Ensuring an affordable Minnesota—Recounting the history of the Bring it Home, Minnesota, campaign for rental assistance
Are you among the majority of Minnesotans who agree that housing should be affordable for all income levels throughout our state?
If so, you’re a proponent of the main idea behind the Bring it Home, Minnesota campaign for rental assistance.
Backed by over 35 major organizations and thousands of individuals, the Bring it Home, Minnesota, campaign advocates for program funding that provides rental assistance so that each low-income family and individual can afford their monthly rent.
In 2023, the campaign made history when it successfully lobbied state legislators to pass into law Minnesota’s first-ever statewide general rental assistance program.
This new program—also called Bring it Home, Minnesota—received enough funding to provide nearly 5,000 newly created rental assistance vouchers for households in need. Despite this monumental achievement, nearly 550,000 qualifying individuals (or 200,000 households) remain without access to rent vouchers.
In other words, the campaign still has a ways to go. The fight continues.
But how did this small campaign go from an idea to a reality within just a few years? What steps led to the successful creation of Minnesota’s first-ever statewide general rental assistance program?
We answer these questions in the paragraphs below. Read on to discover more!
Rental assistance has a long history prior to Bring it Home, Minnesota
To understand the origins of Bring it Home, Minnesota, we must first understand the origins of rent support across the greater United States.
In 1974, the US Congress passed the Housing Choice Voucher Program as an amendment to Section 8 of the Housing Act of 1937.
This event led to the creation of the Section 8 Program, which offers federal rent vouchers to low-income households, which helps them afford to rent homes on the private market.
Housing vouchers created through the Housing Choice Voucher Program (HCV) have been administered by the Federal Government to Minnesotans for decades. However, only one out of every four qualifying individuals receives a voucher due to a chronic lack of funding for the program. That goes for Minnesota and the rest of the United States.
That means three out of every four qualifying individuals do not receive a voucher, creating many other challenges. Without the support of a rent voucher, families and individuals often end up paying more than 30% of their monthly income on rent and utilities.
This state of being “cost-burdened” limits the ability to save for a home, a move, education, retirement, or a life emergency, such as a workplace accident or car accident. For this reason, many people find themselves one unexpected bill away from losing their housing—an event often leading to a downward spiral in other aspects of life.
The early history of the Bring it Home, Minnesota campaign: 2019 to 2022
So, with the Federal rental assistance program drastically underfunded, Minnesota housing advocates in 2019 started to talk seriously about creating a state revenue campaign for housing needs that would include a push for general state rental assistance.
Minnesota had already dipped its toes into this work with the creation of a few small, highly targeted, population-based state programs (such as “Bridges” and “Homework Starts with Home”). While these smaller programs resulted in transformational changes for recipients and their communities, they only met a small portion of the demand among all households needing support statewide.
Encouraged by the results of these early rental assistance programs, the Board of Directors at Beacon Interfaith Housing Collaborative—one of the primary Minnesota housing non-profits supporting the program—decided in 2019 that it would intentionally advocate for more policy change related to housing in Minnesota. At this point, Beacon helped create the rental assistance campaign known as Bring it Home, Minnesota, which officially launched in 2020.
Since the inception of Bring it Home, Minnesota, many individuals have said that creating a Minnesota-based rental assistance program was too big, too far-fetched, and impossible to pass into law. However, a few key legislators recognized the campaign's potential, understanding that a rental assistance program would give Minnesota another effective tool for reducing and preventing homelessness.
Bring it Home, Minnesota gains key legislative support
Of these initial supporters, Michael Howard, the Minnesota House of Representatives legislator for District 51B (which includes parts of Richfield and South Minneapolis), played a crucial role in helping the campaign gain momentum among other state legislators. Howard previously worked to address local housing concerns during his time on the Richfield City Council. He was already familiar with some of the issues and concerns around housing vouchers, which gave him the insight needed to address these concerns and ensure the rental assistance program would help meet the needs of families across the state.
With Representative Howard leading the initiative within the Minnesota House of Representatives, Beacon publicly announced the campaign in early 2020. From there, Bring it Home, Minnesota began to gather collective support from other housing and social justice organizations. This institutional support gave the campaign enough momentum to start promoting state legislation (Bills: HF40; HF2220 / SF333) to fund rental support for all Minnesotans who qualify.
Thanks to the hard work of the campaign's legislative champions, legislators drafted a new program and proposed it to the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2020, around the same time COVID-19 began surfacing in news headlines across the globe.
Although the pandemic delayed this initial hearing, legislators in Minnesota re-visited the initiative in 2021, and the bill officially received its first hearing in the State House of Representatives. After hearing from housing advocacy groups and their leaders, prominent party leaders began supporting Bring it Home, Minnesota. Momentum built up further, and over half of the DFL Caucus (41 representatives, in total) in the State House signed on in 2021.
