Linda Tayor has lived in her Minneapolis home for almost 20 years. In her neighborhood, she’s known as “Miss Linda” the lady with the green thumb and kind soul.
Over the years, she’s volunteered to help those in need, including the homeless. But she almost wound up homeless herself after her landlord threatened her with eviction in February.
“It felt like the world had been pulled from under me,” Taylor, 70, told The Washington Post. “My house means everything to me.”
The landlord had suddenly decided to sell her home for $299,000 and wanted her out within two months.
“I could not sleep, I could not eat,” said Taylor, who lives alone in the two-bedroom house. “I felt really defeated.”
Taylor had worked at a nonprofit organization for about three before being laid off during the pandemic.
She continued to pay her $1,400 rent through her savings, money from family, and government subsidies.
However, she couldn’t afford to buy her home. Taylor said she actually did own her home back in 2004 but was tricked into signing it back over to the previous owner, who allowed her to stay and rent, after she fell short on purchase payments.
Her landlord reportedly did the same to 45 other homes and was caught in a mortgage fraud scheme.
That’s when her current landlord purchased the home.
But the neighborhood wasn’t about to let her move out of the home that was technically hers to begin with. Especially after the landlord raised her rent twice during the pandemic and let maintenance and repair issues go unresolved.
“I just talked to one person and that one person said, ‘There’s no way, Miss Linda, you are going to move,’” Taylor said.
The deadline to come up with the money to buy the home was June.
“I’m going to do something about it,” Taylor recalled telling herself. “This is my house.”
But she didn’t have to. Her neighbors had her back. Taylor ended up getting flooded with donations.
“So many people are losing housing right now,” neighbor Andrew Fahlstrom and housing rights organizer said. “If we actually believe housing is a right, then we need to act like it, because the next stop is homelessness.”
Fahlstrom decided to rally his neighbors to help save Taylor’s house.
“This is a person who has been paying for housing for 18 years. Her rent has gone to pay the property taxes, other people’s mortgages, the insurance, and supposedly repairs, too,” Fahlstrom said. “There needs to be more systemic intervention so that people can stay in their homes.”
Taylor’s neighbors stepped in to raise about $275,000 for her to buy her home which she recently closed on.
“It makes me feel so good,” Taylor told ABC 5 KSTP. “Everything that I have given, it’s coming back to me and I want to continue to give. I love this neighborhood. When we are sticking together, we are going to be successful in our neighborhood. We’re going to take care of each other.”
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