Every day at The Overhead Wire, we collect news about cities and send the links to our email list. At the end of the week we take some of the most popular stories and post them to Greater Greater Washington, a group blog similar to streets.mn that focuses on urban issues in the D.C. region. […]
(Image by Flickr user Fibonacci Blue) I’ve worked in social services for about a decade, almost all of it working on various forms of supportive housing. These days I chair the Suburban Metro Area Continuum of Care, and sit on the governing board of Heading Home Ramsey, in addition to my actual job cobbling together […]
The panhandler at our freeway exit was as much a fixture as the billboard sitting in stalwart silence there. The actual person varied daily, but we could always count on someone camping out at the stoplight. I saw this from the very beginning of our life in North Minneapolis, and I wondered when my girls […]
You may have read the rumors that Metro Transit is going to cut overnight service on the Green Line, due in part to to too many people using the trains as shelter. It’s a tough situation, to say the least, pitting public transit against the basic human right to security and a roof over one’s […]
Dignity. Housing. Help. Five dollars. That’s what some people clamored for when they saw us on the Blue Line one July morning. With our safety vests on and our clipboards wielded, they recognized us as staff (volunteer or paid, it didn’t seem to matter to them) conducting the Point-In-Time Count. It’s a quarterly – now […]
After a brief hiatus, Here to There is back with two new episodes. In episode 7, we take on the complex issue of social cohesion and the ways in which mobility and transportation impact the ability of individuals or groups to thrive as members of society. In the first half of the episode, we join […]
[This is the first in a series of posts about “homelessness”.] I start quite deliberately with the scare quotes above because it is one of my primary objectives here to articulate my discomfort with the way the term “homelessness” is conventionally used. I will argue that it is a crude and inadequately descriptive piece of shorthand that […]
The podcast this week is a conversation with Randall Cohn, a law student and long-time worker and wonk working on homelessness policy in Minneapolis. We sat down the other day in the back room of Club Jaeger, right in the North Loop near many of the homeless shelters of downtown Minneapolis. We chatted all bout […]