St. Paul permanently closes Pig's Eye Park encampment
Crews in St. Paul, Minnesota, cleared out the city's largest encampment on Wednesday.
Crews began clearing out the encampment at Pig's Eye Park around 8 a.m. It is the first of three sites to close under St. Paul's new "Coordinated Transition Plan," which has been controversial since the start.
Advocates are raising concerns about where people will go after the camp is cleared. Residents and community members helping them move said many plan to relocate to other encampments around the city.
"There are ups and downs with everywhere you go and any place you are, any group of people you're around," Kenny, who lives in the encampment, said. "It's just life, and we're living, dealing with human problems and they're coming in and being inhuman and try to tell other humans what to do."
Before crews moved in, a community breakfast and demonstration was happening, with protesters attempting to block the closure.
"It's tense, it's chaotic, there's a lot of fear, there's a lot of unknowing. No one knows where they can go, where there's space, it's just chaos," community member Kyle Dekker said. "People forget that when someone's unhoused, they see them somehow as people not worthy of love and I'm here to make sure that, one, everyone knows that they're people worthy of love, and that all of us are one horrible medical accident away, one massive layoff from being here ourselves."
The city said drug use, assaults and fires are driving up 911 calls and making it too dangerous for the roughly 140 people living at Pig's Eye Park.
"As it related to individuals who are still there, we're still having conversations with them. I just want to highlight and say when the city has done this differently, we continue to learn, we continue to grow. And I just want to highlight that in past experiences we have never really ever had a situation where they have been arrested because of this process that we have," said Assistant Mayor Cedric Baker.
Ahead of Wednesday's closure, city officials said they've been focused on outreach, connecting people living in the camp with shelter, housing and health services. The city said it has added emergency shelter capacity through Ramsey County and outreach teams will work with residents to help them move and connect with resources.
For anyone who refuses to leave, the city says it will continue its "Four Es" approach: Engagement, education, encouragement and enforcement as a last resort.
The city designated an area for protesters in anticipation, saying in part, "This is a difficult day" and "we ask that everyone present allow the process to proceed safely."
"Our focus throughout the day remains connecting people to shelter and services," the city added.
Emotions were high at a public hearing about the encampment on Tuesday.
"There are real people with real commitments that are ready to help," one resident said.
"You just threw away $1 million from a city with a very large deficit that I just heard at a budget meeting," said another resident.
City officials could not tell WCCO how many shelter beds are available and how many have been filled now that the encampment at Pig's Eye Park is shut down.
Union Gospel Mission Twin Cities had about two dozen beds open on Wednesday evening.
Sammy Watkins is the director of chaplains and does outreach work for the mission. Watkins said he's spent several years working with people at the Pig's Eye Park encampment and was back again as the city began to clear tents.
"We were able to bring a guy in today and so that was awesome," said Watkins. "He said if somebody would take me in right now and invest in me, it's a safe place I would go right now."
Watkins said the man was actually living in a different encampment, near the intersection of Randolph and Shepard.
Once people started moving from Pig's Eye to the other encampment, so did the outreach teams. Shepard believes at least 50% of the people in the Pig's Eye encampment moved to the camp near Randolph, more than doubling the number of people living there.
"I would like to have had 20 people that I could have sent to the Mission and escorted them back here, but I know that this work is slow and methodical," said Watkins. "We'll keep building those relationships and meeting them where they are."
The county is opening a Transitional Hub in downtown St. Paul, where outreach workers will be available starting Wednesday through Aug. 20 to connect residents with shelter, housing, healthcare, financial assistance and other resources, according to the city. The hub is located at 555 Cedar St.
