Cloquet apartment building owner Roger Bruhn calls his current conundrum a "series of unfortunate events." When the pandemic hit in 2020, he faced, for the first time, tenants who were not paying rent on units in the Victory Apartments at 17 Eighth Street. That's because federal rules allowed tenants to forgo paying rent during the pandemic without fear of eviction. For 17 years, Bruhn said, he has dealt with only one eviction. Now he had four, soon to be five, units with no rental income in the low-to-moderate-income building 12 units.

Suddenly, his money-making building wasn't. And he had...