A friend of the blog emails:
On Tuesday, St Paul voters will vote on rent control.
Several council members are surprisingly against it. Of course, no surprise that CM Jalali is in favor of it. She tweets about how much she has supported development, and how even that development has not been enough to help tenets who continue to face high rent increases.
If she were really honest, she has mostly supported the tear down of single family houses in order for one developer to build apartments on Marshall Avenue. That particular developer was identified in The Villager as someone who donates to Jalali’s campaigns. She has opposed developments of decades long vacant lots elsewhere.As for the rent control measure on the ballot, I don’t see how it turns out any differently than the garbage collection- small, local landlords bought out by bigger, corporate landlords. They would be the only ones able to afford the rent control. And Jalali probably won’t stop until all the privately owned homes are bought out by corporate landlords so we all become renters, so we can all feel like one, you know. (So we can all be indebted to the whims of our overlords).
Like most everything in Saint Paul politics, this is a group of upper-middle-class progressives in Crocus Hill and Merriam Park playing “let’s build a utopia” with a real city – more or less – as their lab. Just like the indoor smoking ban, or the Tony Soprano Trash Collection “system” [1], or Minneapolis’s “Public Safety” charter referendum, there is no thought to unintended consequences, and plenty of reason to believe it’ll just be another money transfer to the city’s political class.
Given that the inevitable result of “rent control” is rent becoming inexorably less affordable, the developer class – which is finaincially joined at the. hip with the political class. – stands to benefit handsomely.
Saint Paul. Chicago on the Mississippi.
Has anyone ever done the arithmetic to find out the per capita rates of (gun) violence in the Twin Cities vs Chicago? I’m pretty sure that in this regard the Twins are punk amateurs compared the Chicago.
jdm … if you do a quick Googley type search for gun violence Minneapolis vs Chicago 2021, you will find something called “Best Places to Live”. According to this web page:
US Average is 22.7 on a scale of 1 to 100.
My old home, Chicago, is 44.9 on that same scale.
Mpls is 52.8.
Yep, almost 20% higher than Chicago. I wonder why our MSM is not talking about this?
While I am sure that there is a legal reason beyond my simpleton thinking, but isn’t non-landowners voting for rent control, an Unconstitutional takings?
I mean, if I still owned my home in St. Paul (I don’t, sold it for the move to Texas) and wanted to rent it for the princely sum of $5,000/month plus utilities, shouldn’t that be between my tenant and me? And when the current tenant moved out, because my rent was too damn high, Why shouldn’t I be able to seek the next tenant at $6,000/month? Why should anyone prevent me from seeking the highest possible rent for the use of my property?
Glad I could see the direction the city was headed a year ago and convinced my wife to move from the house we bought when we were first married.
When I think of rent control and the provision of public housing in Chicago, I think of two things. First is how Tony Rezko helped Barack Obama with his rent control by purchasing a worthless lot (couldn’t be built) for a cool half million plus so Obama could make his mortgage payments. Second is the response my dad (who grew up in the suburb of Brookfield) remembered people having to public housing in the 1960s; the residents didn’t like it because in the old row houses, they could at least see and call for their kids. You can’t do that on the 12th floor of the projects.
A side note is that “affordable” housing, like those 12 story projects resting on deep pilings with lots of sprinklers and elevators, really isn’t affordable. Thicker supports, deeper pilings, and the like don’t come free. Putting a roof over a shorting building is not several hundred dollars per square foot–do the math.
“putting a roof over a shorter building is not several hundred dollars per square foot”
That is an interesting question, Loren, related to the constitutionality of rent control. A Google search told me the Supreme Court has taken that case up a few times throughout the last 100 years and seems to consistently find it constitutional, for a few different reasons, despite how ridiculous rent control is.
There are times when I think I must be simpleminded.
The Supreme Court rules in ways that seem to defy the plain words of the Constitution more times than they should.
Growing food on your own property, for your own consumption, should not trigger the interstate commerce clause and allow federal regulation.
Civil asset forfeiture should be both a 4th Amendment violation and a taking without just compensation. Rent control is similar.
The problem with that idea, Loren, is drawing the line between a compensable taking and one which is not compensable.
If the government takes your land to build a freeway, you lost all use of the property so you get paid for the taking.
If the government zones your land single-family, you can’t build a high-rise apartment but you can still build a home. You’ve lost some use of the land (that’s the purpose of zoning – the segregate uses) but you still have some economically viable use of the land. Of course, you can’t fit a high-rise on a single lot and couldn’t get financing anyway, but should you get paid for the speculative loss of future profits from your high-rise?
If the government imposes a curfew on your city in response to riots, forcing you to close your business early, you lose sales. If the mayor fails to impose a curfew and the mob burns down your neighbor’s business, she loses her entire business. Must the mayor weigh the lost-sales payout to every business like you against the lost-business payout to her before deciding whether to impose the curfew?
And what about Covid? Lost sales for two weeks, everybody doing their part to flatten the curve, no big deal. Lost sales for a year while your competitor was open for business, much bigger deal. At what point did an inconvenience become a taking?
I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m saying figuring out where to draw the line is not as easy as it looks. Rent control looks like a taking to me. Proving damages might be tricky (how much would you have made by raising the rent minus how many people would have moved out leaving apartments sitting empty) but hey, that’s what accountants are for, right?
If you’re interested in reading court opinions discussing the issue of regulatory takings, I’d start with First English Evangelical Church of Glendale v. County of Los Angeles, 482 U.S. 304 (1987), then Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, 505 U.S. 1003 (1992). Later decisions have modified the law but these were the cases which discussed the concepts and principles at work.
Almost every article about this mentions that a majority of St. Paul homes are now rentals. They go on to say that this is why rent control is important.
No one explains why and how the majority of homes in St. Paul became rentals.