By DaKota Morgan
Housing Justice Organizer
East Side Freedom Library
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When Saint Paul permanently closed the Pig’s Eye Park encampment on August 5, people kept asking one question:
Where are people supposed to go?
The City said the closure followed weeks of outreach and was paired with expanded emergency shelter capacity. Those resources matter. Shelter matters.
But nearly two months later, we know more about what the response actually cost and where people actually went.
The Pig’s Eye closure itself cost roughly $440,000. At the same time, the City and Ramsey County invested about $2 million into expanded shelter capacity connected to the response.
Only seven former Pig’s Eye residents were confirmed to have used those shelter beds.
Meanwhile, an estimated 90 to 100 people relocated to another encampment near Shepard Road and Randolph Avenue.
Those numbers should make us ask more than whether resources were available.
We should ask if those resources actually met the needs of the people they were supposed to serve.
The issue is not that money was spent on shelter. We need more emergency shelter, especially low-barrier shelter that works for couples, people with pets, people with disabilities, people who use substances, and people carrying trauma.
But when nearly $440,000 can be spent carrying out one encampment closure, and millions more can be mobilized for shelter that only a small number of displaced residents use, we should ask whether our system is designed around supporting unhoused people or around making homelessness less visible.
Because Pig’s Eye did not disappear.
The tents moved.
And on the East Side, that fits into a much longer history of disinvestment and displacement.
Disinvestment is not always dramatic. Often, it is ordinary.
It looks like roads remaining in poor condition, community organizations stretching limited funding across growing needs, recreation programs operating with fewer resources, and residents traveling farther for services.
Sometimes it looks like having to fight to keep the institutions your neighborhood already has.
This summer, Mayor Kaohly Her’s original proposed 2027 budget included eliminating funding for the Dayton’s Bluff Library. It was the only Saint Paul library proposed for closure.
The proposal came less than a month after the City Council had approved a three-year renewal of the library’s lease.
After significant community response, funding for the library was restored in a supplemental budget proposal.
That is good news.
But the fact that the library is staying open does not erase the question raised by the proposal:
Why was the only library considered for closure on the East Side?
The significance is not simply whether the building ultimately closes. It is that another East Side institution was placed on the table as something the city might be able to do without.
That question has history behind it.
The East Side was once a major center of industrial employment. As major employers closed, downsized, or left, jobs disappeared and commercial corridors struggled. Then the foreclosure crisis hit many East Side neighborhoods especially hard, stripping families of homes and wealth while renters were displaced alongside homeowners.
Public investment did not consistently match those losses.
A University of Minnesota Center for Urban and Regional Affairs analysis of Saint Paul capital improvement spending from 2006 through 2015 found that the four planning districts making up the East Side received some of the lowest per-capita capital improvement spending in the city.
That matters because disinvestment compounds.
Jobs leave. Families lose wealth. Housing becomes unstable. Infrastructure deteriorates. Community organizations fill the gaps.
Eventually, the consequences become visible enough that government is forced to respond.
That is where encampments enter this story.
People living in tents did not cause East Side disinvestment. Their presence makes visible a much larger housing crisis.
Deeply affordable housing remains scarce. Supportive housing remains insufficient. Shelter remains necessary, but shelter is not a permanent home.
So where are people supposed to go?
If someone cannot afford an apartment, where do they go?
If shelter does not work for their family, their pet, their disability, their belongings, their substance use, or their trauma, where do they go?
If supportive housing has a waiting list, where do they go?
Eventually, some people sleep outside.
Then the tents become visible.
Then visibility becomes the emergency.
Pig’s Eye gives us a clear example of what happens next.
Money becomes available. Staff are deployed. Contracts are signed. Shelter capacity is expanded. Cleanup crews arrive.
The tents disappear.
But if dozens of people simply move to another encampment, have we resolved homelessness?
Or have we relocated it?
That is why we should be asking what nearly $440,000 could accomplish if invested before an encampment reached the point of closure.
What could sustained investment in housing navigation, harm reduction, outreach, eviction prevention, supportive housing, and deeply affordable housing accomplish?
And when millions of dollars are made available for shelter but the intended residents overwhelmingly do not use it, we should not stop at saying the beds existed.
We should ask why they were not used.
Were they accessible? Did people trust the systems offering them? Could couples stay together? Could people bring pets and possessions? Were the spaces compatible with disability, trauma, substance use, and the realities of living outside?
Those questions matter before the next closure, not after it.
The East Side has seen versions of this pattern before.
Where do workers go when jobs disappear?
Where do renters go when housing becomes unaffordable?
Where do families go when neighborhood resources are reduced?
Where do residents go when investment finally arrives after decades of neglect, but they can no longer afford to remain?
And where did people from Pig’s Eye go when their encampment closed?
For many of them, the answer appears to have been:
another encampment.
If Saint Paul wants fewer encampments, the long-term answer cannot simply be removing tents.
It requires deeply affordable housing, supportive housing, accessible shelter, harm reduction, outreach, and services people will actually use.
It also requires sustained investment in neighborhoods before they reach crisis — in libraries, recreation centers, streets, public spaces, and community organizations.
The question raised by Pig’s Eye was never simply whether Saint Paul could make an encampment disappear.
The City proved that it could.
The question is what happened to the people afterward.
Nearly $440,000 later, millions invested in shelter, only seven confirmed shelter users, and dozens of residents relocated to another encampment, we are still asking the same question:
Where are they supposed to go?