Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

The City intends to change the zoning of properties along Front Avenue between Dale Street and Rice Street. That means you can’t sell your land for as much money. Naturally, landowners are upset.

Here’s why: if your land is zoned for Industrial Uses and the building on it is a warehouse, you have a Conforming Use and any future owner can continue to use the land for a warehouse. But if the city changes the zoning of your land to Residential, then your warehouse becomes an Existing Non-Conforming Use. You – and future owners – are severely limited in what you can do with it. You can’t expand. If it burns down, you can’t rebuild. You can’t even guarantee the future owner will be allowed to keep using it as you did. So naturally, the future owner won’t pay as much for it as he would have before the zoning change.

Yes, the City has the power by law to do it. But destroying people’s land values through regulation is not a trifle. It shouldn’t be done lightly.

Key line in the article:

“Because no one who lives or does business in that area was involved in the current planning effort, community members and city officials agreed that the plan needs a second phase of study.”

Nobody who knows anything about the neighborhood was involved in the plan. It was dreamed up by urban planners in government and academia.

The crux of the piece – and it ties into so much about living in Saint Paul and Minneapolis, and any one-party autocracy:

This is how liberals think. We’re so smart we don’t even need to VISIT the neighborhood to know what to do in it. We have a plan for an ideal neighborhood so tough luck to you.

This is classic Saint Paul government in action; make a grand sweeping change “for the good of the peasants” – and then sit back and look amazed as the unintended consequences mount.

Another great – and bigger – example; almost four years ago, the city passed an ordinance requiring most vacant properties to be brought up to the latest building codes before they could get back their certificates of occupancy.  This means a foreclosed house with a bubbled-up paper value of $200.000 in Frogtown, the North End or the lower East Side, which might net $40-50K today, mostly on the value of the land it sits on – would need an additional $100-150K to make it actually salable – meaning the banks would be into properties for $300-350K apiece, guaranteeing a loss of a quarter million dollars on each property they sold.

I asked a few sitting members of the City Council about this.  They didn’t respond “the banks will make up for it with volume!”, but close; one councilperson said – I’m paraphrasing here – the  mortgages are owned by companies with lots and lots of money, so it’d all be OK.

In other words, money came from unicorns.

The results?  The Saint Paul housing market is worse than most.  There is a glut of property on the market; as mortgage companies opt to let properties go into tax default rather than  take quarter-million-dollar baths on them, they revert to state ownership; the state then generally hands them back to the city, which then either sells them to non-profits for a pittance, hands them over to public housing, or sells them on occasion to remodelers who meet the city’s absurdly high qualifications for a nominal amount, sometimes a dollar.

So do you want to pay $188,000 for a property on the private market, or do you want to pay a buck?

Saint Paul is a beautiful city with an incredibly ugly government.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, February 14th, 2012 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Progressive Tyranny, St. Paul. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.