On a recent Friday in late November, Eric Hauge spotted a wave of new eviction filings across Minnesota, many but not all of them related to public housing authorities in the Twin Cities.
“We saw 246 cases filed in a single day,” said Hauge, co-executive director of HOME Line, which tracks court-based eviction filings statewide and provides free legal advice for renters. “We haven’t seen anything like that since before the pandemic.”
Of those filings, 74 traced back to the St. Paul Public Housing Agency, and some were for as little as $300 in unpaid rent. Hauge called that startling, given that court filing fees alone cost just as much. Across the river, the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority had as of Dec. 1 executed more than 100 evictions for the year, more than double the total from 2024.
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“As a federal housing authority, we are prohibited from waiving old back rent,” explained Drew Halunen, a spokesperson for Minneapolis Public Housing, in an interview.
While MPHA has created an internal team to help direct tenants to rent assistance, the state has sunset a major rent-help program and Hennepin County has tightened eligibility and individual spending limits on others, even as it has put more money toward emergency rent relief.
‘Record level’
For St. Paul Public Housing, most eviction filings do not result in an actual eviction, noted Sean Whatley, general counsel for the agency. In terms of actual writs of removal, “we’re on track this year to be at or less than we were last year,” he said.
That’s still a large number for actual evictions. Organizations that monitor residential eviction filings say they expect 2025 may set or approach statewide records, with most of the court filings stemming from both public and private housing providers throughout the Twin Cities, the center of the state’s rental housing stock.
“We continue to hear from the court that filings are at a record level, and our case numbers certainly reflect that, as well,” said Heather Mendiola, lead housing attorney for Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services, a legal aid nonprofit based in St. Paul.
Hauge and others in the industry say the economy likely plays the largest role in the uptick, as rent increases continue to outpace income gains. With federal pandemic relief aid expended by early 2023, some public housing agencies turned to county programs for assistance in helping them offer rent relief to vulnerable tenants, but that’s gotten harder to do as demand climbs and counties face their own financial stresses.
On top of that, Hauge said landlords that owned property during the pandemic seem to file more often and perhaps quicker than before, with some expressing a lack of trust toward tenants after negative experiences. More attorneys appear to be treating evictions as a business opportunity, and technology plays a role, as online hearings make it possible for lawyers to handle different cases in multiple counties on the same date.
State cuts to social service providers may factor in, as well, following recent federal fraud investigations into Minnesota’s Medicaid-backed services. Another possible explanation: a growing percentage of corporate or out-of-state landlords with no personal connection to their tenants have fewer qualms about proceeding to eviction.
“It’s a tough thing to track and share a coherent story with confidence,” said Will Lehman, Hennepin County’s area manager for homelessness prevention, “but certainly it’s related to economics — 90% of eviction filings are due to non-payment of rent.”
Taking a different tack, Cecil Smith, president and chief executive officer of the Minnesota Multi Housing Association, which represents apartment owners, noted that an uptick in filings doesn’t necessarily translate to a major increase in evictions, and that the numbers need more analysis.
Vacancies are relatively high compared to previous years, so if anything, he said, landlords have a financial disincentive to remove tenants and increase turnover.
For filings, “the numbers are higher,” Smith acknowledged. “It’s been that way ever since the eviction moratorium ended. They went to a new base level. The eviction moratorium changed things — it changed renter behavior. … People got used to not paying rent and the government stepping in and filling the gap.”
‘I had exhausted all the resources’
Employee turnover also could play a role. Tenants at St. Paul Public Housing’s Valley Hi-Rise on University Avenue in downtown St. Paul are expected to pay about 30% of their income toward monthly rents. For seven months while she was out of work, Ivy Ana reported her income as zero, but the rent bills kept coming. So did the public housing authority’s eviction notices, which she successfully fought in court three times.
“They were charging me $600 or $700 per month. I was applying to different programs, but I had exhausted all the resources,” said Ana, who found work in 2025 as a paraprofessional at a charter school.
