Rent to Own: Purchasing Power

Minneapolis weighs a law that could let renters buy their place—or pick their landlord.

- By Morgan Baskin

Arianna Anderson had just gone into labor with her fifth child in March 2021 when a bathroom pipe burst. She scrambled to pack for the hospital and, with her husband working out of state, shuttle her young children off to a sitter. Water rushed from a cabinet, pooling on the floor. “Can you imagine? My water was breaking, and there was water coming from underneath the sink,” Anderson recalls. By that point, her four-bedroom, 100-year-old rental house on the 33 rd block of Colfax Avenue in north Minneapolis’ McKinley neighborhood had become the starring villain of her life.

Its issues were myriad, its pestilence almost cinematic. During colder months, it lost heat. In the summer, its mold thrived as Anderson’s 7-year-old son fought bloody noses and asthma attacks. In the autumn of 2021, she says a swarm of more than 60 wasps nested in the kitchen, emerging with a vengeance when she cooked. The family kept a butter knife in the upstairs bathroom to jimmy the door each time the knob fell off. (Firefighters once had to come free her son.) When she returned from the maternity ward with her infant daughter, she discovered fallout from the burst. “There was thick mold,” the 37-year-old says. “So I had to bring a new baby home to that.”