It’s a small space, but Obadiah “O.J.” Pipeboyd, 50, has a name for the studio apartment he keeps within Bimosedaa, the former warehouse building across from the police station on Fourth Street in downtown Minneapolis.
He calls it home, as does Banksy, his new domestic short-hair kitten. Its high ceilings, which lend themselves to his favorite hobby — painting — and its sweeping corner views of the Minneapolis skyline are a far cry from the shelter he lived in for more than a year following a difficult divorce that left him making do off the streets.
“I really appreciate this building from the roof to the bottom,” said Pipeboyd later, demonstrating how he sits on its small roof deck and meditates to his favorite music before sunrise. There’s easy access to public transit, and from there, a food shelf.
To hear Chris LaTondresse explain it, the answer to repeat or chronic homelessness is obvious. First, provide people from target groups — say, juveniles aging out of foster care, or in Pipeboyd’s case, the Native American community — with an affordable place to stay and build community. Then surround them with one-on-one counseling and other voluntary services to help them avoid returning to the streets. In that order.
“We’re trying to find a way to screen people in rather than screen people out, instead of ‘you can’t stay here, you have a history,’” said LaTondresse, a former Hennepin County commissioner who now runs the Beacon Interfaith Housing Collaborative in St. Paul.
Executing that “Housing First” vision has sometimes proven far more complicated than the rhetoric. The role he stepped into little more than a year and a half ago as president and chief executive officer of one of the metro’s largest and fastest-growing nonprofit housing providers came with much responsibility, more than a few headaches and some outright heartache.
In early May, a spate of shootings that claimed six lives in South Minneapolis shook the Native American community, including many residents of Beacon Interfaith’s 48-unit Bimosedaa apartment complex, which opened in December 2023 in the Minneapolis Warehouse District. The name “Bimosedaa” means “we walk together” in Ojibwe, and through a partnership with the Red Lake Nation, most of its occupants hail from tribal roots.
“Native Americans are about 32 times more likely to experience homelessness than whites, a number that has gotten worse in recent years,” LaTondresse said.
Kimball Court among three ‘Housing First’ sites
Beacon Interfaith operates some 16% of Ramsey County’s and 20% of Hennepin County’s “permanent supportive housing,” or housing with support services for the most vulnerable.
Three sites in particular — Kimball Court Apartments on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul, American House in downtown St. Paul and Bimosedaa — all go a step further, following a “Housing First” model that aims to provide studios and single-room occupancy apartments to some of the hardest individuals to place. The goal is to interrupt homelessness by providing immediate access to permanent housing for individuals, regardless of other factors like pre-existing participation in treatment programs.
Arriving with a disability or an addiction is a feature of entry, not a bug, LaTondresse said.
“There is a significant amount of substance abuse,” acknowledged Josie Blake, a program manager with Avivo, which handles substance dependency assessments and provides case managers at Bimosedaa.
Beacon Interfaith’s housing strategy includes moving residents to “Housing First” sites directly from shelters or homeless encampments, which can be a difficult transition. Some 65% of residents who are chronically homeless will return to the streets within months after being taken out of an encampment and placed in low-income housing without services, LaTondresse said. For residents of permanent supportive housing, the return-to-street rate is about 15%, he said.
Critics point to crime, loitering, vandalism
That puts each apartment building on the frontlines of a controversial effort to get the poorest of the poor stabilized.
When that effort has gone badly, it’s made headlines, and drawn neighborhood homeowners by the dozens to community meetings held last year in St. Paul’s Hamline-Midway neighborhood, where many critics pointed to an uptick in crime, loitering and vandalism around Kimball Court.
“I have seen residents literally hanging out the windows doing drug deals. Most of the neighbors have seen that,” said longtime Hamline-Midway homeowner Jerry Ratliff.
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“My friends are surprised I still live here and get nervous visiting us,” added Ratliff, noting Snelling Avenue north of University Avenue has suffered from the loss of long-standing businesses, like a hardware store and funeral home, and vagrancy has added insult to injury.
