United States v. City of Anoka, Minnesota

What this case is about

This is a landmark 2024 DOJ enforcement settlement with the City of Anoka, Minnesota. The case addresses a category of municipal program — "crime-free housing" — that exists in hundreds of U.S. cities. These programs require landlords to evict tenants over interactions with police, including calls for help during a mental health crisis. DOJ found that Anoka's crime-free housing program, as implemented, illegally targeted tenants with mental health disabilities. People calling 911 during psychiatric crises, family members calling for welfare checks, or any interaction with police related to disability-driven behavior triggered eviction proceedings. The result: tenants with serious mental illness lost their housing precisely when they most needed it. The settlement requires Anoka to end the practice of counting mental-health-related police contacts as "criminal activity" for purposes of the ordinance; provide reasonable accommodations to tenants who interact with police due to a disability; train landlords and police on disability-rights obligations; audit prior enforcement and remediate evictions that violated the settlement standards; and submit to DOJ monitoring. The case sets enforcement precedent for similar crime-free housing programs nationwide.

Who may qualify

The settlement directly binds the City of Anoka, MN. It does not create class membership for residents of other municipalities. You can report a problem under this settlement if: - You were a tenant in Anoka. - You were threatened with eviction, evicted, or had your landlord pressured by Anoka's crime-free housing program. - The police-contact incident(s) were related to a mental health disability — yours, a family member's, or another household resident's. For residents of other cities with crime-free housing programs: this case is precedent. You can use it to support a DOJ complaint about your own city under 28 C.F.R. § 35.170.

What helps your case

Documentation: lease agreements, landlord notices invoking crime-free housing terms, police-contact records (911 logs, incident reports), municipal ordinance text, eviction-court records, medical documentation establishing the qualifying mental health disability, correspondence between landlord and municipal licensing authority.

How to document what happened

Documentation strategy: contemporaneous preservation of all landlord and municipal communications; FOIA/public-records requests for police-contact records and ordinance-enforcement records; medical-records preservation establishing qualifying disability and disability-driven causation for police contacts; preservation of eviction-court records and any judgment or settlement. For prospective claims: any new crime-free-housing-related notice or contact creates a discrete actionable event. Document each independently with dates, parties, and content.

What if you don’t have documentation?

Reports may proceed without contemporaneous documentation. Channels: DOJ Civil Rights Division administrative complaint under 28 C.F.R. § 35.170; state Protection & Advocacy agencies; state-level fair-housing enforcement agencies; legal aid organizations. For § 1983 actions, exhaustion is not required for Title II/§ 504 claims; statute of limitations runs from the discriminatory eviction or threat.

What this case doesn’t cover

Outside scope: jurisdictions other than Anoka, MN (though invocable as precedent); landlord-tenant disputes outside crime-free-housing context; federal housing programs (HUD/Section 8 under § 504, 24 C.F.R. pt. 8); private-landlord FHA claims; individual eviction-defense practice (requires private representation).

Legal theory

ADA Title II

Named defendants

• City of Anoka, Minnesota

Case facts

Type

Enforcement action

Affected states

MN

Court

U.S. District Court, District of Minnesota

Filed

2024-08-01

Who to contact

Nobody is running an intake for this one. You can still report what happened.

• Government agency

  U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Fair Housing

  Handles disability discrimination in housing — refused accommodations or modifications, inaccessible design, and rules that push disabled tenants out.

  Housing is covered by the Fair Housing Act as well as the ADA.

  Phone 1-800-669-9777

  TTY 1-800-877-8339

  www.hud.gov/fair_housing_equal_opp

  Housing complaints have a filing deadline. Raise it early and ask an attorney about your dates.

  Filing a complaint is not the same as having a lawyer, and it does not pause any legal deadlines. If you may want to bring a case, talk to an attorney about your dates as well as filing.

  Every state has one. They are free, they take intake directly, and unlike a federal agency they can represent you. Find yours

Key dates

Status

Compliance phase, ongoing monitoring

Settlement

2024

Precedent value

Template for analogous claims against other municipalities

Ordinance revision

Required by settlement timeline