CN04: A City Fenced Off

I'm so angry.

I’m angry at the kind of leadership that mistakes photo ops for policy.

The kind that bulldozes encampments and calls it progress.

The kind that builds fences instead of relationships.

The kind that wins votes in the margins of the city and none of its central core.

I live in and am very invested in Minneapolis. Every election cycle they promise compassion, coordination, and housing as a human right. What we get instead are press releases, vetoes, and fences around former encampments. The city has more chain-link than courage because of votes from people who will never see it. My city keeps building fences between its conscience and its convenience.

This administration bulldozes encampments. Tents are temporary homes, valid and necessary. But they use heavy machinery to crush them and the few belongings people still have: birth certificates, medication, family photos. Call it clean-up in the name of public safety, but it’s optics.

To turn public land into private profit. Developers getting subsidies. Slumlords rewarded with silence. While people sleeping outside get citations and displacement.

Real leadership would mean working collaboratively with Hennepin County, the state of Minnesota, and the people most affected. It would mean facing the crisis directly instead of staging performances of control.

Instead, Mayor Frey keep the crisis visible enough to fundraise from but not visible enough to really confront.

Those of us in housing, outreach, and family services hold what's left behind. We try to find safe and reliable shelter, which our systems don't provide. Shelter, sure. But safe? Nah.

We want to keep kids stable and rebuild trust with residents who’ve watched the city destroy their belongings and their hope. Our jobs get harder. Maybe impossible. Our compassion gets tested by constant roadblocks and vetoes. Our neighborhoods grow more divided, less welcoming, less connected than they could be.

I want a city that tells the truth about itself. One that treats people as neighbors, not nuisances. One that spends as much energy housing people as it does hiding them. I'm immensely proud of my City Councilor and Council Vice President Aisha Chughtai for doing all of this work even when she and her colleagues are constantly thrown barriers from the Mayor's office. And now.... we're facing four more years of those barriers.

But we’ll keep showing up in the gaps; building what this executive leadership refuses to imagine. Because the collapse isn’t theoretical here; it’s been happening in and on our streets. Progressive victories are just proof of our persistence, not the goal of it.

The goal has always been each other.