If Tenants Are To Be Protected, Cities Need To Pay For Enforcement Of The Rules

By Cole Hanson, Minnesota Reformer

November 14, 2025

A 4-3 St. Paul City Council vote in September offers a cautionary tale for cities nationwide: Rights without enforcement create systems where even well-intentioned officials struggle to make protections work.

When tenants on Ashland Avenue faced 28.5% rent increases despite living with water leaks, mold, deteriorating foundations and wobbly staircases, they spent months fighting for protections the city should have provided automatically. The narrow majority (Councilmembers Cheniqua Johnson, Hwa Jeong Kim, Rebecca Noecker and Nelsie Yang) sided with tenants, limiting increases to 3%. That’s the good news. But dissenting council members Molly Coleman, Anika Bowie, and Saura Jost revealed how enforcement gaps force impossible choices for tenants and city government alike.

Cities nationwide have embraced tenant protection policies — rent control, just-cause eviction, habitability standards — but then they don’t fund enforcement. The result is “paper rights” — tenants cannot access these protections unless they have enormous resources to take on landlords, public officials and bureaucratic inertia.

This case illustrates St. Paul’s approach to tenant issues: create elaborate protections on paper, provide minimal enforcement, then blame tenants for the resulting dysfunction.

The city’s rent stabilization ordinance caps annual increases at 3% but allows exceptions, including for landlords who can demonstrate need for “reasonable return on investment.” As it stands, tenants can appeal these increases. Since 2022, just 29 tenant appeals have made it to the City Council with roughly 7 in 10 cases denied prior to this September’s case. What happened on Ashland Avenue shows how this entire process actually works: City staff approved a 28.5% increase after reviewing financial documents, apparently without adequately assessing whether the units met basic maintenance standards, with the hearing officer suggesting the council do the same through denial of tenant appeals against such an increase.

Only when tenants organized and appealed did problems come to light. Instead of ensuring standards were met before approving rent increases, the city required tenants to prove their units were substandard.

In other words: Here’s your rights — good luck enforcing them on your own.

When enforcement fails, officials often choose landlords

When council members voted against limiting the rent increase, their reasoning revealed how enforcement gaps force impossible choices — and whose interests get prioritized.

Coleman and Jost deferred to systems that had already failed. Coleman argued habitability questions “should be determined through city inspections or in housing court” — even though the Department of Safety and Inspections had failed to assess conditions before approving increases. Both said: Trust the process, even when the process just failed.

Bowie opposed the tenants’ appeal to protect “naturally occurring affordable housing.” Despite acknowledging unsafe stairways and deterioration, she proposed allowing a 20% increase because landlords would be “operating at a net zero while complying with city code.” For other Ashland units: “These rents are below market rate… This isn’t a situation of a landlord trying to jack up the rent.”

This asks tenants to absorb substandard conditions and major rent increases to preserve landlord viability. Tenants living with mold and unsafe conditions are already subsidizing the landlord’s operation with their health.

The dissenting votes weren’t from incomplete information — the council had extensive documentation from a HUD-certified inspector and tenant testimony. These were value choices about whose interests matter most when enforcement fails.

The 4-3 vote shows why enforcement gaps are corrosive: They burden tenants while forcing officials into impossible choices. Without adequate enforcement, city leaders default to preserving the status quo. The result: tenants lose.

The broader lesson

Tenant protections fail without three components:

Proactive enforcement: Cities must verify compliance before approving harmful actions. Complaint-driven enforcement burdens vulnerable tenants and forces officials to decide with incomplete information. Landlords with significant property violations should no longer hide on a city council consent agenda when their license comes up for renewal or when they self-certify their rent increases, but be subject to investigation and discussion before the public who sanctions their business in the first place.

Adequate resources: St. Paul budgeted less than $500,000 for rent stabilization in 2025 to oversee thousands of units. It was insufficient this year, and as half of our city rents, it will continue to be without significantly more money. This budget gap forces officials to make judgment calls without verification infrastructure, and leaves city staff forced to cut corners when they would rather do the right thing by their neighbors.

Clear authority: The dissenting members’ uncertainty about considering habitability reflects unclear authority allowing failures to continue. Cities must define enforcement standards clearly, and do so in a way that provides clarity to decision-makers and to those seeking remediation.

Without these, tenant protections exhaust tenants while leaving officials navigating claims without support.

The 4-3 vote went right, but three dissenting votes revealed how enforcement failures create impossible situations. In cities implementing tenant protections, the lesson is that rights without enforcement don’t just fail tenants — they create systems where even well-intentioned officials lack tools to make protections work.

The Minnesota Reformer is an independent, nonprofit news organization dedicated to keeping Minnesotans informed and unearthing stories other outlets can’t or won’t tell..