{"id":2836,"date":"2008-07-15T12:02:47","date_gmt":"2008-07-15T17:02:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2836"},"modified":"2012-02-12T09:15:19","modified_gmt":"2012-02-12T15:15:19","slug":"the-great-saint-paul-land-grab","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2836","title":{"rendered":"The Great Saint Paul Land Grab"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, I wrote about\u00a0the mood change I see in Saint Paul<\/a> since the\u00a0Coleman (Chris) Administration took over, and since the ultraliberal Gang of Four consolidated their power and expanded to Five.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To sum it up – things seem gloomy in Saint Paul lately.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now, I’ve lived in some gloomy places.\u00a0 I grew up in North Dakota, during the farm depression of the seventies and eighties.\u00a0 The family farm, in those pre-ethanol days, was in deep trouble.\u00a0 A decade of profligate farm lending (and borrowing) ran smack-dab into huge surpluses and lower prices.\u00a0 This, combined with government interference in the market both chronic (the various farm subsidy programs) and acute (the 1980 grain embargo of the USSR), made independent farms dry up and blow away faster than Al Franken’s political future.\u00a0 Some farmers (and the rural businesses that supported and depended on them) adjusted; they sold the land and left the business; others diversified crops and, in many cases, careers.\u00a0 Others reacted less rationally<\/a>.\u00a0 And quite a few just hunkered down and rode it out.<\/p>\n

Which, if you’re not on the federal reserve board or Warren Buffet, is about all you can do.<\/p>\n

Unless, of course, government seems hell-bent on making things much, much worse.<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

I got an email last week from a Saint Paul resident, from the Como Park neighborhood.\u00a0 He’ll remain nameless for now, since his wife is closely-enough connected to this issue that it’d be poor form for her name to be floating around.<\/p>\n

\n
She got a copy of this new St. Paul city ordinance from her trade association.\u00a0 If they’re correct that this ordinance was adopted, it could be historic.\u00a0 We could see huge swaths of Frogtown and the East Side disappear in the next three years.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That\u00a0got my attention.<\/p>\n

Saint Paul has a foreclosure problem – and that leads to a vacant building problem.\u00a0 As of yesterday, the city listed <\/a>1993 vacant properties in Saint Paul.\u00a0 The number is big enough when you put it up against the total number of houses (115,713 as of the 2000 census<\/a>); it’s worse when you see how those vacant properties are concentrated.\u00a0\u00a0 While real estate values throughout the city have suffered, a big part of the problem is concentrated in some of the city’s most “challenged” neighborhoods.\u00a0 You can walk some blocks in the North End, the East Side and Frogtown and see more houses with blue “Vacant Building” signs on them than without; I walked a block near one of my kids’ schools, in the North End, last spring and counted five vacant, foreclosed homes out of six on a block just west of Rice Street.<\/p>\n

Now, you can attribute this to any cause you want.\u00a0 Some will point to greedy, unethical lenders – and they are certainly a part of the problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of course, free markets are usually pretty good at preventing bad behavior on their own – and when you see unethical behavior on a wholesale basis, it’s often useful to look for openings for <\/em>that behavior, created by government interference in the market.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Community Reinvestment Act<\/a>, and its various amendments, is a good place to start looking; the CRA impelled lenders to get into the subprime business on a wholesale level in the first place.\u00a0 This wasn’t a bad thing in and of itself; home ownership can<\/em>, in and of itself, be a very good thing for communities.\u00a0 Twenty years ago, “absentee landlords” were the crisis du jour <\/em>in exactly the same neighborhoods that are awash in foreclosures and vacancies today.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of course,\u00a0combining a regulatory compulsion to do assume riskier loans and <\/em>the “get rich quick” impulse on the part of many lenders to fill that compulsion during the housing bubble meant that, in a lot of cases, money was moving faster than information; a lot of new home-buyers didn’t know the questions to ask.\u00a0 The lenders (or, to be fair, the brokers that originated the loans that the big lenders then bought to collect on the debt) didn’t, by law, need to care; they were doing their job, as mandated under the CRA.<\/p>\n

But this posting isn’t about why we have a foreclosure crisis in\u00a0Saint Paul.\u00a0 It’s about how we – as a city – react to it.<\/p>\n

And that’s where the really <\/em>bad news kicks in.\u00a0 Not only are many of the city’s oldest – and, as it happens, most historic – neighborhoods in immediate jeopardy, but so is the notion of actually being able to buy a home, if the plan goes through.<\/p>\n

More on Thursday.<\/p>\n

(Read the whole series: Part I<\/a>, Part II<\/a>, Part III<\/a>, Part IV<\/a>, Part V<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, I wrote about\u00a0the mood change I see in Saint Paul since the\u00a0Coleman (Chris) Administration took over, and since the ultraliberal Gang of Four consolidated their power and expanded to Five.\u00a0 To sum it up – things seem gloomy in Saint Paul lately.\u00a0 Now, I’ve lived in some gloomy places.\u00a0 I grew up in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,28],"tags":[199],"class_list":["post-2836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","category-st-paul","tag-st-paul-land-grab"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2836"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26135,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2836\/revisions\/26135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}