“It’s been a hassle with St. Paul Public Housing,” she said. “I’ve done everything they asked me to do. They asked to report a job starting or stopping within 10 days. I’ve done that, but they have such a high turnover of property managers. … You had almost 12 months of paper trail of me providing the documentation they asked for.”
Her latest court appearances took up every Thursday in October and November through Nov. 21, exhausting her paid time off at work, but Ana said the case ended in her favor, with the housing agency owing her money and the legal filings expunged.
Ivy Ana, a St. Paul educator, outside her St. Paul apartment on Wednesday, Dec, 24, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
“When we work with a client, we do our best to incorporate into the settlement record an expungement, and end the case with that record no longer being public,” Mendiola explained.
Her situation is not unique. Hauge said that prior to 2020, Minnesota averaged about 15,000 eviction filings annually. State and federal eviction moratoriums instituted during the pandemic had fully expired by mid-2022, when cases began to climb toward new records, and not in a good way.
This year, “we’re above 23,000 cases,” said Hauge, toward the end of November. “We’ve never seen that many eviction filings before. … Prior to the pandemic, we averaged about 15,000 cases per year. We’re well over 30% greater.”
Another data source, Princeton University-based Eviction Lab, cites slightly lower numbers, in the vicinity of 21,000 statewide filings as of Dec. 1, but Hauge points out that Eviction Lab uses a court-based data file that does not include cases that have been expunged.
Tenant protections
HOME Line advises more than 20,000 renters annually over the phone or by email on any kind of question related to disputes between tenants and landlords. During the pandemic, renters began inquiring about financial assistance in record numbers, leaving his agency at a loss for how to best respond.
“That is not really a legal question. We’re not really set up for that,” Hauge said. “This year, we’re over 1,100 requests, probably a 40% increase in clients asking about financial assistance, and that’s not really our role. I wish we did have emergency assistance to hand out.”
The state, as well as individual cities and counties, has instituted a handful of changes aimed at helping renters. Among them, said Hauge, Minnesota last year finally caught up to most other states in requiring a pre-eviction notice, forcing landlords to inform tenants 14 days before they open an eviction court file. The notice includes referrals to potential rent help.
“It’s meant to provide an expedited procedure for the tenant to secure funds, but there’s just not enough emergency rental assistance out there,” he said. Still, the advance notice could help a tenant avoid wracking up a legal history, which can make finding another apartment difficult. “They can just vacate if they don’t want that on their record.”
Minneapolis and St. Louis Park have expanded the 14-day notice to 30 days, and St. Paul’s 30-day requirement will take effect May 14, alongside a series of additional citywide tenant protections, including new rules around security deposits and screening criteria. In addition, St. Paul recently launched a $1 million effort to provide landlords with up to $2,500 in one-time grants to cancel out evictions in progress.
St. Paul’s Emergency Rental Assistance and Eviction Prevention Program, which opened Nov. 12, has received 520 applications as of mid-December, and the city’s Planning and Economic Development Housing Team receives, on average, 56 phone calls and 78 emails daily about the program, said City Council Member Cheniqua Johnson, who was instrumental in launching the effort.
Johnson, whose East Side district is generally the epicenter of evictions in St. Paul, said the average request for assistance for individuals who have court dates scheduled is more than $4,200, which far exceeds the $2,500 aid cap. For those without court dates, the average request is about $2,300.
“It is anticipated that all of the fiscal year 2025 appropriated funding will be expended before the end of the year,” said Johnson, in an email.
The city has allocated another $1.3 million toward the program in 2026.
St. Paul Public Housing Agency eviction filings
Officials with public housing agencies in St. Paul and Minneapolis note that a relatively slim percentage of eviction filings actually result in writs, or final court orders for a tenant to be removed by law enforcement. An eviction filing is often used as a procedural step — still far more serious than a written warning — after other efforts have been exhausted.
The St. Paul Public Housing Agency owns and manages more than 4,200 affordable rental units throughout the city, from townhomes to affordable apartments and scattered-site housing.
