Hare, RebeccaHOME Line2018-09-192018-09-192018https://hdl.handle.net/11299/200081Matthew Desmond’s book, Evicted, documented the impact of evictions on communities of color and female-headed households in Milwaukee while his study, Evicting Children, highlighted their effect on children. To demonstrate parallels from his work to Minnesota, the Minneapolis Innovation Team conducted a study with HOME Line that found up to 50% of tenants in two North Minneapolis ZIP codes were evicted in a two-year span. (https://homelinemn.org/mplsevictions) This is devastating for families, schools, and communities as a whole. HOME Line oversaw a 2016-2017 University of Minnesota Humphrey Institute Policy Fellows team who observed that African-American females were both the largest demographic group in Minneapolis evictions and the least likely to be represented by an attorney.1 A survey of 2017 Brooklyn Park residential tenant calls to HOME Line’s free tenant hotline for eviction advice confirms similar demographic patterns in Brooklyn Park.2 The disparity in the demographics of households impacted by evictions suggest evictions are a civil rights issue with important Fair Housing implications. As the recipient and beneficiary of federal funds, the City of Brooklyn Park has an obligation to affirmatively further Fair Housing by addressing barriers to housing access such as evictions.3 With the above in mind, HOME Line prepared this report at the request of the City of Brooklyn Park. The purpose of this report is to examine trends related to residential evictions in Brooklyn Park in order to better understand the eviction process and to identify strategies to minimize evictions and the harmful impacts of displacement on Brooklyn Park renter households. There are three portions to this report: (1) A mapped geographic distribution by both ZIP code and address of evictions in Brooklyn Park using a summary-level data extract from the state courts. (2) Case file review consisting of individual analyses of a randomly selected set of eviction cases filed in 2015, 2016, and 2017. (3) Detailed state data extract analysis of all evictions filed in Brooklyn Park.enReport