Removing Housing Barriers
updated December 11, 2025

When you apply for housing, landlords and property managers will look at your rental history to see if you have had problems in the past, like not paying rent on time, damaging a property, or being evicted.

If you’ve had problems in the past, landlords may not want to rent to you. However, there are steps you can take that might help.

Your Tenant Screening Report

Your tenant screening report may include information about your rental history. If you are denied housing, a landlord must tell you what agency they used for their screening report. You can then contact the agency to get a copy of your report for free. Lawhelpmn.org has more details about getting this report and how to use it.

Expungement of Eviction

If you were evicted in the past, you should see if you can expunge your eviction record. This means making it so that your eviction isn’t a public record anymore, so future landlords won’t be able to find out about it.

There are rules about when an eviction can be expunged and how to do it. Here are resources that can help you with expungement:

Resolving problems with past landlords

Solving problems you had in the past can help you with clearing your rental history and with expungement of your eviction. See if it’s possible to make an agreement with your past landlord, like setting up a payment plan for unpaid rent or for damages you caused. LawHelpMN.org can help you find lawyers who can help answer questions about what sort of agreement might work in your situation.

Having a Representative Payee or Vendor Pay Rent

If you had difficulty paying rent in the past, look into having somebody else manage your rent payments:

  • A representative payee is somebody who manages the benefits you get from Social Security, such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). If you have a representative payee who gets your benefits and manages them for you, this person can directly pay your rent. You can make sure that the landlord knows this, so that they know they will get their rent payment each month.
  • If you get a rental subsidy like Section 8, let the landlord or property manager know that they will get their rent paid directly by the program.
  • If you get General Assistance (GA), you may be able to get a vendor who can then manage your GA benefit to pay rent for you. This can help if your problem isn’t that you don’t have the money, but instead that you forget to pay rent on time. When the property manager knows that another company or organization is making sure that rent is always paid on time, they will feel more confident about letting you rent. Important: You need to use DHS form 2984 to do this. For more information, Chat with a Hub expert.

Writing a Letter

If you are denied housing because of things that happened in the past, you can try writing the landlord or property manage to explain what happened and why things will be different this time.

You may be able to request a reasonable accommodation of the tenant selection criteria if your past problems were related to a disability. For example, if you had undiagnosed mental health issues in the past that led to an eviction, you could explain that you now get treatment and that as a reasonable accommodation to your disability, you should not have your past eviction considered.

Or you could write a letter appealing their decision. An appeal means you are asking them to change their minds. For example, if you had issues with paying rent in the past, you could write to them and explain that you now have the support of family members, or that you now have a program that is helping you keep up to date on all expenses.

To write your letter, try HB101 Write a Letter path. With it, you just put in some information about yourself and then it creates a complete letter that you can copy into an email message or print out and give to the landlord or property owner.