HOME Line Records Support Court of Appeals’ Ruling That Minn. Stat. § 504B.211 Penalizes Both Severe and Minor Entries Made Without Notice

Recently while I was volunteering at HOME Line, I joined with one of its attorneys, Samuel Spaid, to do a study of the type of incidents that led to the enactment of Minnesota’s Tenant’s Right to Privacy law, Minn. Stat. § 504B.211, and what light those incidents cast on the meaning of “substantially violates” in the remedies clause of section 504B.211.

Our resulting article, HOME Line Records Support Court of Appeals’ Ruling That Minn. Stat. § 504B.211 Penalizes Both Severe and Minor Entries Made Without Notice, is available here .

Below is a summary of the article (this is the summary which HOME Line posted on its website at this link):

Privacy violations are one of the most common reasons residential tenants call HOME Line for legal advice. In Minnesota, residential landlords may only enter the tenant’s unit if they have a reasonable business purpose and have provided the tenant with reasonable notice in advance (except for certain emergencies). If a landlord violates this right to privacy, a tenant may sue the landlord for several types of relief.  

Recently, the Court of Appeals in Ryan Rentals LLC v. Ta found that the landlord violated a tenant’s right to privacy by entering the tenant’s apartment for a non-emergency purpose without any prior notice. Because the landlord violated the tenant’s privacy, the District Court terminated the tenant’s lease (at the tenant’s request), returned the tenant’s security deposit, fined the landlord, and awarded the tenant her attorney fees, and the Court of Appeals affirmed this outcome on appeal. 

In order to reach this outcome, the Court of Appeals decided, correctly in HOME Line’s opinion, that the landlord’s actions substantially violated the law. More importantly, the court ruled that “substantially violates” means essentially violates instead of seriously violates. In other words, it ruled that “substantially violates” may include both minor and severe incursions without notice.

The Court’s analysis of section 504B.211 was rather brief. We decided to review the statute’s legislative history in order to see if that history supported or contradicted the Ryan Rental Court’s conclusion. A key part of the legislative history was the original purpose behind the law, especially what sort of concerns tenants had regarding landlords’ entries into their homes. In fact, HOME Line’s testimony in favor of the bill that became section 504B.211 referred in general terms to the many tenants who called HOME Line’s tenant hotline reporting about and asking for legal advice regarding  privacy violations. 

Therefore, we reviewed the files of all of our privacy calls from that time period (from 1992, when HOME Line started, until the law was enacted in May 1995). Of these calls, 77% involved minor (non-serious) incursions and about a third of those involved landlords who only entered once without notice. This supports the idea that section 504B.211 was aimed both at serious and at minor violations, in accord with the holding of the Ryan Rentals LLC court. 

We also reviewed more recent privacy calls to determine how effective the law has been. We conclude that the law has resulted in a modest reduction in landlords’ disturbing tenants’ privacy.

The full report is available here: HOME Line Records Support Court of Appeals’ Ruling That Minn. Stat. § 504B.211 Penalizes Both Severe and Minor Entries Made Without Notice. The report should help parties litigating privacy cases plus the judges hearing the cases to understand the reach of section 504B.211.

Given the review’s finding that Minnesota’s residential tenant privacy statute has had a modest impact in reducing intrusions into the homes of renters, HOME Line reiterates the need for state legislators to modernize this law. An excellent start would be to adopt the privacy provisions of bills currently introduced at the State Legislature: HF 399/SF 773. The changes in these bills would clarify what a “reasonable” advance notice is, and update the civil penalty to a more reasonable amount (a brief summary of the bills is here).