I was listening to a couple of Saint Paul lawmakers talking at a local restaurant the other day.<\/p>\n
One of them said to the other “What can we do to make Saint Paul a better place” as he took a bite from a BLT.<\/p>\n
The other put down his soup spoon and furrowed his brown in thought.\u00a0 “Y’know”, he said after a moment, “what this city lacks is government workers.\u00a0 Yeah, I know – half of the city’s employment base is government offices, bla bla bla, but what about the people who live <\/em>here?\u00a0 Yeah, I know, I know – Saint Anthony is all U of M, and the Midway is 70% teachers and AFSCME, and the East Side is half MAPE, and Highland is mostly state functionaries, and Crocus Hill is mostly government consultants, and the city’s politics are entirely dominated by the MFT and AFSCME.\u00a0 But what if we were to do something to get more <\/em>government workers to move to Saint Paul?”<\/p>\n The first guy swallowed some Coke.\u00a0 “More government workers? But what’ll the taxpayers say?”<\/p>\n “That’s the beauty of it”, said the second guy.\u00a0 “This is the era of “hope and change”; if you take a poo sandwich and call it a “changeburger”, people will pay $6 for it”.<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n The conversation above is fictional.<\/p>\n The city program below – reported by Jane McClure in the Highland Villager<\/em>, which is not online – is not (emphasis added):<\/p>\n In addition to the federally funded Take Credit! Program, which provides more than $8 million in frderal income tax credits for qualified first-time homebuyers in St. Paul and Minneapolis, St. Paul is offering the Heroes First-Time Homebuyers Program, which ioffers forgivable interest-free loans of between $1,000 and $15,000 that can be used for closing costs, down payments or even to reduce the principal on a mortgage.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Leave aside the giving away tax money (which is what a forgiveable loan is – in this case, it’s forgiven if you stay in the home for ten years) for homebuyers; there is a sort <\/em>of logic to getting people into the city’s vast stock of on-the-market (to say nothing of foreclosed and vacant) houses.\u00a0 Of course, the city government is a big part of the reason those houses are empty and their values are plummeting, and the fed had as much to do with the bubble as anyone did, but we digress.<\/p>\n