Minneapolis emergency rent relief fund on track to dole out $300K in the first month

Well, it's been two weeks since the city of Minneapolis opened applications for emergency rent relief. The fund was created after some immigrant families couldn't pay rent because they were too scared to leave their homes and go to work during Operation Metro Surge. The $2 million rent relief fund is being administered through Hennepin County, along with three partner organizations. We're going to check in on the progress of this program for you. Will Lehman is the Area Manager of Homelessness Prevention for Hennepin County. Thanks for being with us, Will. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. We're also really glad to have Jackie Perez, vice president of programs at Clues, Minnesota's largest Latino-led nonprofit organization and a community partner organization, again, helping to disperse some of these rent relief funds. Thank you for your time as well, Jackie. Yeah, thank you for having me. I'd love to start with you, Will. Well, Hennepin County does handles rental assistance year round. So I'm curious to know how this emergency funding fits into the work that you're commonly doing. Yeah, absolutely. Eviction prevention has actually been a longstanding commitment of ours here at Hennepin County. We and our partners work in conjunction through a coordinated system called Rents Help Hennepin. That is an emergency rent assistance system that connects tenants facing eviction to one time financial assistance to keep them in their homes and catch up on rent. And the reason emergency rent assistance is so critical is that 90% of evictions in our community are due to non-payment of rent. So really, this is an economic issue more than anything else. And it's going to be cash that will help tenants to stay in their homes. Coming into this year... Oh, go ahead. No, no, go ahead. What was going on this year? Yeah, coming into this year, our county has committed $10 million towards emergency rent assistance through our Rental Penabin system. And we are so grateful to our partners at the City of Minneapolis who have augmented our funding capacity in response to impacts from Operation Metro Surge to the tune of $2 million. And so our portfolio this year is now at $12 million for the rest of 2026. Okay. And I wanted to, it actually leads into my question. Do you know how many applications have been processed, how much money has been given out for rental assistance out of this two million or specific to Metro Surge Yeah absolutely So we are serving through all of our funding streams tenants who are impacted by Operation Metro Surge across the entire county including Minneapolis and overall across our system this year We've pushed out more than three million dollars in emergency rent assistance, impacting more than 700 households facing eviction through the city of Minneapolis allocation specifically, which rolled out on April 20th. We've pushed out $150,000 already, serving 35 households, which means we're on pace to spend about $300,000 per month. Jackie, as time passes here, what are you seeing in terms of just the need for folks? It's hard to imagine if somebody couldn't pay their rent up until this point, that what that situation would look like for them or how long that is stretching beyond when there was the greatest presence of federal agents here. How has the need evolved in this past month or so, I wonder? Yeah, well, the need continues to increase. It hasn't, the number of calls that we receive hasn't leveled up. So we continue to see, for example, just since this funding got released, we received 175 requests for assistance. And out of those, we screen and about $60,000 in requests has been awarded with an average request of about $2,500 per family. However, we are very intentional, given the restrictions of this funding, we're very intentional about ensuring that we don't turn people away if possible. So though some of our funding does have strict requirements, we do everything we can to bridge the gap for individuals who don't qualify for this restricted funding using internal resources with the goal of ensuring that no one falls through the cracks due to city or county restrictions. Okay. Will, how does it work specific to this funding for folks? Who can apply? How much can they receive? I understand it's like whatever the need for that individual is. It's not a strict dollar amount for everyone. That's exactly right. We are administering assistance so that we can fully prevent a household's eviction, which means we typically don't establish a cap on assistance outside of an overall cap of or 10 months of rental arrears And the way it works is such that a resident can reach out to any of our access points whether it be one of those three providers administering the city of Minneapolis dollars or any of our other 20 plus access points across the overall rental penipin network Those requests are funneled through our application system and the applications are processed centrally through the county and we are the ones administering those payments. Payments go directly to property managers. That's our best assurance that those payments will directly prevent the eviction. And Jackie, do you think there are still people afraid to seek help or afraid of sharing information or skeptical of any sort of government funding in that way? What are you seeing there? Yeah, absolutely. There is fear, but we've done a really good job of building relationship with the community. And so we're an organization that they know they can trust and come to. We've always approached housing as part of a broader vision of family stability. So this isn't new work for us. And we've also found a way to make the process as seamless as possible. So the initial application for us is less than two minutes. And we assign a housing navigator that goes through the entire process with each household, given that the families that we serve require high-touch guided support to navigate those requirements and documentation. Okay. Considering just all of this work, Will, what are you seeing in terms of evictions? Are they going up right now, or what are you seeing at the county level? It sounds like many have been prevented. Yeah, certainly. Again, as mentioned earlier, we've prevented more than 700 evictions already in 2026. Globally, looking at the sort of landscape of eviction risk in Hennepin County, we have not seen that eviction filings have increased so far in 2026. However, that is relative to 2025, which happened to be the highest year on record for our county in terms of, excuse me, eviction filings and eviction judgments. So we're very concerned about the overall level of eviction risk. And coming into this year certainly would anticipate there could be further increases further down the line I do want to point to mutual aid as a critical response of the community and grassroots level that won necessarily show up in our evictions data but certainly have prevented a number of eviction filings so far this year. And as mutual aid dries up over the coming months, we may see an increase in eviction filings later this year. And of course, we remain committed to responding to any such increases. Jackie, as you're talking with folks What are you hearing? Because we know this idea of, you know, in Minneapolis, the city council and the mayor are going back and forth about trying to, you know, make some changes to some of the eviction filings or processes to give people some more time. And a lot of people are trying to figure out what is the best way to help people right now. I mean, do these eviction pauses help or are people have obviously relied a lot on mutual aid, although I don't know if that's still going to be as as fervent or, you know, as readily available as it was the past few months, because that can't be sustained forever. What do you think in terms of solutions? Can there be a combination? Yeah, I mean, you know, this isn't new, right? Like I said. So one of the things that we've had a crisis, housing just in general, the cost of living has gone up, rent has gone up, and we've seen it a lot with our homelessness, specifically in Minneapolis. So, yes, removing some of these restrictions does help, but it is a systemic issue and one that is going to require a lot to change and turn the tide. Our role in rental assistance comes through strong partnerships with Hennepin County and other local partners. And it is something that we're going to have to continue to do. And ensuring that our families can access these resources in a way that is culturally responsive, linguistically accessible, and rooted in trust is key for many of the communities that we serve. Absolutely. Part of ongoing work. Thank you both so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you. Will Lehman is the Area Manager of Homelessness Prevention for Hennepin County, and Jackie Perez is the Vice President of Programs at CLUES.