Readers Write: Homelessness, HCMC CEO severance, our country’s future

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes letters from readers online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

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When I saw that Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey claimed there are only 27 people experiencing unsheltered homelessness in Minneapolis, my first thought was, “Tell that to the 100-plus people I distribute meals to in south Minneapolis each week” (“Homeless say they’ve been pushed to shadows,” front page, April 14). Removing encampments does not magically house these people; it just scatters them, leaving them alone and vulnerable and making it more difficult for outreach workers to find them.

The article published April 14 noted that the city spent more than $330,000 evicting homeless encampments in the second half of last year — money that could be better spent housing people or providing them with basic income rather than further upending their lives to make them less visible. Minneapolis could use this money to provide guaranteed income to homeless individuals, which has been shown to decrease homelessness and increase people’s ability to meet their basic needs in San Francisco’s Miracle Money program (USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, 2023), and increase employment and financial stability as well as improve mental and physical health in St. Paul’s People’s Prosperity Pilot program (Baker, 2023). The choice is up to the city of Minneapolis: Continue the inhumane practice of destroying the only homes and property homeless people have and making it more difficult for them to survive an already traumatic situation, or use its resources to support these people and get them the help they need, whether that be housing, mental health and disability services or addiction treatment.

Abby Guetter, St. Paul

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Once again, Frey’s administration has chosen to not take accountability for their actions, and instead peddle a demonstrably false narrative about our unhoused neighbors. Cloaking unethical and cruel Minneapolis policies in the language of compassion doesn’t change the reality: These policies are dangerous to our unhoused neighbors.

And then there’s the lying and twisting of the narrative. Frey has repeatedly cited on the campaign trail a figure of “27 people” currently experiencing unsheltered homelessness. There has been significant pushback on that number from outreach workers (and anyone with eyes to see their unhoused neighbors as individual human beings). Leaving aside that shelters are not always safe places for unhoused neighbors — even if folks who have been living in encampments want to go into a shelter, there usually isn’t room.

An April 24 opinion piece, “We’re not turning away from encampments — we’re lifting people up,” is careful to couch this statement as “35 people experiencing unsheltered homelessness in encampments” (emphasis mine). Note the distinction. The Frey administration has made encampments almost an impossibility.

But eliminating visible encampments does not mean eliminating unsheltered homelessness. Our unhoused neighbors are still there, just pushed deeper into the shadows and made more vulnerable.

Frey’s administration keeps trying to convince the public not to believe our own eyes, when we can see that his policies around housing and homelessness have failed and are making the problem worse and not better.

Flannery Clark, Minneapolis

At a time when thousands of government workers are being involuntarily dismissed and private-sector workers are being laid off, the CEO of Hennepin Healthcare System has resigned, saying “a strong leader passes the baton when the time is right” (“HCMC’s CEO could get $1M in severance,” April 24). That statement by Jennifer DeCubellis suggests that she voluntarily resigned after five years on the job.

However, voluntary resignations for the average (i.e., not C-suite) employee result in no severance pay, and even company-imposed layoffs for employees with the same tenure as DeCubellis result in only two weeks of post-employment pay — if they are lucky.

DeCubellis, on the other hand, for her voluntary resignation, gets more than $470,000 for six months, post-resignation, plus up to another six months of severance if she doesn’t find another job within a year. Plus, she gets $85,000 of employer-paid benefits, plus another $118,000 for 6½ weeks of unused paid time off (which is forfeited for the average Minnesota worker). That’s a potential total of more than $1 million for resigning compared to the average employee getting zero dollars for resignation.

The response from companies is usually “We need to pay this to attract quality employees.” If she was forced out for doing a poor job (which was not the stated reason for her departure), then she obviously wasn’t a quality employee. If she made this decision on her own, why are we paying her over a million dollars to find another job?

Ted Rich, Crystal

Way back in 2025, when the U.S. lost its leadership roles in health, science and technology, most people were focused on more immediate concerns. The implications of drastic cutbacks at agencies such as the CDC, or the IRS, or the SSA, or the FAA were all too quickly apparent. But the consequences of decimating agencies charged with, and highly successful at, finding creative solutions to the challenges of the future, such as the National Institutes of Health, or the National Science Foundation, or NOAA, or NASA, or the Departments of Energy and of Education, were less obvious. Many of our congressional leaders, who had supported these efforts throughout their careers, did understand the incredible damage that would be done by the mindless cutbacks at that time. However, decades later, historians have yet to figure out how these leaders allowed the U.S. to enter that period of sharp and so far permanent decline. In their biographies, some have lamented their own disastrous lack of courage. Others maintained that they were doing the best they could at the time. History has not treated either group kindly.

Lawrence Rudnick, Minneapolis

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A note in response Ka Vang’s American tourism column (“Stars, stripes and side-eye abroad,” April 24): We just returned from a trip to Italy and experienced the normal delightful courtesy we always receive traveling there. When discussions turned to politics, Italians uniformly tell us they are confused by how a country so highly regarded in the world for its consistent striving for global justice could possibly change so dramatically. They are deeply concerned that they are witnessing the conditions and processes that produced Mussolini, from the demonizing of immigrants to the control of the press. Unless the American public takes notice and acts, any student of history can predict the next steps.

David Whitcomb, Woodbury

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“Don’t they know this will wreck the economy?” They know, and they don’t care.

“Don’t they know they’re being hypocritical about free speech, government overreach and spending, political corruption, etc.?” They know, and they don’t care.

“Don’t they know they’re hurting people?” They know, and they don’t care.

Much of the rhetoric about this administration implies they do not know what they are doing. The harm caused by the administration and its allies is a deliberate feature of their actions, not a bug. They are not bumbling around. They are not incompetent. They are not getting their priorities wrong. They are purposefully selective, determined and effective at getting the results they want. A mistake here and there does not change that. Do not get distracted, and do not underestimate them.

Andrew Ruffing, Edina