The sound of bagpipes still makes Butch Inks feel sick to his stomach.

It brings him back to seven funerals of active-duty firefighters when he was St. Paul’s assistant fire chief and then fire chief.

Those were the worst days of his career, said Inks, who retired Tuesday after 31 years as a St. Paul firefighter.

Firefighters are impacted at higher rates than the general population for cardiac disease, cancer and post-traumatic stress disorder. As chief, Inks focused on the health of St. Paul firefighters. He brought about comprehensive cardiac and cancer screenings, reestablished a full-time health and wellness coordinator, and started a peer support team.

Most people think of firefighters as running into burning buildings to save lives and extinguish flames — “and we do that a lot,” Inks said — but more than 80 percent of the work of St. Paul firefighters is emergency medical responses. The city’s firefighters are all emergency medical technicians and many are also paramedics.

“The EMS calls, day-to-day, wear and tear on the mental capacity and emotions of a human being,” said Inks, who recalled as a fire captain when he delivered a baby one morning and, later the same day, responded to a call a block away of a baby not breathing; the child had been beaten.

‘It’s OK to not be OK’

Butch Inks, second from right, as a St. Paul firefighter when he was assigned to Squad 1, where he worked from 1996 to 2001. He rose through the ranks to become St. Paul’s fire chief and retired on Dec. 30, 2025. He and other firefighters were pictured after a kitchen fire. From left to right: Randy Villarreal, Dan Berger, who was Inks’ first captain at the fire department and Floyd Jones, who went on to be the best man in Inks’ wedding. (Courtesy of St. Paul Fire Department)

Inks, 57, said he was “from an era where you didn’t speak up” about your feelings. Even five years ago, Inks said he would still tell people, “I’m fine.”

“It was the wrong approach,” he said. “I think we’ve shifted the culture to, ‘It’s OK to not be OK.’”

He now tells fellow firefighters that he talks to a therapist about the traumas he witnessed up close as a first responder. He spoke to recruit classes and firefighters at stations about the importance of not keeping their memories and emotions bottled up. By being open about his own experiences, he wants to help others.

“I can be very intentional because on my very first day on the street after I finished the fire academy, we went to a call of a woman who was having a heart attack,” said Inks, who remembered that she died as he gave her CPR.

Back at the station, where firefighters in St. Paul prepare meals during their 24-hour shifts, “someone was like, ‘pass the ketchup,’” Inks said. As a young man, Inks thought, “What is going on here? Somebody just died.”

“You can’t hold this in because I’ll tell you what’s going to happen: You’re going to drink excessively, you’re going to get divorced — if you get married at all — you’re going to have relationship problems,” Inks said. “The job will disrupt your life if you don’t recognize that what you’re seeing and experiencing was not normal. You have to have a way to process that.”

Inks will be the next executive director of the Minnesota Fire Service Certification Board, and he plans to bring his message of physical and mental wellness for new firefighters into that role.

Started working for city at age 15

Butch Inks was sworn in as St. Paul fire chief Nov. 13, 2019, during a St. Paul City Council meeting. His wife, Erica, held the Bible for the ceremony. (Jean Pieri / Pioneer Press)

Being fire chief was challenging: “It’s managing people, feelings, expectations; it’s holding employees accountable,” said Inks, adding that his wife, Erica, was the only other person who understood how much time went into each of his decisions.

“You have to be able to talk through every decision you make, and we all benefit from another point of view,” Erica Inks said. “We’ve joked about this before — I am probably the person in his life who can tell him most honestly if I don’t agree with him.”

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Inks said he didn’t expect that being chief would also be tough on his wife and four children, two of whom are now teenagers and two in their 30s. He slept with his cellphone next to him, at the ready to respond if there was a major fire or large-scale incident in St. Paul.

Still, Inks said it was an honor “to be a public servant for so long, and in the city I grew up in, in the city I love.”

Inks was raised on Stinson Street across from the Front Recreation Center in the North End.

He played hockey at the outdoor ice rink across the street from his house and was a right wing on the Como Park High School hockey team, along with playing football and baseball.