For fiscal years running from April 1 to March 31, there were 271 SPPHA eviction filings for nonpayment in fiscal year 2024, resulting in 48 evictions, for an execution rate of about 18%. In fiscal year 2025, there were 393 filings for nonpayment, resulting in 66 evictions, for an execution rate of about 17%. In the current fiscal year, there have been 191 filings from April 1 to Dec. 1, resulting in 43 evictions to date, an execution rate of about 23%.
Officials with St. Paul Public Housing say they expect the 2026 fiscal year to end up somewhere between 2024 and 2025 in terms of eviction volume.
Project-based assistance
In 2020, St. Paul Public Housing completed a “rental assistance demonstration” conversion, shifting most of its public housing units into the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s project-based rental assistance program, which directs federal housing funding to a particular location, as opposed to a tenant. The project-based rental assistance limits the agency’s ability to consider rental history, or lack of rental history, when determining rental eligibility.
The conversion to project-based assistance happened just before the pandemic, so some of the practical effects of the new screening rules were not immediately apparent, according to officials, as COVID-related protections halted evictions for nonpayment for two years. Even when those two years were over, the agency had to sort through a backlog of cases.
“We are only now beginning to see what our ‘normal’ post-(conversion) eviction patterns look like, and it is still too early to draw firm conclusions about long-term trends,” said Whatley, the agency’s general counsel.
Whatley said staff work at length with residents to “resolve balances, establish payment agreements and prevent displacement wherever possible. A court filing is the last step in a long progression of outreach and problem-solving, not an indicator of a shift in PHA philosophy or approach.”
Minneapolis Public Housing Authority eviction filings
The Minneapolis Public Housing Authority, which at over 6,000 housing units constitutes one of the largest landlords in the state, executed 107 eviction writs for the year through early December, more than double the 39 eviction writs executed in all of 2024. About 20% of its 544 eviction filings this year proceeded to an actual eviction, up from less than 9% last year.
Officials say that increase has rolled out despite their best efforts to avoid it. During the pandemic, MPHA launched an internal housing stabilization team dedicated to connecting residents with back-owed rents to various financial and service supports. The team is designed to help residents solve both their immediate financial needs and make lasting changes to ensure continued rent payments, Halunen said.
Throughout the pandemic, they assisted nearly 750 families in receiving more than $2.5 million in rent relief through RentHelpMN, the state’s targeted assistance program. When the state ended the program this year, the team shifted to Hennepin County’s rental and emergency assistance initiatives, the chief one being Rent Help Hennepin.
With Rent Help Hennepin funds unlikely to last the year due to high demand, the Hennepin County Board added $1.5 million to the program in October, bringing the total budget to $11 million. That’s helped 3,000 people avoid eviction, but it’s still nowhere near the estimated $50 million that would be necessary to assist every Hennepin County household falling behind on their rent, said David Hewitt, Hennepin County’s director of Housing Stability.
Out of budget necessity, “we have prioritized preventing eviction for families with children, seniors and people with disabilities,” Hewitt said.
In 2023, the public housing authority helped residents complete more than 450 applications to receive more than $800,000 in rent relief payments from Hennepin County’s programs. In 2024, that increased to 600 applications and more than $1 million in rent help. Through early December, the team had helped residents complete more than 380 applications for more than $500,000 in rent relief.
In the spring, however, Hennepin County’s rent relief programs went through what housing authority officials have described as an abrupt change, reducing the number of MPHA residents eligible to receive emergency rent assistance. Lifetime limits of $10,000 or 10 months in rent rolled out seemingly overnight, and to qualify, residents would have to pay off half their balance if they’re four months or more behind on their rent.
Perhaps the most surprising requirement of all, “before you can apply for rent help, there needed to be an eviction filing,” Halunen said. “It prevented us from getting residents connected to rent help (early). … Our team was surprised. We were surprised.”
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Agency officials say they never received formal correspondence from the county, and were only informed verbally about the changes after they had already taken place.
Hewitt noted that the purpose of emergency housing relief is just that — one-time emergency aid — and it’s not the same as an ongoing rent subsidy. Coming out of the pandemic, Hennepin County also expanded the role of Adult Representation Services, a county department that provides independent legal representation to low-income clients in civil matters, to include housing cases.
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