“It’s a complex problem,” he said. “I don’t mean to say it’s going to be an easy fix, but it’s going to take a lot of leadership, which I haven’t seen yet.”
St. Paul police have had the following calls for service yearly to Kimball Court, 545 N. Snelling Ave.:
• 2020: 296 calls.
• 2021: 189 calls.
• 2022: 425 calls.
• 2023: 113 calls.
• 2024: 258 calls.
• 2025: 45 calls, year to date.
Meanwhile, LaTondresse hopes to elevate more of the success stories, and he hopes to see sites like Bimosedaa and Kimball Court replace low-income single-occupant residencies, or dorm-like “flop houses.”
“Dollar for dollar, investing in permanent supportive housing is one of the biggest returns on investment,” he said.
To LaTondresse, that means moving past simple rhetoric and celebrating the residents at Bimosedaa — and its sister “Housing First” apartments — as tenants and partners, not just as visitors, occupants or charity.
‘Not a shelter setting’
Asked why security at Bimosedaa’s front desk — or Kimball Court, for that matter — doesn’t inspect bags as tenants enter and leave the building, LaTondresse waved away the suggestion.
“This is not a shelter setting. These are residents. These are people’s homes. They have a lease, with rights and responsibilities,” said LaTondresse, following a recent tour of Bimosedaa’s conference rooms and common areas. Services for the homeless, he said, rest on a continuum, with emergency shelter serving as triage toward the bottom.
“If it feels challenging, it’s because this work is extremely challenging,” he said. “If there’s going to be a better future on these issues, I think our public needs to understand how exactly we go about solving homelessness. ‘Shelter’ is not the solution to homelessness. It’s an emergency response to homelessness.”
As a leading developer of affordable housing in the Twin Cities, Beacon Interfaith already houses some 1,200 residents in about 800 residences across the metro. It’s also poised for major growth. In 2024, there were another 392 Beacon Interfaith homes in development across Minnesota, including the planned expansion of the 76-unit Kimball Court building, which was a lightning rod for neighborhood controversy and back-to-back police visits when LaTondresse started in his new role.
Some, but not all, of that neighborhood tension has since faded as construction and fencing have eliminated places to loiter. With about $3.85 million in no-interest loans from St. Paul and financial backing from a wide range of partners, construction of the addition is now well underway, with an opening for the expanded Kimball Court residences expected around February 2026. The goal is to make Kimball Court, after a $19 million refresh, more like Bimosedaa.
The building addition and remodel will add 22 units, as well as new offices and common areas, better sight lines for security, improved ingress and egress, and other features intended to make the dormitory-like structure similar to Bimosedaa in its security and amenities.
LaTondresse maintains that physical environment can make all the difference.
In addition to one-on-one counseling, Bimosedaa residents have on-site access to twice-weekly group therapy with a licensed clinician in the housing development’s conference room.
Some sessions have taken the form of traditional Native American “talking circles,” led by a community leader. A roof deck outfitted with a small raised-bed garden allows residents to grow their own sage, which is used in ceremonies or hung on doors. Having spaces to congregate offers an alternative to loitering outside, which has been an issue near Kimball Court, he said.
‘They’ve never done sweeping and mopping’
At Bimosedaa, Avivo, a Minneapolis-based provider of vocational counseling services and shelter supports, provides case managers who in some cases guide residents through everyday tasks. With an office located near the front door, it’s easy to hail residents and schedule them for their next appointment as they walk by.
“For a lot of them, this is the first housing stability that they’ve had,” said LaTondresse. “There’s going to be rules and guidelines that you follow. … Some people have never had an apartment before. They don’t know how to clean out an oven. They’ve never done sweeping and mopping.”
The population Beacon Interfaith targets with its “Housing First” model has a wide range of needs.
Once construction is complete, Kimball Court will span 98 residences, adding 22 apartments to the existing 76-unit building. The new apartments will have their rents subsidized through the St. Paul Public Housing Authority and the site-based federal Section 8 housing program. Referrals to Kimball Court will be made through Ramsey County Coordinated Entry and the Red Lake Nation Coordinated Entry systems for single adults.
