Developers Halt Projects After St. Paul Voters Approve Rent Control

Plenty of hand-wringing about the possible throttling of housing supply.

This policy only affects rents. New-building developers will shift toward an ownership model. All those $2800/month luxury apartments under construction? Yeah, those are now now $750,000 condos. For the folks purchasing those units, not much changes.

For everyone who lives in a $1100/month brick 4-plex, things definitely change. Rent hikes stabilize. For the landlord, long-term profits are severely reduced. A small landlord might decide to cash out and retire.

For everyone who lives on a block of residential housing, half of which was purchased by a slumlord during the housing crisis and allowed to decay...hopefully that slumlord will decide to give up the game, and sell those houses back to individual owners. Hope hope hope.

For economists, this is a beautiful gift. They can do proper science, studying the effects of neighboring policies in St. Paul and Minneapolis.

Economic reality should surprise no one. Price controls diminish supply. Worse price controls cause worse supply shortages.

I'm sorry but I don't really see a problem here. The fact that they won't be able to absolutely gouge people, including inflation, seems reasonable. Inflation rising above 3% is hardly the tenants fault and chances are the tenant is suffering from that as well, probably more so. Is there no other way to encourage development outside of making sure the tenants make less every year? Ultimately that's what they're ensuring here since most people are lucky to even see a raise that covers inflation. Also, the mayor can shove off. The people voted, get your wheels greased elsewhere.