By Sagirah Shahid
Dear Council Member Shaffer,
You recently published a newsletter that gave an unbalanced representation of what working-class and impoverished constituents within your ward have expressed regarding a city ordinance to extend the pre-eviction deadline. Unlike statements made by many of the multi-million dollar nonprofits cited in your newsletter, evidence-based research from leading housing experts suggest that preventing evictions saves lives.
In a 2024 scholarly article published in Housing Studies, researchers concluded
“…regardless of case outcome, eviction filings trigger far-reaching and lasting consequences for tenant households, including immediate and long-term threats to housing stability, health, relationships, and financial security.”
In a 2025 study published by Prinston’s Eviction Lab, families with school aged children whose parents received eviction filings had increases in absences, more suspensions and were more likely to have lower test scores. In a separate 2025 study co-published by Eviction Lab and New America, eviction filings or the threat of eviction filings were tied to “ negative student outcomes; student parents who face eviction are 23 percent less likely to complete a bachelor’s degree compared to their housing secure peers, and more likely to have lower quality of life, including higher mortality rates and lower earnings years later.”
Even a University of Minnesota study partially funded by the city of Minneapolis in 2019, indicates that prevention would save lives. The University of Minnesota’s CURA made lengthening the eviction process a policy recommendation.
The expertise of industry scholars, grassroots advocacy organizations such as Inquilinxs Unidxs Por Justica , and the lived-experiences of your working-class, working-poor, and impoverished constituents are unified in recognizing the benefits of eviction prevention.
Renters recovering from the economic disruptions caused by Operation Metro Surge need time to access resources and to repair the harm caused by the federal occupation of our city. We are not asking for “mercy.” We’re calling for sensible justice. There is nothing practical about increasing the city of Minneapolis’ unhoused population simply because the wealthiest amongst us do not value patience. Their profits are not worth more than our lives.
– Sagirah Shahid, Minneapolis
Related: A message from Council Member Elizabeth Shaffer on the pre-eviction notice ordinance
Related: The 60-Day Dead End: Why Mayor Frey Should Veto the Pre-Eviction Ordinance
Related: A message from Council Member Aurin Chowdhury on the pre-eviction notice ordinance
Council Member Shaffer’s argument is coherent only if you start the story too late. By the time a tenant reaches the notice stage, the policy failure has already happened. The real issue is not whether 30 days or 60 days is the perfect timeline in a vacuum. It is that the state failed to intervene early enough, broadly enough, and automatically enough after the ICE surge disrupted income at scale. MPR reported that HOME Line’s financial-assistance calls were up 76% and that eviction filings in the first two months of 2026 were still tracking with 2025, which was already the highest year they had seen at more than 25,000 filings. That is not evidence of stability. It is evidence that mutual aid is functioning as emergency load-bearing infrastructure while government lags behind.
If policymakers truly believe “time without money” is a debt trap, then the answer was never to do less time and call it realism. The answer was to act sooner and route aid through the landlord layer automatically, the way broad emergency intervention worked during COVID, instead of pushing desperate tenants into a fragmented application maze after they are already behind. Even Shaffer’s own account admits the city is relying on only $1 million in rental assistance while providers and advocates are describing a much larger shock. A later, narrower intervention does not prove the earlier, stronger intervention was wrong; it proves it was never seriously attempted.
Governance failed here, full stop. Not just the governor. Not just the Minneapolis City Council. Not just one agency, one office, or one vote. The failure was systemic and unilateral.
When the ICE surge began disrupting income, court attendance, work stability, and family safety, every relevant layer of government should have recognized the same thing. This was not a normal housing environment, and normal process was no longer an adequate response. Instead, state and local leaders allowed the crisis to mature downstream until the only options left were narrow, reactive, and politically defensible rather than structurally sufficient.
By the time officials were arguing over whether 30 days or 60 days was the better notice period, the policy failure had already occurred. By the time nonprofit providers were debating arrears math, mutual aid was already functioning as emergency infrastructure. By the time advocates were begging for interventions, families were already carrying the cost of delayed governance in the form of fear, displacement risk, debt accumulation, and instability. A functioning system would have acted upstream: pause the filings, automate the aid, route support through the landlord layer, and prevent arrears from snowballing in the first place. That did not happen.
So this is not a story about one bad ordinance or one missed executive action. It is a story about a governing structure that responded too slowly, too narrowly, and too cautiously to conditions that were obviously destabilizing in real time. When public officials fail to intervene early enough, broadly enough, and automatically enough, they don’t get to reframe the downstream damage as proof that stronger intervention was unrealistic. They are looking at the consequences of their own delay. And the people paying for that delay are the same people government was supposed to protect.
For folks to pit people against one another, and right now, and then try to shame families that have worked hard, saved every penny, pooled their resources, to be able to buy a run down duplex or triplex, then do the work on it, and live there, along with their tenants, and suggest that somehow this group, and thankfully there are PLENTY of them, in ALL of our neighborhoods, are the wealthiest, and greediest, among us all, is just wholly inaccurate and insulting.
But, just the same old DSA speak we have come to expect, that has done so much damage to this city. All of it pretty ironic, and especially now…
* Given how much WE PAY to keep this very large city council, 13 seats, which is very large compared to other cities of this size, with these VERY high salaries for each council member, then adding those costs of their asigned aides, then all of the benefits they all luxuriate in, which are extensive, and the costs for our city staff, that have to be at their disposal … that all RESULTS in an actual cost of 1/4-1/2 million dollars PER Council seat, PER year ( tax payer monies.)
I would love to see, and as documented, how much of the Chugley’s salaries they are individually donating, through Aug, to keep any ONE family from being displaced. But, I think many would be surprised to learned of how ungenerous the Chugleys actually are with their very high incomes, all tax payer supported, and what they do with all that disposable income. 🤔