In St. Paul, more than one Hamline-Midway resident has expressed doubt about the efficacy of adding more people in vulnerable situations to a challenged area.
“Rampant public drug use, trespassing (despite clearly posted No Trespassing signs), and public intoxication is not something the city should be willing to accept as normal or acceptable,” wrote Devin Creurer, a property manager with a Snelling Avenue apartment building situated across the street from Kimball Court, in a petition to the city council and mayor’s office last December.
Creurer said trespassers forced their way into his building to engage in everything from drug use and prostitution to defecation, so his company invested $32,000 in three new high-security, tamper-resistant doors.
“Our residents routinely reported to us the people conducting this illegal activity were seen coming and going from Kimball Court,” he wrote.
Fast forward seven months, and Creurer said he’s keeping an open mind.
“I think its too early to say how the expansion/renovation will impact the neighborhood as it’s not fully open yet, is it?” said Creurer, in an email. “Logically, the large investment they’re making should make their building more secure and hopefully some of the funds will be allotted to enhance security patrolling around their property.”
A hub for narcotic traffic
In crime incident reports last September, St. Paul police identified an empty lot next to Kimball Court as “the hub for most of the narcotic traffic” in the western police district, which stretches from Larpenteur Avenue to West Seventh Street and Minnesota 280 to about Dale Street. “As soon as squads leave the area, dozens of unsheltered individuals line up waiting outside the building to buy and sell narcotics.”
The lot also became known as a major distribution hotspot for goods shoplifted from area stores. Homeless and transient residents, sometimes as many as 40 at a time, began congregating last year in and around the parking lot of a boarded-up CVS store at the corner of Snelling and University avenues. In community meetings, residents complained of garage burglaries, street litter, vandalism and fighting.
“Just because we’re concerned about crime doesn’t mean we’re against the homeless,” said Ratliff, the longtime Hamline-Midway resident. “A lot of the people we have problems with were not living at Kimball Court, but they were attracted to the theft circles and drug circles.”
Former City Council President Mitra Jalali, who took strong criticism as one of the building’s defenders, resigned from the council in March, months after helping Beacon Interfaith secure public funding for Kimball Court’s expansion. Voters will choose a new Ward 4 council member on Aug. 12, and the challenges surrounding both Kimball Court and the general Snelling-University area have crept into campaign discussions.
A St. Paul police spokesperson declined to speculate why calls for service have plummeted from 258 calls last year down to 45 this year to date, except to point out construction has eliminated some spaces to congregate.
Beacon Interfaith officials have said Kimball Court has sometimes been unfairly scapegoated for societal woes.
“I hear the community loud and clear on this,” LaTondresse said. “But what percentage of challenges in the community are related to the broader trends … and what percent are on account of an individual property or building?”
Improvements with time
The fentanyl crisis, rising housing costs and other “aftershocks” of the pandemic “hit many of our communities extremely hard, which in turn has hit a lot of our residents, even those that are stably housed, and nonprofits in particular,” LaTondresse said. “There’s been a real before-and-after sea change in the last five years, certainly in Hamline-Midway, but also in a lot of our communities.”
Still, the situation has since improved, and notably so.
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The vacant Star Market next door to Kimball Court has been torn down to make room for the addition. Fencing now surrounds the CVS parking lot, discouraging loitering. Litter has become less of a concern, and a new coordinated security effort along University Avenue — “Safe and Strong University Avenue” — combines the efforts of Metro Transit police, civilian Transit Rider Investment Program (TRIP) agents and partner agencies.
The nonprofit has made its share of changes within the apartment complex. Before the pandemic, Beacon Interfaith was able to provide its “Housing First” model at Kimball Court with civilian staff manning a front desk. It now provides 24/7 security, as well as a different property management company than it had a few years ago. A street outreach organization, 21 Days of Peace, has helped direct loiterers to resources.
Ratliff isn’t convinced that Beacon Interfaith or the city is fully prepared for the expanded facility.
“Yesterday, we had a guy with a machete stopping people from getting into a coffee shop on Snelling,” he said Monday. “They need more than sight lines and cameras.”
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