Report: Hennepin County MN tenants w/rep 2x more likely to stay in homes

Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid has been running a housing representation project in Hennepin County.  The latest report on their pilot found, among other things, that represented tenants were twice as likely to stay in their homes, received twice as long to move if necessary, and were four times less likely to use a homeless shelter.  

An article in Bench & Bar of Minnesota dove further into the data.  It found that only 3% of tenants were ordinarily represented outside of the pilot, and that within the pilot, represented tenants won or settled their cases 96% of the time, compared to 83% for those receiving limited scope rep and 62% of those who were unrepresented.  Also, represented tenants were 21 percentage points more likely to remain in the home and received twice as much time to move as unrepresented tenants.  Most dramatically, 78% of represented tenants left with a clean eviction record, compared to 6% of unrepresented tenants.

At the same time, the City of Minneapolis announced it has created a $500,000 fund for eviction defense.