His first job was at the Front Rec Center when he was 15. By 16, he had a key to the building and became a recreation aide. He never stopped working for the city of St. Paul.

‘Aggressive but cautious’ firefighter rose through the ranks

When Inks joined the fire department in 1994, Dan Berger was his first captain on Rescue Squad 1 at Station 4 on Payne Avenue near East Seventh Street.

“He was very dependable right away and reliable,” said Berger, who is now retired. “He was aggressive but cautious — good traits to have in the fire business.”

Berger saw Inks’ motivation and said “he pursued endless training” both through the fire department and the Air Force Reserve, where Inks served for 26 years, most of the time as a firefighter. Berger said he expected Inks would get promoted through the ranks.

Being physical as a firefighter took its toll on Inks, as it does on many firefighters. Shoulder, back and knee problems are common. When firefighters get called to an emergency, they might go from a conversation at their station to suddenly “doing manual labor,” said Inks, who needed various medical procedures for his knees throughout his career.

Butch Inks when he became a St. Paul fire captain in 2004. (Courtesy of St. Paul Fire Department)

In 2011, there was a large apartment complex fire on Cushing Circle near Energy Park Drive and Lexington Parkway.

As a captain, Inks and other firefighters forced open apartment doors to make sure people were out and to get them to safety if they weren’t. An estimated 42 units were damaged, with no residents reporting injuries.

But he tore a muscle in his shoulder and received cortisone injections to relieve inflammation and pain over the years and his shoulder condition worsened.

He had shoulder replacement surgery in November. As he was recovering, Inks — who became fire chief in 2019, after serving as interim chief since 2018 — told Mayor Melvin Carter and then-Mayor-elect Kaohly Her that he would need to retire at the end of the year.

Inks is a licensed firefighter, which requires ongoing training, and he said he determined his shoulder could not withstand continued training without the risk of further injury.

Though Inks is no longer putting out fires, he said he believes St. Paul’s fire chief should be able to carry out all the duties of a firefighter.

“I ask them to put their life on the line and to do extraordinary things,” he said. “… As a leader, I don’t think I should be expecting them to do something I can’t do.”

Assistant Fire Chief Greg Duren was tapped to serve as interim fire chief and began on Wednesday.

Mayor Her “is committed to a fair and transparent process for determining the next fire chief,” a spokesperson said.

More staff, more calls

Before Inks told the fire department he was retiring, he pondered over how best to express “how appreciative I am of the work they have done.”

“Where this department was in 2018 to where it is now is an incredible shift,” Inks said. “We’ve asked a lot, we’ve changed a lot, and they’re the people that feel the change the most.”

Staffing is at its highest level in department history, Inks created new career and EMS pathways to get young people in the door, and he managed a 56 percent increase in calls for service over the last decade, the city council wrote in a resolution declaring Dec. 30 to be Chief Barton “Butch” Inks Day.

Inks said the biggest changes he oversaw also included:

Starting the Basic Life Support division. Before, Advanced Life Support was sent to every emergency medical call. Adding Basic Life Support resulted in speeding up emergency medical response times by almost one minute, Inks said, and created another entryway for people to become St. Paul firefighters.
Beginning CARES (Community Alternative Response Emergency Services), a two-person EMT alternative emergency response to nonviolent mental health crises and behavioral emergencies.
Overseeing the building of a new station to replace the old Station 7 in Dayton’s Bluff and reopening a shuttered station on West Seventh Street near downtown, bringing the stations in the city to 16. That’s allowed for more space for fire ladders, ambulances and engines — including the first electric engine in the state — to keep up with increasing call volume.
Securing grant funding for enhanced annual physicals for firefighters. “We used to get a general physical every year, and now he have a head-to-toe assessment,” Inks said. “They’ve identified some potential life-ending illnesses for folks who were able to catch it early and get treatment.”

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Inks moved his office from fire department headquarters to the city’s Emergency Operations Center.

“I went from running the fire department to running a city-wide pandemic response,” Inks said. At the EOC, they coordinated finding food for kids and delivering meals, and processed St. Paul Bridge Fund applications for emergency relief for families and small businesses.

