Mayor puts increased focus on addressing growing behavior issues downtown

Frustration has been building in Mayor Paul TenHaken this summer.

He feels it consistently, he said — from his own observations to reports from his team to questions from residents and businesses.

Putting it bluntly: “We’ve become a great city to be homeless in,” he said. “And that’s not a badge of honor.”

The issue is not that people who lack access to permanent housing are calling Sioux Falls home, he said. It’s that public intoxication and other crimes with varying degrees of severity are tending to increase along with a segment of the homeless or transient population.

“Quite honestly, I’m over it,” TenHaken said. “I have asked our team to start being much more aggressive, within the confines of the law, as it’s allowed, in order to ensure we’re not letting some of these issues slip two degrees at a time because that’s what’s happened over the past year.”

The same attributes that make the community amenable for those trying to escape homelessness have made the city an attractive place for those less motivated toward recovery, he said. The word appears to be out that people in Sioux Falls can find shelters strategically located within an easy walk of free meals, plentiful public transportation and parks, and fairly easy access to cash and food from the public when soliciting.

“I’m very passionate about this issue right now,” TenHaken said. “It’s top of my list. But it’s not my issue to fix or our shelters’ issue to fix or our cops’ issue to fix. Everyone has a part in this.”

Police Chief Jon Thum said officers have noticed unfamiliar individuals loitering downtown, even in the past few weeks.

“We have to recognize that Sioux Falls has become a gathering point, partially because other communities lack resources to deal with the issues they’re experiencing,” Thum said.

Homeless or transient individuals regularly are coming to Sioux Falls from across South Dakota and the surrounding region, both Thum and TenHaken said.

“I’m not so naive to think we’re ever going to cure or fix or dissolve homelessness in our community,” TenHaken said. “But for whatever reason, in the last year it’s gotten quite a bit worse. I need to figure out why.”

A complex issue

For TenHaken, who calls himself “a data-driven guy,” the issue is particularly vexing because it’s hard to measure.

“I have no good data by which to determine the size and the scope of the problem,” he said. “How many homeless do we have? I can’t tell you.”

Neither can Michelle Treasure, who became the city’s homeless coordinator in March — though not for lack of trying.

“We do the point-in-time count once a year in January, which is great because it’s our only long-standing data over time … but we know it’s not quite accurate as far as what we’re seeing in real time,” she said.

“Part of my role is to work with our state partners and our local partners and providence to understand those real numbers every day. What are we seeing, and what does the journey look like of someone in Sioux Falls? How did you get here? Did you come here because you know we’re a resource-heavy city? What’s really going on?”

Data is tracked by various entities in different ways. Is a person sleeping on someone’s couch considered homeless? It depends which entity is tracking it, for instance. Are most of the behavior issues downtown from individuals considered homeless? There’s also no clear way to tell.

Still, the annual benchmark — a one-day count in January — this year found 610 homeless individuals, up about 20 percent from the same time a year ago.

Nationwide, the most recent data covers 2023. It found on a single-night count that more than 653,100 people were experiencing homelessness — up 12 percent from 2022.

No one close to the issue in Sioux Falls is disputing that it’s higher now than it was six months ago.

“We know that people are coming here,” Treasure said. “We’ve talked to other cities in the state of South Dakota that say they send people here without a plan. A bit of that is somewhat frustrating because although we do have the services to support people, there has to be a plan to support it.”

Still, “before we get to the root causes, we have to deal with the symptoms,” TenHaken said.

For law enforcement, “many of the issues we encounter, especially in dealing with the homeless population, core issues are either mental health or addiction,” Thum said. “We’re not the entity that can deliver these services. … There’s a need for people to intervene early and intervene often who may be a gateway to better services.”

There are efforts underway to bring the various agencies working to serve the homeless population closer together.

The goal is to increase collaboration among all the entities working in what feels like “a very fragmented space,” TenHaken said. “You have churches and individuals and social service agencies and government agencies, and we have to figure out a way to collaborate better in this work.”

The public has a role to play too, he added.

“What I’m finding is that the benevolence we’re extending is exacerbating the problem,” he said. “Our community has to stop giving out money to people. It’s not a cash problem. I cannot stress that enough. Our community is making this worse by handing out money.”

Other problems include “making cheap, bottom-shelf alcohol available at bargain prices in our downtown,” he added.

There’s a need to support both the individuals who are invested in taking advantage of recovery services in Sioux Falls while addressing those who aren’t, Treasure said, calling it “a small population of people that are just really creating this disorderly behavior in our city.”

While there are individuals legitimately working toward permanent housing, there’s also “a growing segment we’re seeing choosing this lifestyle,” TenHaken continued.

“We’ve become in some ways too compassionate,” he said. “We’ve lost out on the tough-love aspect of encouraging people to get out of this cycle.”

Street-level services make slow but steady progress connecting with homeless