Rent control is not on the ballot in Minneapolis this year, but depending on who voters elect as mayor and city council members, it is on the table.
That’s because in 2021, 53% of Minneapolis voters approved an amendment to the city charter giving the City Council the authority to regulate rent — something the council has so far failed to do, stymied in part by a lack of consensus with Mayor Jacob Frey’s administration about how to address the city’s housing woes.
But if state Sen. Omar Fateh, a democratic socialist who has supported rent control policies, wins the mayoral election and maintains a likeminded City Council majority, the governing coalition would have a green light to draw up a rent control ordinance, which would then be put to city voters.
In interviews with MinnPost and through public statements, the leading candidates for mayor and city council largely agree that more could be done to support residents in need of stable, affordable homes. But how they would do it — and how the city’s economy would respond — has become one of the top issues in the lead-up to Election Day.
Will new construction get a pass?
As Nov. 4 nears, even Fateh has hedged his language on the issue, saying at recent mayoral candidate forums that the city should learn from neighboring St. Paul’s experience with rent stabilization efforts, “including what exemptions we can put in place.”
Related: St. Paul’s rent control policy could be further watered down in response to development downturn
St. Paul’s experience was relatively brief: Following a 2022 voter-approved 3% cap on annual rent, city leaders soon enacted an exemption for developments built after 2004 — a response to nosediving rates of new development. When asked by MinnPost what Fateh thinks Minneapolis could learn from St. Paul, his campaign did not provide details.
Polling on the issue has been sparse in Minneapolis in recent years, but members of the City Council’s progressive majority, led in part by President Elliott Payne and Vice President Aisha Chughtai, have continued to beat the drum for strong rent stabilization policies.
Chughtai, speaking in late September on the “Wedge LIVE!” podcast, said she does not support exemptions for new construction, but “if that’s something that my colleagues would be interested in exploring, I have some ideas around how we can structure a new construction exemption to incentivize behaviors we want to see,” like expanding Minneapolis’ policy requiring a percentage of units in new buildings to be affordable, or requiring development to meet certain standards for environmental sustainability.
Rent relief without rent control
Mayor Jacob Frey and candidates DeWayne Davis and Jazz Hampton are firmer in their opposition to rent control. They say it pushes apartment developers out of the city, stifling investment in the new housing Minneapolis badly needs.
But they agree Minneapolis must do more to expand housing opportunities and keep rents in check. Statewide, the National Low Income Housing Coalition says Minnesota is short more than 100,000 deeply affordable rental homes for its roughly 165,000 renters qualifying as “extremely low income,” generally defined as earning 30% of area median income or less. In 2025, 30% of the median income for a family of four in Hennepin County is $39,700. That’s about $5,000 more than a childcare professional earns, and about $7,000 more than a fast food employee earns, according to Minnesota wage statistics.
As the incumbent, Frey has leaned on his eight-year record. He said the city’s supply of deeply affordable housing has increased more than eight-fold since he took office while citywide rents remained largely flat. And he said the city’s Stable Homes Stable Schools initiative, launched during his first term, has secured housing for nearly 6,000 children in Minneapolis Public Schools.
If he wins reelection, Frey said he plans to see that more than 12,000 new housing units are built affordable for a range of income levels, to expand the 4d Affordable Housing Incentive program aimed at supporting landlords who provide affordable units, and to expand efforts to close the city’s racial homeownership gap.
In an interview with MinnPost, Hampton said Minneapolis should fast-track deeply affordable housing projects, make it easier to get building permits and cut regulations that he said artificially limit housing supply. As an example, he named a requirement for rental units inside existing houses to have separate entryways. Changing that could free up roughly 700 units for rent across the city, he said.
“The cost of building is often what’s most detrimental” for large and small builders alike, he said. “If it takes too long to build, those are dollars that just slide out the window.”
Davis echoed Hampton’s call for more deeply affordable housing. He said the city needs to support nonprofit builders focused on creating housing for people underserved by private developers, and build more public housing on its own. He’d also like to see Minneapolis do more “to make sure that people can afford the housing that’s available and that renters are protected.” His ideas include a just-cause eviction policy, further raising the city minimum wage (which will increase to $16.37/hour on Jan. 1) and passing an ordinance to prevent investors from driving up housing costs through speculation.
“There’s such a high need”
Tenants and their advocates just want results. United Renters for Justice member Anain Losano, a 20-year resident of the Lyndale neighborhood, said rent increases in her part of town far outstrip residents’ ability to pay. Anecdotally, Losano said prevailing rents on studio apartments have nearly doubled in Lyndale and surrounding areas over the past few years. A friend of hers recently had to move after their rent jumped from $1,000 to $1,500 overnight, she added.
