Minnesota lawmakers are moving measures meant to protect renters this session, after more ambitious bills meant to spur construction of more apartments appear to have fallen short.

The state Senate this week passed a tenants’ rights bill that contained a slate of new protections, and a set of regulations around apartment buildings where a single utility meter is shared by all tenants, which has meant tenants don’t get the same protections as other utility customers. DFL lawmakers hope the pair of bills will make a difference for the nearly 1.3 million Minnesotans who rent their homes, after a bill last session dedicated one-time money and a metro-area sales tax to affordable housing and rental aid.

“We wanted to bring policies that made that field more of a balanced one,” between renters and landlords said Sen. Zaynab Mohamed, DFL-Minneapolis.

Both bills passed the Senate this week and are now before the House.

If the tenants’ rights bill becomes law, tenants will have the right to organize and work with outside organizers. Mohamed said that provision was inspired by three buildings in her district, where tenants started talking during COVID-19 about their shared complaints about maintenance and rent increases. With the help of tenant organizers, they banded together to demand fixes from the landlord. Mohamed said the organization is now working to buy the building and turn it into a co-op.

The bill contains a wide range of other regulations for landlords. Landlords won’t be allowed to deny someone a lease who has an individual taxpayer identification number — which some immigrants use instead of a Social Security number. Tenants who end their leases early because they have been victims of domestic or sexual violence or harassment can move to get evictions erased from their records. Landlords won’t be allowed to charge pet fees for someone who has a service or support animal.

Republicans criticized the bill as a one-sided approach that doesn’t address the causes of expensive housing.

“Instead of encouraging more homeownership and the development of additional rental properties, Democrats took an adversarial approach to the landlord-tenant relationship that reduces private property rights and jeopardizes the safety of everyone who lives in multi-family housing,” Sen. Eric Lucero, R-St. Michael, said in a statement.

The bill also gives protections for renters who are supposed to be moving into new or renovated apartment buildings when those buildings aren’t finished by the time the lease starts — like what happened with a Dinkytown student apartment building last fall. The bill would require developers or landlords to provide or pay for somewhere else for their tenants to stay until work is finished, or let tenants get out of the lease and get their money back.

Mohamed said legislators did eliminate some provisions from the bill after meetings with landlords’ groups. “The bill is significantly smaller than when it started.”

The other bill, which passed the Senate Thursday, deals specifically with apartment buildings that have only one meter to measure how much gas, water or electricity all the tenants use. These kinds of single-meter buildings tend to be older, with less-expensive apartments.

Landlords have the power to switch off utilities to tenants in single-meter buildings without any recourse, said Sen. Scott Dibble, DFL-Minneapolis, and landlords have sometimes used unpaid utility fees to evict people.

“This is another way to make sure people are secure in their housing,” Dibble said of his bill.

Because tenants in these types of buildings are not direct customers of utility companies, they do not have the same state protections as people who pay electricity, gas and other utility bills directly to a utility company. The bill extends similar protections to tenants in those single-meter buildings.

The at-times opaque divisions of the bills in single-meter buildings, sometimes undertaken by third-party billing companies, have resulted in some tenants facing monthly bills of several hundred or thousands of dollars for modest apartments. A Utah-based landlord, Investment Property Group, was sued by the Attorney General’s office last year over the way it divided utilities at its properties including the Greenway Apartments in south Minneapolis, and three buildings in Hopkins.

Dibble said he saw the bill as “one of those easy, make-people’s-lives-better bills.” Republicans did not raise any objections on the Senate floor, and the bill passed 44-19.