Project BUILD

Minneapolis, Minnesota is a center of Indigenous culture, community, and resistance, shaped by a long legacy of organizing, knowledge production, and collective care. Project BUILD (Better Understanding Involuntary Local Displacement) is a collaborative effort among a consortium of community members, researchers, and service providers working to understand the health impacts of displacement in proximity to homelessness. Central to this work are people with lived experience, whose expertise guides both the research process and interpretation of findings.

Indigenous people are overrepresented in the unhoused population of Minneapolis, and many core BUILD members are enrolled tribal members, deeply connected to the geography and history of South Minneapolis. Hiawatha Avenue runs south from the East Phillips neighborhood along the Mississippi River (Wakpa Tanka) toward its confluence with the Minnesota River (Mni Sota Wakpa) at B’dote, a site of deep significance where the United States signed a treaty with Dakota leaders in 1805 to establish a military fort. Nearby lies Little Earth of United Tribes, established in 1973 through federal housing subsidies and recognized as the largest urban Indigenous housing community in the United States. The corridors surrounding Hiawatha, Lake Street, Franklin Avenue, Bloomington Avenue, Chicago Avenue, and Nicollet Avenue remain concentrated sites of ongoing displacement affecting unhoused residents representative of more than 40 sovereign nations.

Since 2023, Project BUILD has practiced community-based participatory research focused on involuntary displacement. Through monthly gatherings, participants document events, share experiences, and collectively analyze housing insecurity, criminalization, substance use, and public policy. Using citizen science methods, the project gathers data on encampment sweeps, “move along” orders, inequitable policing, surveillance, urban design, and barriers to basic resources and services. This work examines how displacement operates through interconnected federal, state, local, private, and interpersonal systems.

Major challenges faced through project BUILD are rapidly changing practices of displacement in proximity to housing precarity. Increased criminalization and dehumanization through state-sanctioned and state-organized violence are the current trend in municipal responses to encampments, access to public spaces, social service eligibility, and homeless service delivery. These practices impact health, health access, interaction with community and health care delivery, and public health interventions.

Project BUILD recognizes lived experience as a critical form of knowledge. Through oral histories, collective reflection, and community research, participants document the policies and conditions shaping displacement and survival while identifying practices of resilience and solidarity. This work has become increasingly urgent amid heightened policing and state violence in Minneapolis and the broader Twin Cities, including the intensified federal presence associated with Operation Metro Surge.