When Kate Eubank showed up to Minneapolis City Hall in January to advocate a statewide eviction moratorium, she thought of a five-year-old boy at her daughter’s school.
Ms. Eubank had brought the boy a Christmas present three weeks earlier as his parents hid from the ICE agents roaming Minneapolis streets. Soon after, the boy’s father was taken at a bus stop, his mother lost her job and the family missed a rent payment.
Parents at the school then scrounged up the money to help the family avoid eviction.
It was Ms. Eubank’s first time speaking at City Hall. “We are at the limits of our capacity as neighbors and as family,” she said, leaning into the microphone while a scrum of cable news cameras faced her. “We can’t do enough and we can’t do it alone.”
That feeling mounted for months, as Ms. Eubank and hundreds of other Minnesotans reached into their pocketbooks to keep their neighbors housed. When grassroots funding dropped off, many organizers continued pressing local government leaders for intervention even as national attention faded.
For months, the government’s response was muted. Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, would not impose an eviction moratorium. The Minneapolis City Council passed $3.8 million in rental assistance, but the Democratic mayor, Jacob Frey, vetoed measures to temporarily extend the grace period before an eviction.
Then in May, organizers notched an unexpected political win, securing $40 million in emergency rental assistance from the state. It represents a fourfold increase in the amount the state spends on that form of homelessness prevention in a typical year. But to the small army of neighborhood organizers striving to prevent evictions, the ICE surge exposed a deeper crisis the state is poorly positioned to address.
State Representative Michael Howard, a Democrat, largely credits the rent movement for pressuring lawmakers to match their herculean lift.
At least $14 million in grassroots donations have been distributed since January, according to Yusra Murad, an organizer affiliated with the rent-fund coalition Keep Minnesota Housed. That figure, based on a tally of 40 rent funds, represents only part of the total raised, excluding donations from charitable foundations and other crowdfunding efforts.
Mr. Howard, who co-chairs the House housing committee and represents a suburb south of Minneapolis, said that “Minnesotans were leading in their own neighborhoods and then they took that same fight to the legislature. It really did prove pivotal” He said lawmakers should learn from the system that Minnesotans built to provide far more rental assistance far more quickly.
“I heard more about the system failure of rental assistance during Operation Metro Surge than I ever have before, and I have heard about that for years,” Mr. Howard said. “We should feel pressure as government to be as responsive as we’ve seen folks at the community level.”
Alexandria Gomez, a substitute teacher, was among the thousands of Minnesotans who mobilized to support neighbors who were at risk if they left their homes.
She started the Phillips Community Free Store in 2020, sharing free produce and hygiene products outside of a volunteer-run bike shop in South Minneapolis. This January, while running food deliveries to families in hiding, she started getting questions about rent support.
Ms. Gomez and her fellow organizers quickly became experts on the resources available from the city and the county — and on the system’s limitations.
There were income restrictions. Confusing forms. Timelines that prevented residents from asking for help until they were almost over the edge. On top of it all, there wasn’t enough aid available, and people, many fearful of sharing information with the government, needed immediate help.
Ms. Gomez started a GoFundMe soon after Renee Good was killed, charting a system that skipped the usual requirements. If people said they needed help, she helped them. She was able to quickly identify who needed support, thanks to the network that persisted from 2020.
Leaders on each neighborhood block identified the needs in their area. She gave them cashier’s checks, which they passed along to families in hiding when rent was due.
Her efforts yielded more than $1.5 million in rent assistance, helping hundreds of families in the Phillips neighborhood stay in their homes.
Across the state, many other new rent funds worked in similar ways, as Minnesotans created a patchwork safety net together.
That community effort seems to have had a meaningful impact on eviction filings.
Last year, Minnesota hit a state record for the most evictions filed. In January and February, however, filings were slightly lower than the previous year, according to HOMELine, a nonprofit tenant advocacy group that tracks eviction data. Eric Hauge, a co-executive director at HOMELine, said mutual aid “absolutely kept filings artificially lower.”
But eviction filings are now again on track to exceed last year’s high. And grassroots donations have dwindled since Operation Metro Surge wound down, forcing many groups to shut down and shuffle renters to those that remain.
Now that the state aid has passed, it will probably reach local providers between July and September, according to the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency.
“It’s too little, too late,” Ms. Gomez said of the state funding. “I don’t think it’s really going to scratch the surface of the need — especially considering we’ve only been helping people who are impacted by Metro Surge.”
For low-income renters alone, the state’s own research outlines a $350 million need for annual emergency rental assistance. When the federal government exacerbated that need, philanthropic foundations were slow to respond, with one notable exception: John Wilson, who grew up as a renter with an intimate view of housing precarity. He got rich after his company patented a cancer innovation, and started a foundation that has distributed more than $23 million to local rent groups as of June 11.
When the Wilson Foundation joined the rent movement in late February, Mr. Wilson tapped into a network of trusted mutual aid groups — allowing him to move at a speed unusual in the foundation world. Mr. Wilson said things seemed better than they were in March, but the amount of rent support requested has not diminished.
At La Viña church in Burnsville, a suburb south of Minneapolis, Pastor Miguel Aviles is acutely aware of how urgent the need created by the ICE surge remains in his community. Legal fees, outstanding bills and health costs are mounting, and many households are missing breadwinners. At the peak of Operation Metro Surge, he continued to lead his majority-Latino congregation in person, even when he feared he or his wife might be caught up in the seemingly indiscriminate sweeps. But he received the highest volume of calls for rent help in May and June, months after officials announced the end to the federal operation.
Mr. Aviles is celebrating the state rent relief win, but he’s not expecting the aid to reach many of the families he has been supporting.
As of June 5, the church has distributed more than $1.2 million in rent aid, helping more than 1,000 people. Many would not qualify for typical rent relief programs, Mr. Aviles said, because they are not named on an official lease and are renting from family or friends. “We know these cases are real and most agencies are ignoring these cases,” he said. “And these people are going to be out in the streets.”
Mutual aid is “putting the whole system on its head,” said Mr. Hauge of HOMELine. “And I think it does speak directly to the need for structural change.”
The struggle for noncitizens to access housing aid could get worse. In addition to wide cuts to food, health care benefits and much federal funding to the state, the Trump administration wants to disqualify citizens and legal residents who live with undocumented family members from receiving housing assistance or accessing public housing.
Anna Stamborski, a lead organizer of Neighbors Helping Neighbors — one of the largest mutual aid networks that formed in response to the ICE surge — said communities need to stay organized in the face of threats like these.
Although state funding is on the way, Ms. Stamborski and other rent organizers are disillusioned that the local government didn’t heed their most urgent demand: a delay in evictions when losing shelter meant potential violence with armed agents outside.
At the peak of the surge, it was not intervention from philanthropy, the government or corporations that reached those thrust into crisis, Ms. Stamborski said. It was those who built relationships and infrastructure with their neighbors. That’s the work Ms. Stamborski hopes will continue, as she foresees a long-term fight ahead.
“Churches know exactly who this rent relief is going for. Schools know exactly who these families are that need help with rent. Neighborhoods know exactly who those people are that they’re organizing within their neighborhoods,” Ms. Stamborski said. “There’s beauty in relationships and proximity.”
This article was published as part of a collaboration between The New York Times’s Headway Initiative and Minnesota Public Radio, focused on covering housing in Minnesota. This reporting is supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with the Local Media Foundation serving as a fiscal sponsor. 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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