Daily Archives: 7 October 2022

Rent Control Fails Again

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And so does the St Paul, MN, city council, sort of.

Last November, the city’s voters passed a rent control law that caps annual rent increases at 3%. Then reality intruded, and the City Council was forced to attempt corrective actions.

The City Council noted in its reform bill that, “according to data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, there have been only two hundred (200) residential building permits in Saint Paul through April of 2022, compared to 1,391 at the same point in 2021.”

That drop occurred as immediately as any economic reality can—beginning just two months after the cap was passed.

The City Council’s corrective actions are limited to

  • a 20-year rent-control exemption for new residential properties and some apartments that participate in government affordable-housing programs
  • after a tenant leaves or is evicted with just cause, landlords will be able to raise rent by 8% plus inflation
  • property owners can…apply to St Paul for an exemption to the 3% rent cap if their property taxes go up or if there are “unavoidable increases” in maintenance and operating costs, including increases owing to inflation

In truth, this may be all the City Council can do to…modify…the will of the city’s residents. To get serious correction to this rent control fiasco, the question really needs to be resubmitted to those residents.

If those voters reaffirm their position on rent control, we’ll all know what those worthies truly think about housing and access to it by those in the lower economic tiers of the city.

Snowflakes

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A New York University chemistry professor—at NYU after four decades at Princeton—has been fired because his students, many of them doctor wannabes, circulated a petition complaining about how hard his class was. Their petition read in pertinent part,

We are very concerned about our scores, and find that they are not an accurate reflection of the time and effort put into this class….

Neither should grades be a reflection of the time and effort; they should be a reflection of actual performance and learning. Imagine a patient whose illness was prolonged, or who was maimed, by a botched treatment being told “So sad, but I tried really hard.” Or the survivors of a patient who died from that botched treatment being told, “Too bad, but I put in a lot of time on your son.”

The seemingly unjustified firing because some precious snowflakes didn’t want to work is not the only problem here, though. The other problem is NYU itself.

I wouldn’t hire anyone who had New York University on his resume. NYU appears unconcerned that its graduates cannot think critically, or that its graduates are afraid of the hard work the real world contains, even as it appears to take student whining seriously. NYU graduates would seem to be a waste of any enterprise’s payroll.