Public housing tenant challenging MPHA's right to evict without a rental license

Stacey Marable is one of many Minneapolis Public Housing Authority tenants battling eviction. Unlike most others, she is using the legal action against her to force MPHA to make its properties more livable.

The mother of five has lived in public housing 10 years. She said she found pests, water damage and electrical hazards shortly after moving in. The city of Minneapolis denied her repeated inspection requests.

Six years ago, with her children having nose bleeds and trouble breathing, Marable saved up to hire a private inspector who found toxic mold contamination inside the walls and floors.

Medical bills mounted. Marable eventually fell behind on rent by $164. MPHA spent $334 on court fees to evict her.

"My two older sons, it affected their schoolwork because they didn't know if they were going to be able to come home, have a place to lay their head," she said.

Marable sued, arguing that the city treated public housing tenants as second-class citizens. She eventually won a Court of Appeals judgment that ordered the city to inspect public housing.

The city now conducts complaint-based inspections of public housing, said city spokesman Casper Hill. But MPHA units remain unlicensed, exempt from routine inspections that enforce a slew of minimum health and safety standards.

Continuing to test what tenant protections apply to public housing, Marable has withheld rent since last June's ruling in her lawsuit. Now she is back in housing court with her home again on the line.

"A landlord's covenants of habitability are interdependent with a tenant's covenant to pay rent," contended Marable's lawyer Mary Kaczorek.

In response, MPHA has argued that the city never asked the agency to purchase rental licenses and lacks the resources to conduct regular inspections of the agency's 6,000 units.

"Absolving MPHA tenants from paying rent would significantly impair MPHA's ability to provide housing to the tenants MPHA serves," said director of operations Mary Boler in a court filing.

Rent accounts for 37% of MPHA's operating costs.

According to MPHA, HUD Manager Thomas Feeney said in a 1992 memo that the agency should not pay annual licensing fees if the city did not provide annual inspection services. HUD has not updated that guidance in 30 years.

The city currently inspects all privately owned rentals on a one- to eight-year cycle depending on the documented problems at the property.

A hearing has been set at the end of April in Marable's eviction case.

"It was very difficult to continue to keep on with the fight, but the Lord, he held me down and let me know that he was there beside me," she said. "In the back of my mind I know not too many tenants could do what I am doing."

A potential class action lawsuit making the same case on behalf of all Minneapolis public housing tenants is working its way through state court.

MPHA blames the derelict state of the agency's portfolio on HUD's "decades of underfunding."

Bills in the state House and Senate earlier this year would have spent $45 million from Minnesota's estimated $17.5 billion surplus on repairing the agency's family housing. While the Senate's big housing bill dedicates $30 million to MPHA, the House housing committee's spending package allots nothing to public housing rehabilitation statewide.

"For reasons that are equally unknown and shocking to me, this committee determined that these families deserved no part of this historic state surplus," said MPHA executive director Abdi Warsame. "What does it say about us ...? "