Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:<\/p>\n
Leftists despair when their own principles collide, leaving it impossible to decide who to hate.\u00a0 Example:<\/p>\n
Poor people can\u2019t afford to buy their own homes, so they rent.\u00a0 Renters don\u2019t own the building so they can\u2019t make improvements.\u00a0 Landlords have little incentive to make improvements that reduce profits.\u00a0 So poor people live in crappy housing until they can afford to move somewhere nicer.\u00a0 We should hate the landlord, right?<\/p>\n
Except in St. Paul.\u00a0 Here, the City requires rental properties to be nicer than owner occupied.\u00a0 I\u2019m not kidding; I was a landlord here for 15 years and earned Class A ratings for my rentals.\u00a0 I know the codes and how they\u2019re applied.\u00a0 The truth is the City set the standards for rental properties so high that landlords can\u2019t afford to maintain them.\u00a0 And when they don\u2019t, the City tears down privately-owned rental properties and partially replaces them with publicly-owned low-income apartments, otherwise known as \u201cProjects.\u201d\u00a0 Every renter I ever met preferred a dingy rental house with a bit of yard over the city housing Projects.\u00a0 But if the City is tearing rental houses down, where else can poor people go?<\/p>\n
The policy has the effect of eliminating low-density rental housing stock scattered in neighborhoods and herding poor people into high-density housing projects in centralized locations.\u00a0 The policy mostly impacts people who receive welfare and in St. Paul, that\u2019s mostly people of color.\u00a0 So the City\u2019s policy causes disproportionate harm to poor Black families.\u00a0\u00a0 Under federal Fair Housing Law, that\u2019s called \u201cdisparate impact\u201d and it\u2019s a form of illegal discrimination.\u00a0 Racists discriminating against welfare recipients . . . we should hate Mayor Chris Coleman\u2019s crew?<\/p>\n
A group of landlords sued the City on exactly that legal basis and the case was all set for hearing at the United States Supreme Court when the City backed down rather than lose the case.\u00a0 The City tried to spin it as worry that Conservative justices on the Supreme Court would overturn the civil rights law that the City was violating.\u00a0 So now what: hate the Supreme Court?<\/p>\n