“Every time a renter moves out, [the landlord] paints the place and charges what they want,” she said through an interpreter.
Losano said the situation is worse for family-sized apartments, which make up only 10% of the city’s rental stock. The city should limit landlords’ latitude to raise rents, but it also needs to take matters into its own hands and build more “dignified” public housing, she said.
“Every time a unit empties, people are in there immediately … because there’s such a high need,” she said.
Protecting renter health and safety
The Minneapolis City Council is listening, Ward 7 Council Member Katie Cashman said via text message.
“We need strong renter protections to make sure renters are provided dignified housing and basic consumer protections when they sign a lease,” she said, emphasizing the range of possibilities short of strict rent control.
On Oct. 9, the council passed an ordinance requiring council review of “high-risk” rental licenses up for renewal. The measure would apply to about 2,250 units with “significant violations that impact tenant health, safety and livability,” said Council Vice President Chughtai in a constituent newsletter. The hope is that it will nudge landlords to fix health and safety issues raised by the city’s burgeoning tenant union movement. Frey signed the measure on Oct. 14.
Related: As Minneapolis’ mayoral candidates edge for policy points, the battle for likeability looms large
But Cashman, a self-described “swing voter” on the council, said she’s not prepared to vote “yes” on rent control. “I still oppose a rent cap as it definitely hampers investment, no matter what carveouts you try to create,” she said.
Lessons from the other side of the river
Commercial real estate developers agree. They say St. Paul’s ordinance had far-reaching consequences for the multifamily housing market, even outside of St. Paul’s city limits.
“It put a black mark on the Twin Cities generally,” said Maureen Michalski, regional senior vice president of development for Ryan Companies, a national development company based in Minneapolis.
That’s because the deep-pocketed national banks, pension funds and life insurance companies that fund projects by developers like Ryan approach metropolitan areas as if they were one real estate market, rather than a diverse set of local submarkets. They see rent control anywhere within a metro market as a threat to property owners’ long-term returns, Michalski said.
After St. Paul voters approved a 3% cap on rent increases in 2021, development activity plummeted and Ryan effectively halted production of market-rate housing in the city’s 122-acre Highland Bridge redevelopment. Housing permits also cratered in Minneapolis, buttressing Michalski’s argument that the specter of rent control soured lenders on the broader Twin Cities market.
Though affordable housing construction continued at Highland Bridge, Ryan and fellow market-rate developer Weidner remained on the sidelines until the St. Paul City Council voted this spring to permanently exempt apartments built after 2004 from the ordinance, Michalski said.
Ryan believed a 2022 amendment to exempt new construction for 20 years “was not sufficient given that housing is financed on a 30-year schedule … we just knew that the investment market wasn’t going to respond,” Michalski added.
The academic perspective on rent control
A May 2022 paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests St. Paul’s rent control ordinance adversely affected existing properties and tenants, too. Researchers attributed most of the 6% to 7% decline in St. Paul home values following the Nov. 2021 vote to the ordinance. They also found that rent control benefited relatively high-income tenants at the expense of lower-income homeowners.
“To the extent that rent control is intended to transfer wealth from high-income to low-income households, the realized impact of the law was the opposite of its intention,” they wrote.
Rent control proponents often point to a study published in 2021 by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Urban and Regional Affairs finding “little empirical evidence show[ing] that rent control policies negatively impact new construction.”
Myron Orfield, director of the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law School, said rent control doesn’t work at the city level because housing developers and buyers can simply move to neighboring communities without rent caps.
“It’s much more sensible, or at least plausible, at the metro level,” he said. But other policy levers — like requirements that outer-suburban communities build more multifamily housing — do more to check housing costs than strict rent control on any scale, he added.
‘I was right‘
Former St. Paul City Council member Jane Prince, who represented parts of the city’s East Side until 2024, joined a majority of then-City Council members in opposing the ordinance in 2021. She warned at the time that it would encourage “predatory landlords” to raise rent as much as they could while discouraging routine maintenance and overloading city resources with exemption requests.
In an interview Oct. 9, Prince said things had played out as she expected. Particularly galling, she said, is the upward pressure on rents even as mom-and-pop East Side landlords struggle to improve the smaller, older buildings that form the backbone of the city’s affordable housing stock.
“We put ourselves in a position where people are seeing higher rent increases than the market would have given them,” she said in an interview with MinnPost. Since 2021, rents have risen faster in St. Paul than in Minneapolis, according to the Twin Cities Housing Alliance.
“I was right,” she said. “Go figure!”
Brian Martucci is a freelance writer covering the Twin Cities for MinnPost.
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