Minnesota

Minnesota Landlord Tenant Law

I want to move and I don't have a lease or my lease has expired. How much notice do I have to give my landlord?

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Click here for more information.If you want to move and you don't have a lease or your lease has expired you are what is called a "tenant-at-will." That is, a tenant who is there with no contractual obligation to remain. Minnesota Statue504.06 deals with the amount of notice a tenant-at-will needs to give before moving.
As a tenant-at-will you have to give as much notice as the time between lease payments. Therefore, if you pay monthly, you have to give at least one month's notice. Additionally, this notice must be given on or before the day it is due. 

So, if you want to leave at the end of February you must tell your landlord (preferably, in writing via certified mail) on or before the last day of January. Regardless of how often you pay rent a tenant-at-will never has to give more than three months notice.

I don't live in Minnesota but these rules seem similar to those in my own state. Is it o.k. to to rely on them?

No. The rules of every state are different. Sometimes the differences are subtle but sometimes they can be significant. 

The best way to antagonize a judge is to bring law to court that is not correct. Call a tenant's union for help -- they should be listed in the phone book. I do plan to write Plain-Person's Guide's to Landlord-Tenant law for other states. If you would like your's considered as a candidate, please drop me an e-mail at the address at the end of this page.

My landlord has done something not permitted or prohibited in the lease which is making it impossible for me to live at my apartment. What can I do?

This area gets tricky. First, run through the rest of this program and make sure that the landlords actions are legal. If they are legal, but simply obnoxious -- like making the tenant live with a roommate they can't stand -- the options are limited. One option would be to try to file a rent escrow claim, in which the tenant pays rent into court and the court holds the money until the landlord makes needed repairs of fulfills promises. A second option is to withhold rent until the landlord remedies the problem.

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The other option is to argue your landlord has made life so terrible for you that they in-effect evicted you. The landlords behavior must be so bad that it is as if their actions made it impossible for the tenant to continue living in an apartment just as if they had the sheriff throw the tenant out.. This is called aconstructive eviction.

To perform a constructive eviction the tenant must move out of the apartment then claim the landlord did something which made the apartment unlivable. This is very dangerous because if the court disagrees, the tenant will be held responsible for unpaid rent until the apartment can be leased to a new tenant plus the cost to the landlord of finding a new tenant.
Historically, constructive eviction was one of the only ways to get out of a lease if a building was unlivable. However, the legislature encoded the "covenants of habitability" into law. 

These are a series of responsibilities a landlord cannot dispel through a lease. If the landlord has violated one of the promises, the tenant is better off filing a rent escrow claim than trying to claim constructive eviction.

The Plain-Person's Guide to Landlord-Tenant Law seems biased towards tenants. How can you publish such a thing?

Actually, the Plain-Person's Guide is not as biased as the author originally intended. There just isn't a reason: Minnesota law is generous to tenants, realizing there's an enormous power discrepancy between tenants and landlords. That's why the Attorney General's guide seems a little biased (it's just following the law).

Get all TWINLAB products at least 20% OFF Tenants have since the earliest days of landlord-tenant law been on the bottom. In England, where our laws come from, it was assumed that only God could own land but that God vested the right to give out land to the King. The King in turn gave that right to a several chosen people, called Lords (thus, the term landlord and the House of Lords in England). 

Lords gave it to sub-lords and so on, until the land was finally leased to the people to lived on it, called serfs.
Life as a serf was rough: they had very few rights. Therefore, the founders of the U.S. reformed the law and adopted relatively liberal policies to tenants. These have always been around: they're as American as apple pie and baseball (and free speech, and elections). The idea was that landlords are in a more powerful position and the state has a moral obligation to intervene and even out the playing field.

FREE Shipping when you spend $49 or more at eVitamins.com! Finally, if you're not satisfied with that answer the founder's of the U.S. inserted verbiage into our constitution permitting anyone to say anything they want to. While this has come under attack frequently -- especially on the Internet -- it remains one of the most guarded and treasured of U.S. freedoms. It is under the first-amendment, and all the rules surrounding it, that the Plain Person's Guide is published. 

Use it, enjoy it, and if you like it drop a note to the author at :

michaelo@winternet.com