Emergency Assistance for Housing Stability
Minnesota’s Emergency Assistance (EA) program helps families resolve one-time financial crises related to their housing needs, covering expenses such as back rent, mortgage payments, and utilities. While EA is funded statewide through the Minnesota Family Investment Program (MFIP) Consolidated Fund, it is administered by individual counties and Tribal nations giving them wide discretion to set different maximum benefit amounts, eligibility criteria, verification requirements, covered expenses, or other program policies.
The first phase of this project is a descriptive analysis, followed by a full impact evaluation. The descriptive analysis report explores characteristics of applicants, approvals and denials, as well as local variation in program implementation to better understand the current program and to inform future policy decisions. Using administrative data records and information found in local agency EA plans, researchers at Minnesota Management and Budget identified three primary themes. First, applications increased substantially during the study period from 2016 to 2023, as well as the denial rate. Second, total EA spending across the state decreased by almost half from 2016 to 2023, but average payments per household stayed relatively flat. Third, there are large differences in EA policies across the state—with potentially large implications on for participation. Please see the executive summary or full descriptive analysis report for more details.
This report presents a deeper understanding of the use of EA by Minnesota residents and program implementation by local agencies across the state. There is a need for further research on this topic, particularly how the EA program overall affects outcomes for participating households and to the effects of differences in how local agencies administer the program. The IEU plans to conduct an impact evaluation in consultation with State, Tribal, and local partners to provide insights that can be used to better serve families in crisis across Minnesota.
Prior to this analysis, MMB also collected all local agency EA plans on file with DCYF and catalogued them for over 30 different policy and program elements, including eligibility criteria, emergencies covered, verifications required, maximum benefit amount, and more. We used these data in the descriptive report and plan to use them again in the impact evaluation. These data are available in an Excel spreadsheet, linked below. The spreadsheet contains an overview of how the data were collected and coded, a data dictionary, and a tab each for EA plans currently in effect and historical EA plans.