Shot in the Dark

The Great Saint Paul Land Grab, Part VI

I’m going to interrupt my narrative (although rest assured, it’s going to continue) to announce a fascinating experiment.

Bob Johnson, of the A Democracy blog – which focuses on housing and city council issues in Saint Paul – is hosting a round table discussion featuring, as this is written, Saint Paul City Council member Kathy Lantry.

They’re talking about a number of housing-related issues, including the vacant home ordinance we talked about in the rest of this series (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V), as well as some I haven’t talked about much; a RICO suit against the city by a number of landlords, questions about code enforcement abuses, and the future of housing in the city.

I’m honored to have been asked to help moderate the discussion, along with Bill Cullen, a Saint Paul landlord and activist. (Bill will let me know if that’s not a fair description!).
So go over to the thread on A Democracy and leave a (polite, reasonable) question; Bill and I will be picking the ones we forward to Councilperson Lantry and any other city officials that agree to participate.

This should be an interesting exercise.

UPDATE: Bumped up to today, so everyone hopefully sees it.

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Mitch Berg

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2 responses to “The Great Saint Paul Land Grab, Part VI”

  1. nate Avatar
    nate

    Some gas-bag posted about a dozen long boring questions over there, takes forever to read them, when the real question should be “what are you doing to cut my property taxes?”

    I suspect the answer is “Cut? We on the Council are not familiar with that word. Do you mean ‘cut’ as in raise them only 15% instead of 16.9? We can’t afford to ‘cut’ taxes under our pay-go rules. We go on a spending binge, you pay, that’s the deal. No ‘cut’ involved.”

    .

  2. Shot in the Dark » Blog Archive » The Value Of Crappy

    […] noted in my “Saint Paul Land Grab” series (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, and more to come),  The City of Saint Paul is requiring all rgistered vacant homes to be brought […]

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