St. Paul City Council members unanimously approved a measure Wednesday, March 25, that will allow tenants more time to pay their rent to address increased housing instability related to Operation Metro Surge.
The ordinance will temporarily extend the pre-eviction notice period in St. Paul to 60 days beginning on May 14. The measure will be in effect until the end of the year.
St. Paul’s pre-eviction notice period, or the time a landlord has to give a tenant to pay rent before an eviction case is filed against them, is currently 14 days. The period was already set to expand to 30 days beginning on May 14. The new measure will further push that out to 60 days temporarily.
Many immigrant families did not go to work and sheltered in their homes when thousands of federal immigration agents came to Minnesota during the operation. City leaders and advocates have stressed that many families are still struggling to make ends meet and pay for basic necessities like rent and food, even though federal officials said the operation is over. Advocates say that giving tenants more time will prevent evictions and keep residents in their homes.
“St. Paul’s housing conditions were already fragile before Operation Metro Surge,” Council Member HwaJeong Kim said at the meeting Wednesday. “The surge did not create that fragility, it weaponized it. Fourteen days was never enough, and 30 days is not enough … Time is one of the few tools this council controls directly with this policy, and today we will use it for the betterment of families.”
In an interview before the vote, Tony Aarts, a leader with Unidos MN’s Sanctuary Cities Organizing Team and a St. Paul resident, said while community members have pooled a substantial amount of rental assistance and mutual aid, it’s not enough to meet the need.
“The idea of the 60-day [notice period] is it’s creating this window of recovery that’s so desperately needed so that people can stabilize, can gather their income, can put the pieces back together,” Aarts said.
Jessica Szuminski is a policy attorney at the Housing Justice Center and works with cities and the state to get tenant protections put in place. She said she believes St. Paul is the first city in Minnesota to extend the pre-eviction notice period to 60 days.
According to data from the nonprofit HOMELine, evictions in St. Paul and the state are about on par with numbers from last year. But the organization attributes that to the amount of mutual aid that has been available. The group’s tenant hotline has still seen a significant increase in calls over the past few months from Minnesotans inquiring about rental assistance, how to break a lease and if landlords can allow ICE to enter residential buildings.
“Mutual aid may continue to fill some gaps, but it is not a sustainable longterm solution to structural housing instability,” HOMELine’s co-directors Eric Hauge and Jess Zarik wrote in a letter to the City Council earlier this month.
The council considered exempting the St. Paul Public Housing Agency from the ordinance, but voted 5-2 on Wednesday not to do so.
Agency officials had argued that they already adjust rent to resident’s income, and that having more unpaid rent could impact their federal funding.
Advocates pushed back against an exemption for the agency. Data provided from HOMELine showed that the SPPHA filed 45 evictions on March 20, more than half of which were for allegedly less than $1,000 owed.
“It is counterproductive and contradictory to pass a tenant protections ordinance and then to exempt the largest landlord in the city from that ordinance,” said Council Member Cheniqua Johnson.
The Minneapolis City Council passed a similar ordinance to extend the pre-eviction notice period to 60 days, but it was vetoed by Mayor Jacob Frey.
Frey argued when he vetoed the ordinance that giving people more time to pay rent would cause them to accrue more debt. He instead proposed additional rental assistance funding.
Szuminski said that the amount of debt people will accumulate doesn’t change how difficult it is to find housing after being evicted.
“The goal is for them to access the money they need, to pay off what they allegedly owe and then stay housed,” she said. “We’re preventing homelessness. We’re preventing evictions. We’re not increasing rent debts, we’re increasing a chance of stability.”
The Minneapolis City Council is scheduled to vote on whether to override Frey’s veto of the ordinance on Thursday, March 26.