He also ran fire department operations from the EOC when civil unrest and fires erupted in St. Paul after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. He stayed at the center around the clock for three days.

The damage was bad, but Inks said it could have been worse. “We made sure it wasn’t by responding to every fire, every single time,” including smaller-scale fires like dumpsters.

Another sad goodbye

On Dec. 17, Inks gave the oath of office to the department’s 21 newest firefighters at their academy graduation.

Before Inks’ last time handing out St. Paul Fire Department badges, as he spoke to the audience of new firefighters’ family and friends, he looked at his wife sitting in the front. He saw Erica Inks was teary and he grew emotional as he spoke.

“While you begin your journey, I’m preparing to conclude mine,” he told the new firefighters. “I was once in those seats right there, 31 years ago. … I challenge you, that you don’t forget, that it is a job … but it’s bigger than that. It’s bigger than that to the people we serve. … You save people’s lives.”

Three days later, one of the new graduates, Timothy Bertz, had a sudden and major medical event at home. Bertz died at the hospital on Dec. 22. He was 52, and had been a firefighter in Harris in Chisago County and Lino Lakes.

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On Inks’ second-to-last day of work, he found himself again feeling sick over the sound of bagpipes at a funeral because Bertz was another firefighter who lost his life too soon, Inks said.

The funerals he took part in as chief for several other firefighters were also medical emergencies. Two were firefighters who battled cancer and two were situations of suicide.

After wearing the department’s formal dress uniform at Bertz’s service Monday, Inks also donned it for his last day of work at the department on Tuesday. It was something he did throughout his tenure, at events that didn’t require him to dress up.

“In my mind, if I don’t, the only time I wear that uniform is when someone dies,” Inks said. “It has to mean more than only wearing it to that. I’m representing the people of our department, our city.”

St. Paul fire chiefs through the years

The list, based on the department’s 2010 yearbook, does not include interim or acting chiefs.

Butch Inks, 2019-2025
Tim Butler, 2007-2017
Douglas Holton, 2003-2007
Tim Fuller, 1991-2003
Steve Conroy, 1966-1991
Levi Shortridge, 1964-1966
Frank Oberg, 1958-1964
John Barry, 1957-1958
William Mattocks, 1949-1957
Ed Novak, 1948-1949
William Sudeith, 1934-1948
Owen Dunn, 1924-1934
Randall Niles, 1920-1924
Henry Devlin, 1914-1920
Randall Niles, 1913-1914
Jeremiah Strapp, 1905-1913
John Jackson, 1901-1905
Hart Cook, 1898-1901
John Jackson, 1889-1898
John Black, 1883-1889
R.O. Strong, 1876-1883
J.R. Prendergast, 1870
J.H. Hullsick, 1869
Frank Brewer, 1867-1868
Bartley Presley, 1866
Charles Williams, 1864-1865
Luther Eddy, 1863
B. Rodick, 1863
John Pickett, 1863
J.E. Missen, 1862
W.T. Donaldson, 1861
J.B. Irvine, a few months
Charles Williams, 1859-1860

American sports leagues treated global expansion as an aspiration for decades, but it was something to pursue only when convenient — and often without much strategic forethought.

The calculus changed in 2025, as evidenced by the organizations that signaled that going global is now a permanent feature of doing business as an American sports league, and the National Football League has provided the clearest example of how far a U.S. league is willing to go.

Over the last 12 months, it expanded its overseas schedule from five to seven games — and even scheduled the Minnesota Vikings to play in Dublin and London on consecutive weekends. It was the league’s first-ever back-to-back overseas road trip, boosted by a global marketing program that involves all of the NFL’s teams. In some ways, it’s a prototype for what could be coming as the ambitious organization pushes for a 16-game international schedule.

Meanwhile, the National Basketball Association revealed it was seriously exploring the formation of a European competitive association. Those plans happened against the backdrop of its own expanding international schedule, which includes games in Mexico, Abu Dhabi and across Europe.