In 2022, the DFL Caucus within the Minnesota House of Representatives decided it would make Bring it Home, Minnesota a priority. Then-Housing Committee Chairs Representatives Alice Hausman and Michael Howard would champion the bill together.
Community supporters rallied outside as legislators refined the bill inside the state capitol building. They pushed for the campaign to continue after it was denied a hearing in the State Senate earlier that year.
After the 2022 session and rally, Bring it Home, Minnesota worked with partners and started expanding its statewide reach and support. Legislative champions decided to collectively prioritize the campaign and push hard to ensure something would pass for Bring it Home, Minnesota in 2023. This push marks the moment when House File 11 and Senate File 11 came to be introduced during the 2023 legislature.
2023 and beyond for the Bring it Home, Minnesota campaign
As 2023 began, Minnesota experienced a historic $17 billion surplus in its state budget—a good omen for the Bring it Home, Minnesota campaign. This surplus gave the campaign’s champions—including Representative Michael Howard and Senator Lindsay Port—a boost to their target budget, which is the total allocated amount of money they can spend on housing.
Overall, investment in housing usually receives less than 3% of the state budget, which amounts to around $200-$300 million annually. In 2023, Because of the advocacy that Beacon and others had done around housing since 2020, the housing budget swelled to a record $1 billion. However, there was a catch.
Despite this historic investment in housing, the state would only allocate $50 million for ongoing funding. One-time funds play a pivotal role in building new homes, but we need ongoing funding to provide those of us who need rental assistance with continued support.
Knowing that ongoing funding would be crucial for the success of continued rental assistance, the Housing Committee Chairs helped create a new metro sales tax to generate ongoing funds.
This new quarter-cent sales tax applies to the seven-county Twin Cities metropolitan area, and legislators estimate it will provide around $300 million in ongoing funding over two years. Most of that funding will go directly to city and county governments to help fund the development of affordable housing and homelessness prevention initiatives.
With funding and support of the Minnesota House and Senate secured, the Bring it Home, Minnesota rental assistance program officially became law when Governor Walz signed the bill during the summer of 2023.
This moment marked a historic first step toward Minnesota becoming the first state to guarantee that all low-income renters can afford their homes and experience the safety, security, and stability that goes along with it.
In all, Bring it Home, Minnesota will fund around 5,000 new statewide rental assistance vouchers. That’s a significant achievement.
Despite the passage of Bring it Home, Minnesota, over 540,000 low-income Minnesotans will still struggle to pay rent each month—putting them one emergency away from ending up without a home. And so, our work continues.
How everyone benefits from a fully funded Bring it Home, Minnesota
Rent vouchers provide a simple, cost-effective solution to create housing stability and lift individuals and families out of poverty. However, despite their historic success throughout the US, only one out of every four eligible households will receive a voucher.
Moving forward, the Bring it Home, Minnesota campaign will focus on closing that gap. We want 100% of qualifying applicants to receive a rent voucher because rent vouchers are proven to lift individuals and families out of poverty.
According to the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, federal rental assistance lifted three million individuals out of poverty in the US in 2018. That includes over 665,000 senior citizens and 936,000 children. Put into perspective, that's roughly the same population as the Twin Cities metro. Research and public records show that rental assistance has lifted more people out of poverty than any other federal program besides Social Security.
So, how would a fully funded Bring it Home, Minnesota impact our state?
Rental support would free up money in family budgets statewide. With a rental support voucher ensuring they would spend no more than 30% of their monthly income on housing costs, families would have more funds to provide for their children, their health, and their future. Families could afford more quality food, seniors could afford life-saving medications, and parents could save for their children’s education or their own retirement.
The stability created by rental assistance would also reduce the number of families and individuals seeking emergency services, shelter, or medical care. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, an individual experiencing homelessness costs the American taxpayer around $35,000 per year. However, that cost decreases by around 50% when individuals find stable housing.
In other words, by helping provide affordable housing now, rent vouchers can save taxpayers money down the road. As former Secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Shaun Donovan, observed, “We learned that you could sustain people in homelessness for $35,000 to $150,000 a year, or you could literally end their homelessness for $13,000 to $25,000 a year.”
We all know what the better deal here is, which is why Bring it Home, Minnesota will continue to advocate for more funding until all qualifying individuals receive rental assistance. Beyond economics, we all have a moral obligation to see to the well-being of our neighbors and our state. For our campaign, that’s an obligation we intend to keep.
Want to help Minnesota become more a more affordable place to call home?
If you—like thousands of Minnesotans—agree it’s time for serious solutions to Minnesota’s housing insecurity crisis, join us in action. Sign up for our email list to stay informed on what you can do to get involved.