We just wrapped up our busiest December ever—for both new contacts (emails and calls combined), 1,641, and total contacts—2,957.
But the superlatives aren’t limited to December. This was the highest year ever in HOME Line’s history for new contacts, a statistic we’ve kept since 1992: 20,241 contacts from all 87 Minnesota counties, passing our earlier high mark from 2023 of 20,086. Counting follow-ups, we had 36,377 contacts throughout all of 2025. To date, we’ve advised over 355,000 Minnesota renter households.
1,196 of these contacts were in Hmong, Somali, Spanish, or were multilingual—a 6% increase over last year’s record number of contacts. To show how this aspect of HOME Line’s work has grown, in 2021 we advised 524 contacts in these languages—making 2025 a 128% increase over 2021.
It wasn’t just elevated inquiries on our hotline—we also performed many tenant/landlord legal trainings and presentations, more than any other year in HOME Line’s 35-year history. In 2025, we spoke to 147 different audiences, reaching more than 3,900 attendees in 18 counties. We spoke to tenants, landlords, social workers, incarcerated individuals preparing for release, attorneys, and students (high school, college, and law school). To date, we’ve given speeches to over 2,800 audiences, reaching more than 86,000 audience members.
We keep careful records of each client interaction and note the issue(s) advised on with each renter household. Below is the number of contacts in 2025 versus 2024 for the top 15 topics.
Repairs are, once again, the top reason for inquiries on the hotline, but evictions remain close behind. There were some months in 2025 when evictions were the top issue, and evictions are up 11% over the prior year. This is because evictions are up—likely to their highest level in Minnesota history. According to our records, there were 25,484 residential evictions filed in Minnesota last year (excluding foreclosures and commercial evictions), up from the previously known highest number of 25,097 in 2023.
Leave a Reply