Minneapolis Encampment Sweeps Tied to 65% Rise in Overdose Risk

When Minneapolis crews clear a homeless encampment, the streets around it record more drug overdoses than usual for days afterward. That is the central finding of a University of Minnesota study that matched a year of encampment clearances against emergency calls for nonfatal overdoses, and its authors describe it as among the first attempts to put hard numbers behind a complaint harm reduction workers have made for years.

Kumi Smith, a University of Minnesota epidemiologist, led a research team that partnered with community members who had themselves experienced homelessness. Together they documented 87 camps cleared in Minneapolis between April 2024 and March 2025, then compared those dates and locations with the 1,431 nonfatal overdose 911 calls logged in the same period.

Within a two- to four-block radius of a sweep, the risk of an overdose was 65 percent higher than expected over the following three days. The researchers widened the radius to eight blocks and stretched the window to two weeks, and the increase remained statistically significant, according to a summary of findings that have not yet been published.

How the comparison was built

The design is unusual in a field where sweep data is notoriously hard to assemble. Cities rarely publish clearance records in a form researchers can use, and encampment populations move. By recruiting people with lived experience of homelessness to help document the clearances, the team captured a level of timing and location detail that administrative records usually miss.

Joshua Barocas, a physician and public health researcher at the University of Colorado Anschutz, told Axios that the approach "probably captured the sweeps problem better than any other study that we know of." Barocas published a similar study in Denver that found sweeps had no measurable effect on nearby crime rates. Read together, he said, the two studies add to evidence that clearances destabilize the lives of people living outdoors without addressing the conditions that put them there.

What displacement does to overdose risk

The Minneapolis findings land in a long-running argument about how encampment policy interacts with the overdose crisis. Sweeps rarely move people far. They push residents a few blocks, out of sight, and in the process separate them from the outreach workers, syringe exchanges and clinicians who had learned where to find them.

Smith's own summary is blunt. Sweeps "trap city governments in endless, expensive loops," she told Axios. "Sweeps consume enormous public resources only to displace people down a few blocks, all while driving up the risk of overdose."

That reading is consistent with earlier reporting on how displacement affects people who use drugs, including the isolation that follows when a camp is broken up and people who had used in groups begin using alone. Naloxone distribution and medications for opioid use disorder both depend on regular contact with a person; both get harder to maintain once that person's location changes every few weeks. The naloxone and medication-assisted treatment pages on this site describe how those interventions are delivered in practice, including the outreach models that rely on repeat visits to the same spots.

A Stanford researcher pushes back

Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University professor and former Obama administration adviser, cautioned against reading the results as a verdict on sweeps. He told Axios the study does not measure the harms that encampments themselves create for housed residents, nearby businesses and public parks, and he argued the research carries a blind spot in treating the concerns of people who are not homeless and do not use drugs as irrelevant.

"People who use drugs matter," Humphreys said. "So does everybody else."

He also raised a possibility that the Minneapolis data cannot settle: that a clearance functions as a crisis that pushes some people toward housing applications or treatment. Barocas said there is little evidence a sweep accomplishes that, and Smith argued cities do not have to choose between allowing encampments to persist indefinitely and displacing them. She pointed to "resolution" models that connect residents to services gradually instead of removing them on a deadline.

What the Twin Cities do next

The study arrives while both cities are still deciding how to handle camps. St. Paul officials have said they intend to clear all large encampments, though no date for the next sweep has been set.

In Minneapolis, a City Council committee meets Wednesday to consider a proposal that would create managed parking lots where people living in their vehicles could sleep overnight, a model that keeps residents in one place and within reach of services rather than moving them along.

For now the practical takeaway is narrower than the policy debate. The three days after a clearance are a period of elevated risk in the surrounding blocks, which is precisely the window in which outreach teams could concentrate naloxone distribution and re-engagement efforts if cities chose to treat sweeps as a public health event rather than only a sanitation operation.