Dear reader,
Last week, we took a broad look at the federal government’s disappearing data infrastructure. Today, we’re focusing on one data point in one particular state: the number of eviction filings in Minnesota.
Minnesota offers an illuminating window into efforts across the U.S. to keep residents housed. In 2018, Minneapolis, the state’s largest city, voted to eliminate single-family zoning, advancing one of the boldest housing reforms in the country. As ICE’s Operation Metro Surge recently revealed, the Twin Cities are a notable hub of organizing for tenants’ rights. With housing insecurity rising, examining the Land of 10,000 Lakes is a good way to consider how to combat it.
Eviction filings are not the same as evictions. Many events may occur between a tenant’s receiving an eviction notice from a landlord and being forced out of a property — they may pay late rent, for example, find another place to live or challenge the eviction. But some research has found that increases in eviction filings are more correlated with increases in homelessness than actual eviction judgments.
Now, with the Trump administration turning against policies that aim to house people dealing with chronic homelessness, more attention is turning toward what states can do to prevent homelessness altogether. Read on for more from Cari Spencer, who covers housing for MPR News, on why evictions have been rising in Minnesota and what the state is doing about it.
— Matthew Thompson
What’s happening to eviction filings in Minnesota?
Minneapolis has often made headlines for tempering rent growth for the average renter, while prices climb in comparable cities. And in Minnesota, the average rent is lower than the average in the country overall. But the state is also bucking national trends in a surprising way: Eviction filings are skyrocketing.
In 2025, eviction filings fell slightly in the 10 states and 38 cities tracked by the Eviction Lab at Princeton University — dropping about 3.2 percent below the two-year average from 2023 and 2024. Yet in Minnesota, and even more so in the Twin Cities, the trend has moved in the opposite direction.
In the two years before the pandemic, Minnesota averaged 15,200 eviction filings per year. Filings took a steep dip during the COVID-19 eviction moratorium — when they averaged about 5,600 per year — while the federal government committed billions of dollars to rental assistance nationwide. When protections ended, filings shot up to new heights. For the past five years, there have been more than 23,000 each year in the state.
Last year, a record of nearly 26,000 evictions were filed in Minnesota. Then, Operation Metro Surge happened.
The federal incursion quickly exposed the number of families living on the edge — and the thin line between income and eviction. ICE sent many households into hiding and detained many breadwinners. It was enough to cause hundreds to fall behind in rent. It took a grass-roots mutual aid movement raising millions of dollars to mitigate the crisis at its peak. One local philanthropist, John Wilson, has distributed more than $27 million.
But this had already been a growing reality for renters across the state.
Why are more people on the edge of homelessness?
There’s a basic problem: Many of Minnesota’s fastest growing jobs — essential functions such as taking care of aging family members, serving meals and checking out at the store — don’t pay enough to cover the cost of living there.
In four out of five of the most in-demand jobs, the gap between the median income and the income needed to afford median rent has widened over the past decade, according to the Minnesota Housing Partnership.
And it’s getting even harder for minimum-wage workers to make enough to cover rent.
A decade ago, a minimum-wage worker in Minnesota needed to work 79 hours per week to afford a two-bedroom unit at the fair market rate, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. That’s the equivalent of working two full-time jobs.
In 2025 — when eviction filings hit a new high statewide — that worker needed to clock 101 hours per week to afford a fair market two-bedroom apartment. That means two full-time jobs plus a part-time gig.
Over that same decade, the number of extremely low-income households has grown, along with the portion of such renters who spend more than half of their paychecks on housing costs. An unexpected cost or loss of income could tip them into a housing crisis.
How is Minnesota responding?
As more Minnesotans confront eviction notices for the first time, the state government is giving more attention to a critical lifeline: emergency rental assistance.
In a typical year, the state’s primary emergency rental assistance program, the Family Homeless Prevention and Assistance Program, receives about $10 million, with another $18 million for two broader emergency funds.
The program has been around since 1993, but since 2024, the state has been required by law to regularly assess the need for rental assistance.
Now it seems the state may rely more on this form of aid as a stop gap.
In 2023, the state legislature, then dominated by Democrats, answered the post-pandemic rise in evictions with $45 million for the program, after allocating $50 million earlier in the session as part of a $1 billion housing omnibus bill during an ample surplus year.
After Operation Metro Surge — with a smaller surplus and a divided legislature — the state quadrupled emergency rental assistance to $40 million, which came as a surprise even to those who had been advocating it.
But it still falls short of what’s needed to keep low-income families from falling into homelessness, which Minnesota’s housing finance agency puts at $350 million a year.
What’s the long-term picture?
Like every other state in the country, Minnesota faces a shortage of homes, particularly ones that low-income renters can afford. The Minnesota Housing Partnership said the state needs nearly 100,000 more such homes.
That shortage has declined by 3,700 homes compared with last year, according to the latest report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition. But for many low-income renters, even an “affordable home” is too expensive.
Will Delaney, the co-executive director of Hope Community, a local nonprofit that develops mixed-income and affordable housing, said he sees this firsthand.
“I don’t think there’s any way that we can produce enough new housing that housing is suddenly going to be affordable to people all the way down the income ladder,” Delaney said. “We need different kinds of solutions for folks at the lower-income bands.”
One solution he’s hopeful about: state tax-funded housing vouchers.
A new 0.25 percent metro sales tax is expected to generate $2 billion for the state over the next four years. A quarter of that would help fund Bring It Home, a new state program that mimics Section 8 and is projected to extend subsidies for about 4,400 people.
The Minneapolis Public Housing Authority hasn’t accepted new applications for federally funded Section 8 vouchers since 2019, and then only one in five applicants who had already been in line for 10 years got off the waiting list. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed new rules that could shrink Section 8 even more.
There are currently about 400 households on the wait list in Minneapolis. The state housing authority will soon begin taking applications for the 600 to 700 new vouchers the sales tax is expected to fund.
What can I check out next?
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In June, we covered the effects of ICE’s deployment in Minnesota, and the momentous grass-roots effort to keep the state’s residents housed.
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Increasing the housing supply has become a focus in addressing the nation’s affordability crisis, but in February, Ronda Kaysen reported on why that may not be enough.
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Several U.S. cities are exploring public investment in new housing, aiming not for monetary returns, but for more units, Conor Dougherty reported in May.
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Soaring housing costs are spawning a new generation of politicians who muddle the typical partisan divides, as Kate Zernike reports.
— Cari Spencer
Your turn
Test your knowledge: The median home price across the U.S. is around $450,000. But in San Francisco, A.I.-fueled wealth has driven sky-high valuations. According to a report from Redfin, the median home price in the city in April was what?
Tell us your thoughts: Have you experienced housing insecurity? Are you seeing rising eviction filings where you live? What are your thoughts on the developments in Minnesota? Please email your thoughts to [email protected].
Following up: After our edition last week on declining federal data infrastructure, our sources at the Federation of American Scientists followed up with more context on the information cataloged at Data.gov. “While Data.gov currently lists 362,000 data sets, the actual number indexed in the catalog is closer to 500,000,” a spokesperson for the group wrote in an email. “Also, there are many more public data assets held by federal agencies but most are not released due to staffing and resource constraints, not because access is intentionally limited.”
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Investigating: A significant figure from the government has been drawing intense scrutiny since last week: the number of American troops who have been killed during the war in Iran.
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A correction: Last week’s edition of this newsletter misquoted Crystal FitzSimons of the Food Research and Action Center. She referred to families that were struggling, not starving.
Cari Spencer contributed reporting.
The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.
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