Mayor Carter Charts a Third Way on Rent Control in Saint Paul

[Mayor Carter at last night's Mayoral debate.]

From the beginning, my biggest frustration with the HENS rent control proposal is that it put Saint Paul voters between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, as I first stated, the details of the proposed ordinance make for terrible housing policy for all the reasons I’ve been explaining. On the other hand, limiting rent increases would help lots of people and it just feels wrong to vote against it.

Balanced those two things had become a really difficult choice for lots people around Saint Paul, including many of the Council Members who were forced to answer “yes” or “no” to supporting the HENS rent control referendum as-written. But yesterday, the Mayor tweeted a statement that, for me, changes the situation.

His very short tweet was basically a “yes, and…” It’s a stance that helps me breathe a sigh of relief in what had become a very frustrating situation with few good outcomes. While I still think there are some unknown legal hurdles, how this debate is playing out illustrates the difference in process around how Minneapolis and Saint Paul handle difficult policy problems. 

Parsing Semantics

To re-cap what elected officials have said: Council Members Jalali and Yang have said that they support the rent control ordinance, with Jalali in particular cautioning that “we can have some revision after a period of time.” Meanwhile, Council Members Brendomen, Prince, Thao, and Tolbert all said they do not support the rent control ordinance, citing to varying degrees problems around new housing and unintended outcomes. Meanwhile Mayor Carter had remained cryptic, indirectly saying he was “studying it” through a spokesperson.

Well, that changed yesterday.

It sucks to parse a Mayoral tweet as if he’s a Federal Reserve Chairman, but in a way, he kind of is and that’s what we have here. The key part of Mayor Carter’s Tweet IMO is the following clause: “we can and must make it better, quickly”.

Those eight words say a lot! Here’s how I read them:

• “we can [change it]…” = I am working with the City Attorney and think there is a path to amend this policy without too much trouble.
• “… and must make it better” = there are specific details in this policy that I don’t agree with and don’t support. I am committing to changing them.
• "quickly” = I’m not going to wait around and leave it on the books for a year or two to see if it “works”; instead, we’re going to change this policy as soon as we legally can.

The last word “quickly” is doing a lot of work. You don’t stick a dangling adverb into your carefully-worded Tweet unless you mean it. I think Mayor has a plan to act as soon as legally possible to change this policy. (My wild guess would be that he tries to amend the ordinance before it would be enacted in June; but for purely legal reasons, it might also mean next November.)

This is likely all we have to go by. Unless I’m wrong, I doubt the Mayor will clarify unknown details before the election. During last night's League of Women Voters debate, he kept calling the policy proposal a "first draft" and "a start", and specifically mentioned new construction as a provision that bothers him, but did not say anything more specific. For Mayor Carter, there’s little to be gained by elaborating before November.

Trust, Legal Hurdles, and Process 

It’s a relief to hear that there’s a plan for changing this ordinance, and that proposed policy won’t be on the books for very long (if at all). I think that the Mayor, who will be easily and justifiably re-elected, has a lot of leverage, even more so after he’s said he will be voting “yes.” With the majority of the City Council on the record opposing the rent control ballot measure as-written, there should be few hurdles to changing the problematic details as much and as soon as they legally can. 

(More on that in a second.) 

I also trust Mayor Carter on housing issues. From the beginning of his campaign four years ago, he has been a strong supporter of pro-housing approach on the Ford Site. His recent, controversial veto of the Lexington Parkway development denial shows that his office has a good grasp over on-the-ground housing debates in Saint Paul. In short, if he says to trust him, and that his changes to the policy will work out, I’m inclined to believe him.

One frustration I’ve had about the rent stabilization/rent control debates in the two cities resolved around process. Over in Minneapolis, they’ve been studying rent stabilization for years. If Ballot Question 3 passes there, they’ll have an in-depth public hearing process process where city officials, staff, and members of the public debate and weigh in on all kinds of critical questions.

Meanwhile, in Saint Paul, we have nothing but anecdotes. There’s not even rudimentary information available on what the problem is and how different kinds of policies might work.

For example, here are things we don’t know:

• How fast are rents going up, in the short- and long-term?
• How many apartments would be affected by a 3% cap?
• Where are prices rising faster or slower?
• How many “corporate landlords” are there in the city?
• How many small-scale or BIPOC landlords are there in the city (e.g. someone who owns a duplex and “rents" it to a relative)?
• How many variance requests would the policy generate each year, depending on inflation, taxes, etc.?

Of course, I can think of lots more questions, but that's some very basic stuff!

Should the referendum pass in Saint Paul, I imagine that the Mayor will task City Staff to figure these questions out and tailor policy changes based on what they find. That’s important, because having the city’s housing policy experts use actual data on rents, and research about the pros and cons of  critical details, is a necessary and missing step. 

[This is the big legal hurdle that's still out there.]

But the other wrench I have to cautiously throw into the wind: the lawyers might win in the end. 

The ALEC-written, rent control-preemption state law is still there on the books at the State Capitol. It’s never been tested in court AFAIK. I’ve read all the relevant statues — the state law, the city charter, and the HENS ordinance — and to my eye, it is not clear if and when the City can change the ballot-approved policy. A lot depends on the legal differences between “repeal” and “amend,” or between “enact” and “renew.” Nobody knows what a judge will decide about that, especially if it’s this guy again.

For example, Minneapolis City Attorney’s office has cautioned their City Council that the legal issues around rent stabilization ordinance are vague. That’s why they have “strongly suggested” that the voters decide on, not one, but two ballot measures: the first to grant “permission” to have a policy (which is weird), and the second so that voters have a chance to approve the specific details of that policy. What this tells me is that the Saint Paul “process” here will be litigated, and likely by the same group of MHA-backed attorneys that defeated the City soundly on the tenant protection ordinance.

I don’t think anyone should be sanguine about the legal situation, and there’s still a very good chance that this whole thing is thrown out in court and renters facing steep rent hikes are left with nothing. I guess we’ll find out. 

But if it works out, much like the contrast around policing and reform, Minneapolis will be going through a drawn-out and contentious public process while Saint Paul will be hopefully crafting a good (maybe even better?) policy, without much fuss, in a back-room kind of way.

TL;DR - TBD

Mayor Carter changed the conversation last night. If you read behind the lines in his tweet, he pledged to quickly change the proposed policy, and seems confident that he can find a way through the legal hurdles. We don’t know what the details will be, but I trust Mayor Carter on housing.

In short, the Mayor’s “yes, and…” tweet comes as a relief. Unlike before, where Saint Paul voters were forced to choose between two bad situations, I look at this ordinance now as the functional equivalent of the one in Minneapolis, which I’ve supported from the beginning: we don’t know what the details will be, and I believe City Staff and elected officials can sort it out. If done right, and I’ll post in a few days what I think that means, Saint Paul can lead the way on addressing the housing crisis, climate change, and a whole bunch of other critical municipal pickles.

[See also my short column in Minnpost about the Saint Paul ordinance and my long-read with all the research about how this rent control proposal affects housing in Saint Paul, an explainer of why a 3% rent cap blocks new housing construction, short posts on how the policy would affect rents and taxes, interviews with housing policy experts on new construction and rent control, guesses about Mayor Carter's plan, and what I recommend we do about the housing crisis instead of the rent control proposal.]