In soccer, the National Women’s Soccer League announced a clutch of new global streaming and broadcast agreements, and Major League Soccer shifted its calendar to align with global associations. Even golf pivoted. The Masters, the sport’s most prestigious American tournament, changed its rules to invite more foreign champions to the event. And we can’t forget about the National Hockey League, which opened a permanent European office.

These initiatives represent a shift away from business focused on American audiences to globalized entertainment available to everyone (There are exceptions, of course. Major League Baseball has long had a thriving fan base and business across Latin America.). Even a decade ago, this evolution seemed unlikely. The domestic opportunities with media rights deals — the largest source of income for major professional sports associations — and legalized sports betting were then compelling enough to keep leagues focused at home. Plus, the returns from global expansion have been limited and tenuous. For example, the NFL’s lauded annual series of games in London lost money as recently as 2016, despite consistent sellouts. The NBA, among the most aggressive organizations when it comes to expanding overseas, still loses money on its international games. And the NHL recently acknowledged that it would probably make more money playing overseas games at home.

What, then, has motivated the sports industry to seemingly ignore past and present challenges and keep investing abroad? Leagues are more financially resilient than they’ve been in years, thanks to the post-pandemic recovery — spurred by fans returning to stadiums and live entertainment — and a surge in private equity and other investments. And those gains coexist with growing uncertainty about the viewership habits in the domestic market. While American fans still love sports, younger ones are drifting away from watching full games to consume highlights on social media, so there are reasons to doubt that an old business model based on media rights growth will remain as lucrative.

Overseas fans offer another option to convert a wave of new investment into long-term returns, and two key factors ensure that the globalization boom has momentum going into 2026 and beyond.

First, American professional sports have become increasingly savvy at scouting, developing, and — above all — showcasing international talent. Foreign-born players are marketing hooks for overseas fans.

Second, the emergence of streaming has enabled leagues to deliver their content directly to consumers. For example, the NFL doesn’t have to rely upon individual broadcasters with different schedules and priorities to show its games in overseas markets.

Instead, since 2023, the organization has distributed games globally through DAZN, a single platform accessible to almost anyone with internet. Matchups can be watched both live and on demand and supplemented with additional content like NFL RedZone and NFL Network. Most importantly, fans can just pay for the NFL — they don’t need to buy into an expensive local cable or streaming package to get their football.

The arrangement seems to be working. Though viewership numbers aren’t available, in February, DAZN announced that paid subscribers to the NFL service grew 23% year-over-year. And it’s not just DAZN offering this kind of friction-free global streaming platform. Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Apple+ are acquiring and offering sports to countries beyond U.S. borders, too.

Of course, global expansion isn’t without possible downsides. As leagues shift their attention abroad, they could alienate fans at home who are accustomed to games being scheduled around their calendars. Not every American fan or season ticket holder is happy to see afternoon home games moved to London and broadcast early on Sunday morning.

More serious are the potential political and reputational consequences of doing business in authoritarian countries. In 2019, the NBA learned this the hard way when a tweet from then-Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey regarding Hong Kong led Chinese businesses to freeze out the association for years. The incident likely cost the NBA hundreds of millions of dollars.

But for now, the leagues are committing to an opportunity years in the making. Whatever the risks, 2025 is the year that American sports fully embraced business beyond its borders.

Adam Minter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the business of sports. He is the author, most recently, of “Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale.”

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It was hard to know what to believe this past year. In the old days, there were conspiracies about the moon landing. These days, it feels like there’s a conspiracy about everything — that the truth is up for grabs, alongside crusty government datasets.

Some people chose to verify what they heard with multiple sources, including legacy media. Others followed a podcaster or Substack writer who they thought had the corner on truth. And some just asked ChatGPT.

One of the rallying cries of our conspiratorial age is “do your own research.” But that’s not easy at the best of times. Some data require expertise and context to interpret. And this year, some reliable government datasets disappeared altogether. Others are incomplete thanks to 2025’s Democrat-led government shutdown, the nation’s longest.

Yes, long-delayed numbers from that shutdown are now emerging — like high GDP growth and lower-than-expected inflation. But this new information is only adding to the confusion. The data is incomplete and partially being drawn from other sources, making comparisons difficult. It shows how damaging even temporary losses in government data can be.

