Edina Neighbors for Affordable Housing

No group of protesters could devastate south Minneapolis more than years of disinvestment and abandonment already have.

What does systemic racism look like? In this episode, we look at how housing discrimination in theory and in practice in the Twin Cities contributes to the dramatic racial disparities in Minneapolis.

Eviction moratoriums and unemployment benefits are expiring, which will have a bigger effect on minority neighborhoods, experts say.

When the nation’s economy ground to a halt this spring, economists warned that an avalanche of evictions was looming. The federal government and many states rushed to ban them temporarily. Twenty states, including Louisiana, Texas, Colorado and Wisconsin, have since lifted their restrictions, and researchers have tracked thousands of recent eviction filings in places where data is available. Eviction bans in nine other states — including Minnesota — and at the federal level are set to expire by the end of the month.

Widening gaps in income, wealth and opportunity in the years before the virus hit left everyone more vulnerable to the disease. It undermined the nation’s defenses and weakened its response. Yet the devastation of the pandemic has also created an opportunity to begin to put things right, to ensure that the America that ultimately emerges is more just, more free and less fragile.

Civil rights advocates have spent 50 years warning Minneapolis that segregation couldn’t work. This month, the region’s persistent racial inequality and social isolation broke out into fiery unrest.

While COVID-19 seems to have blunted the growth of rent prices somewhat, its longer-term effects on rent — and renters — remain unclear.

Homelessness in the United States is the most extreme manifestation of a broader housing crisis.

This project has uncovered, documented, and mapped the systematic use of property deeds to enforce racial segregation in the Minneapolis area.

Low-income tenants in south Minneapolis will gain control of five apartment buildings from embattled ex-landlord Stephen Frenz, ending a bitter fight after complaints of substandard conditions and attempted evictions.

It’s a mistake to blame density for the spread of the coronavirus. Cities, large and dense by definition, do not inevitably support explosive viral transmission. But factors that do seem to explain clusters of Covid-19 deaths in the United States are household crowding, poverty, racialized economic segregation and participation in the work force. The patterns of Covid-19 by neighborhood in New York City track historical redlining that some 80 years ago established a legacy of racial residential segregation.

Letting moratoriums expire without putting long-term renter support in place would be devastating. Once moratoriums end, officials say courts will likely be overwhelmed with eviction proceedings.

As COVID-19 continues to take thousands of lives each day in the United States, minorities in particular are being ravaged out of proportion, public health officials say.

The governor said in a news conference call from self-imposed quarantine that landlords and financial institutions cannot start eviction proceedings during the state’s peacetime emergency for the virus. Walz said halting evictions was necessary to slow the spread of the coronavirus and it would be “not only personally cruel, but counterproductive to what we’re trying to do” if people did not have a home to stay in.

Without a place to stay, it’s next to impossible to maintain the “social distance” necessary to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.