Evictions &amp; Inequality in North Minneapolis: Centering Community in the Creation of Public Policy

Brittany Lewis,Molly Calhoun

doi:10.33596/coll.56

Abstract

Single Black mothers face the highest risk of eviction in the United States. In North Minneapolis, a community manufactured to contain undesirable populations through housing discrimination, decades of urban disinvestment, and unfair lending practices, the situation has become further exacerbated by the rise in distressed-property investment and disproportionate rates of eviction. This community-engaged action research project engages with tenants and landlords to illuminate how and why evictions occur in North Minneapolis, MN. The approach disrupts the power imbalance that exists between researchers, local power brokers, and community-based organizations to produce research findings that both value people’s lived experiences and utilize those experiences to produce community-centered public policy solutions. Community-centered policy solutions include lengthening the formal eviction process, creating a more human-centered process for financial support, and disrupting a cycle of dependency that is often reinforced by the state.

Highlights

Black women in North Minneapolis face a crisis that has gone unaddressed for far too long – the social and economic crisis of evictions
How do landlords and tenants make meaning of current eviction processes to inform community-engaged policy solutions? In doing so, we aim to disrupt the power imbalance that exists between researchers, local power brokers, and community-based organizations to produce research findings that both value people’s lived experiences and utilize those experiences to produce community-centered public policy solutions
We outlined and integrated the findings as they related to three localized public policy solutions that arose from this project

Summary

Introduction

Black women in North Minneapolis face a crisis that has gone unaddressed for far too long – the social and economic crisis of evictions. The community needs assessment included churches, multicultural youth organizations, cultural centers, non-profit agencies, criminal justice advocacy centers, shelters, and others. In this engagement process, one of the most pressing issues impacting residents in attaining access to fair and affordable housing was unlawful detainers (i.e., evictions). Based on the needs assessment and the Minneapolis Innovation team report (Minneapolis Innovation Team, 2016), CURA set out to further examine the issue of evictions in North Minneapolis from the perspectives of landlords and tenants themselves. CURA believes in the production of community-engaged research and values the meaningful involvement of our community-based partners throughout the research process, from the identification of research question(s) to the d issemination of results

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion