Who Warned You…
By Mitch Berg
…about this kind of thing, City of Saint Paul?
Building permits in Saint Paul are off 80% since “rent control” passed:
The rent control ordinance passed in St. Paul last November is having exactly the consequences that were predicted before it was passed. If you set a price below a market price, you increase demand relative to supply, worsening the very shortages the price control was meant to fix.
From a MinnPost piece:
With three months of data on the books since the passage of the rent control measure in November, results are rather grim for anyone hoping for new apartment buildings in St. Paul. Compared to the same period during the previous year, multifamily building permits are down over 80 percent. Meanwhile, in Minneapolis overall construction is up as the economy has rebounded.
And it’s worse than that. Landlords are jacking up rents, fast, because they know that with inflation gutting the rest of their budgets, they’re not going to get another chance.
And yet the rent control advocates – highly schooled but uneducated drones that they are – still say this is about making housing affordable.
March 16th, 2022 at 7:52 am
I couldn’t stop laughing at the comments from the real estate developer, Kou Vang, who is Hmong, talking about all of his investors bailing on him. Some of those “family”investors, are likely Hmong, too. Maybe those people in the Hmong community that are Democrats because a Democrat helped them get to the U.S. will WTFU. By the way, there was one prominent Democrat that voted against funding those funds to bring them in and it was none other than our drooling, brain addled occupier of the White House, then Senator Pedo Joe Biden.
March 16th, 2022 at 8:23 am
The Gell-Mann Effect, also called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect describes the phenomenon of an expert believing news articles on topics outside of their field of expertise even after acknowledging that articles written in the same publication that are within the expert’s field of expertise are error-ridden and full of misunderstanding.
https://loricism.fandom.com/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect
There should be a similar “Effect” for politics. It would be defined as acknowledging the complete failure of politics to address a relatively small, local issue (like housing costs), while insisting that politics can solve global, multidimensional problems (like regulating the earth’s climate or eliminating poverty).
March 16th, 2022 at 8:54 am
With the passage of the rent control ordinance, there’s now a useful real-world experiment taking place. Was the conventional wisdom true that rent control would reduce housing construction, and if so, to what degree? Or is it possible to apply rent control to new housing without impacting the new apartments that cities like St. Paul need?
Here’s a way to perform this experiment without screwing over renters and property owners.
You have $1,000. You can invest it in product A, let’s call it “Saint Paul Housing,” which has no limit on how much it can decrease in value, but is capped at +3% on the top end, or in product B, called for convenience “Minneapolis Housing,” which also has no limit on how much it can decrease in value, but also has no limit on how much it can return on the top end.
Think it over, take your pick, I’ll wait.
March 16th, 2022 at 9:05 am
Scarcity drives lower prices. Everybody knows that.
March 16th, 2022 at 9:09 am
Not a fair test. It would have worked, except slavery. And Trump. And Russia.
March 16th, 2022 at 10:22 am
“Rent control advocates still say it’s about affordability.”
Except Rent control advocates came out against increasing supply of housing by being against developing a vacant lot along Lexington Ave. They advocate against any type of development in the Midway because if they build something people want to go to, some might drive a car there (when we have a train that we need to force people on). They advocate against developing the Ford Plant site in a way that would increase public benefits of the river. And let’s not forget one of the biggest supporters of Rent control on the city council (Mitra Jalali) also has as a big developer donor-Schwartzman. Schwartzman has been buying up and tearing down houses on Marshall Avenue.
It was so obvious before the vote who really supported rent control. Developers who stand to make money when the City gives them their exemptions. And all the actual affordable housing will be torn down. And the advocates will have moved on from St Paul to ruin something bigger. (If given the opportunity).
March 16th, 2022 at 1:39 pm
If we had a local media that was non-worthless we might find out who is benefiting from these insane policies, because it sure as heck isn’t going to be poor people.