenius, a spokesman for the mayor. He said Ramsey County teams were on site at the Pig’s Eye camp beginning Tuesday to connect residents to housing and other resources.
But those who work directly with residents at the encampments say the closures will put residents at more risk.
Two dozen activists showed up at a St. Paul City Council meeting on Wednesday to protest the city’s plan, carrying signs that said “Evictions kill” or “Do you know a single resident’s name?” Several attempted to testify but were cut off because the issue was not on the agenda.
“We want to make sure both the council and the mayor’s office understand we’re not going to accept this, and that we think this is a humanitarian crisis,” Rising Waters Mutual Aid member Linda Voight told Sahan Journal ahead of the meeting. “Evictions, no matter whether you have the resources or not, are never the answer.”
Activists, camp residents caught off guard
On July 8, the mayor’s office announced through a press release that the city would begin closing the encampments. The decision came as a surprise to nonprofit organizations and mutual aid groups that work with unhoused people but also the encampment residents.
Her cited concerns over health, safety and human dignity as the reasons for the closures, promising the city would work with its unhoused residents to help them find shelter and housing.
The city will begin clearing the sites on Aug. 5 with the Pig’s Eye encampment, which has about 200 residents. Dates have not been announced for the James Avenue encampment near Shepherd Road, which has about 60 residents, and an encampment by L’Orient Street, near a former Kmart, which has approximately 35 residents, according to Rising Waters.
Plans to close the Pig Eye’s Park encampment have been in the works since then-Mayor Melvin Carter began planning for it last year, Wagenius, said in an email to Sahan Journal.
He said the city’s 35-day notice period is longer than what officials have provided in past encampment closures.
“We intentionally extended the timeline to give people more opportunity to access resources, develop a plan, and make a successful transition rather than feeling rushed out,” he said.
Michael Russel, Kmart encampment resident of five years, learned of the planned sweeps a week after the mayor’s announcement through “word of mouth.”
While Russel does not know what this will lead to for him, he hopes the city will help him get shelter and health support. At 63, he is struggling with substance abuse and injuries from car accidents he has been in in the past year and a half, while also supporting his nephew who lives in the encampment with him.
“I feel bad because I don’t have anywhere else to go,” Russel said. “… I just pray that God helps us out here.”
Kat Hunter, co-founder of Rising Waters Mutual Aid, is skeptical of claims that the city and county can find enough beds for all those who will be displaced and said the closures will isolate people who found community in the encampments and make it harder to get help from nonprofits and mutual aid groups.
Rising Waters volunteers deliver food, hygiene items, tents, coolers and other supplies to St. Paul encampments three times a week.
“The statistics on overdoses in and around encampment sweeps are horrifying to an extreme degree,” Hunter said. “I think that I will lose friends, and I won’t know if it’s because they’ve died, or because they chose to move further into the county, or because I just can’t find them.”
Justin Lewandowski, director of Open Hands Midway, echoed Hunter’s worries about the housing availability. Lewandowski was among the community partners that learned of the encampment closures a day before the city announcement on a conference call with the mayor. He, and all the other organizers he has been in touch with, were unaware of the city’s plans.
“A lot of the [unhoused] folks that I’ve talked to, [are] just waiting for housing, just waiting for the call,” Lewandowski said. “The coordinated entry system to get into housing takes months, if not years. The shelter programs alone are are bursting in that capacity, and to say that the plan is to provide wraparound services when we have no housing, to say that we’re going to work with community partners when many of them who are doing the work directly with our unhoused neighbors were blindsided by this … we could have done so much more.”
Currently, there are 2,668 unhoused people who have completed the coordinated entry assessment and are waiting for a housing referral in Ramsey County.
Tony Dillworth has been living in St. Paul encampments for about six years. He has been on the waiting list for housing for four. The city has offered him options that Dillworth was not interested in for a number of reasons, which involved the far distance from his workplace, his partner and living conditions.
Minneapolis saw similar hesitation from unhoused residents when it came to accepting shelter the city provided after their sweeps at the end of 2025. Out of 169 people the city offered alternative shelter, only nine accepted.
Over the years, Dillworth has also experienced disrespect and harassment from city officials, which fostered even greater distrust in city services. Recently, a law enforcement officer threatened him to throw out all of Dillworth’s belongings in the trash. These included Dillworth’s documents he needed to obtain housing.
“If you’re not here when they come to the clean-up, they will take all your stuff without thinking about it, not knowing what’s valuable to you,” Dillworth said. “They don’t check for nothing. If you’re not around, they just take [everything]. I would make sure I was here, so they couldn’t mess with my stuff.”
Another resident of the Kmart encampment, Justin Demico Ford, recently received confirmation that he will get housing. Ford has been living at the camp for two years. Before then, he was a manager at Leeann Chin in White Bear Lake. After getting robbed in downtown St. Paul, Ford lost his job and his housing. Now, Ford is close to getting housing with the help of two nonprofit organizations.
“I never had experience trying to get housing from the city,” Ford said. “They never offered their services. But I went through outside sources to help with that situation, and got housing. That’s in the works right now without the city’s help.”
Following Pig’s Eye Park encampment closure in early August, Hunter predicts that people will relocate to the other smaller encampments in the city. The mayor’s office has not yet announced closure dates for the James Avenue and Kmart sites.
Mixed response from City Council
Several City Council members have spoken in support of the mayor’s plan to close the three encampments.
Council Member Cheniqua Johnson, who represents the ward where the Pig’s Eye Park encampment is located, said in a statement that the encampment had become “unsafe and unsustainable.”
In a statement, staffer Silver Moran-Stewart said Johnson was working to balance safety concerns from neighbors with a mandate to make sure encampment residents are “treated with dignity” and connected to housing and support services.
Council Member Saura Jost told the Pioneer Press that closing the encampments was “a difficult but necessary decision.”
Others had a more conflicted response. Council Member Molly Coleman said in a Facebook post that the encampments were unsafe, but the city needed to balance the harm of uprooting residents with a clear plan to make sure camp residents have housing and support.
The City Council will hold a workshop on the issue on Wednesday, July 22, at 12:30. The session is not open to public comment.
Correction: The spelling of Mayor Kaohly Her’s name has been updated in this story.