It’s true that not all government statistics are perfect. Take the Census Bureau’s poverty math, as my friend and former AEI colleague Andrew Biggs has warned. Figures from 2023-2024 report that the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) for seniors increased from 9.7% to 9.9%. This is not so far off from the poverty rate of working-age adults, until you remember that seniors are getting monthly Social Security checks and free healthcare.

But Biggs points out that the Census OPM inexplicably doesn’t include ‘irregular income,’ such as withdrawals from 401(k)s. Accounting for this, the real poverty rate of seniors drops to 5.9%. The Census knows this and reports a new, supplementary way of calculating the poverty rate called “the NEWS,” but headlines of rising elderly poverty steal the show.

Or take maternal mortality rates. It’s long been said that the U.S. has the highest rate of maternal mortality in the developed world. But as I wrote in National Affairs, the U.S. also changed its measure of how to calculate maternal mortality. In 2003, the CDC began including a pregnancy check-box on death certificates even if the cause of death was not necessarily pregnancy-related.

This is widely recognized to have inflated the numbers. (In 2013, the pregnancy checkbox was used 187 times in deaths of people over age 85, according to economist Emily Oster.) Tighter definitions of maternal mortality rates strictly related to childbirth show U.S. rates to be elevated, but roughly on par with peer countries such as Canada and the UK, though maternal mortality rates for Black American mothers remain significantly higher.

What to make of these differences in government calculations? Some people might allege conspiracy — that someone inside the agency is massaging numbers. The books are cooked!

But the boring truth is that some things are harder to measure than they’d seem. And there are trade-offs in what and how we count. (For example, the “pregnancy box” was added because we were likely undercounting pregnancy-related deaths before.) Even in cases where we’ve come up with a more accurate way to measure something, there can be benefits to keeping consistent standards — they help us see trends over time.

This year, the Trump Administration often stoked the former approach. President Trump fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after a lackluster jobs report in August. “We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY,” President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social. He similarly accused Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell of slowballing rate cuts to make him look bad and misreading inflation data: “There is no Inflation, and every sign is pointing to a major Rate Cut.”

Other data simply disappeared on his watch, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration no longer tracking billion-dollar weather disasters (which seem to be increasing) and delayed data rollouts from the Department of Education (which slows sliding student scores).

This mentality essentially means it’s all up for grabs. If you don’t like the data, you can fire the accountant, ignore the spreadsheet, delete the database. And you better believe that the next accountant will keep your happiness in mind when crunching the numbers.

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But then how will we know what’s true? And if we lose our ability to tell, then what?

As Thomas Sowell wrote in Knowledge and Decisions: “The cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is a difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge used today.” This surely includes our embrace of and advancements in science: the relentless search for objective truth outside ourselves.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t improvements to be made in data collection. It is the responsibility of data collectors not to lock blindly into the old ways of doing things, but to constantly seek to make the data more holistic and transparent. Where there are alternative measures that can be used — for the poverty rate, or maternal mortality, or jobs numbers — they should publish them alongside the traditional metrics. The Congressional Budget Office, for example, releases multiple projection scenarios with each of its reports based on different assumptions that are spelled out.

And for us, it’s our responsibility to wrestle with numbers that challenge our assumptions, whether we’re journalists, policymakers or news consumers. But we must resist the belief that the entire federal data infrastructure is corrupt. While I don’t doubt that there are bad actors now and again in government, or that incentives within bureaucracies can become bloated and misguided, we should be slow to throw out data systems and older ways of tracking things, not quick.

Turning our back on data would remove any outside accountability, leave policymakers driving a car without map or road, and lead the country to a place where the titillation of conspiracy and cherry-picked numbers become the only barometer of what’s real.

This year, we came closer to that point than any time I can remember.

Abby McCloskey is a columnist, podcast host, and consultant. She directed domestic policy on two presidential campaigns and was director of economic policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

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.

Related: Crackdown on social service providers leaves some without housing assistance

“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.