In St. Paul, housing advocates are celebrating a historic win for one of the strictest rent-control mandates in the country, even as City Hall grapples with how to interpret, staff and enforce a voter-approved ballot initiative it has not budgeted for.
Members of the city council this week expressed frustration and confusion over when the new limits on rent increases take effect, which is apparently in May.
“We didn’t wait for policymakers or funders. We leveraged the power of the people and direct democracy to do this for ourselves,” said Danielle Swift, an organizer with the Frogtown Neighborhood Association. “Text banking, phone banking, door-to-door, 100 percent grassroots organizing got it done.”
Alarmed by overnight rent hikes for low-income tenants, organizations such as the Housing Justice Center, TakeAction Minnesota, the Alliance and the West Side Community Organization gathered signatures to get their own rent-control proposal on the Nov. 2 ballot by petition, without coordination with City Hall, where support was limited at best.
“They did not come to the council or the city first,” said St. Paul City Council President Amy Brendmoen, who had favored a “no” vote. “They just did it.”
QUESTIONS AROUND IMPLEMENTATION
The lack of dialogue between the mayor’s office, the city council and the advocacy community is fueling hard feelings on all sides, as well as questions around implementation.
Four of the seven council members had urged a “no” vote against the rent-control proposal, which imposes a 3 percent cap on annual residential rent increases. The ballot initiative was approved by St. Paul residents Tuesday by a vote of 53 percent to 47 percent.
Underscoring the disconnect, the full text of the city ordinance was difficult for the public to find until the city posted it to the landing page of its website on Oct. 28, or five days before the election. Opposition was led largely by the Realtor and real estate development community, which raised $4 million and did heavy mailings.
“There were a fair number of public forums,” said Margaret Kaplan, president of the St. Paul-based Housing Justice Center. “I don’t think people were going into this uninformed. … (Our advocates) did such a great job about telling people’s stories and getting it to connect to people’s experiences. But it was really hard to know what the impact of over $4 million on the ground was going to be.”
CITY HALL UNPREPARED?
Members of the city council expressed dismay Wednesday that with the 2022 city budget process nearly complete and a maximum tax levy already approved, they’ll now have to figure out how to staff and fund what could be an elaborate appeals process for hardship exemptions. That could translate to removing funding from other city initiatives.
“It doesn’t seem like the administration has a lot of answers at this point,” said city council member Rebecca Noecker on Thursday. “The council doesn’t really have a legislative role. It’s all on the mayor’s side — the education, the enforcement, the implementation and actually proposing a budget for it. … It is concerning to me there hasn’t been more preparation on the administration side, at least so we can hire up and enforce it. Ordinances don’t matter if they’re not enforced.”
In Minneapolis, Mayor Jacob Frey vetoed ballot language last August that would have allowed voters to impose a new rent-control mandate. But he did not block a separate ballot question that asked voters whether the Minneapolis City Council should be authorized to assemble a rent-control ordinance the old-fashioned way — through public hearings, discussion among elected officials and negotiation.
As in St. Paul, Minneapolis voters approved that ballot question on Tuesday.
Minneapolis will have time to hire staff and create a legal and technical infrastructure around rent control that St. Paul still lacks, settling questions about how landlords can submit hardship appeals, where the city will find money for enforcement and appeals hearings, and whether the city council can amend the ordinance down the line.
In St. Paul, Carter had signaled general support for a “yes” vote last month while calling for quick changes to the ordinance proposal, in light of concerns about a possible negative effect on housing construction. Carter, however, has yet to spell out what those changes might be, and the city attorney’s office has raised concern that amendments that appear to veer from the voters’ intent could open the city to litigation.
“Now that residents have affirmed rent stabilization for our city, we look forward to engaging with community members to implement and improve upon this policy,” Carter’s communications director, Peter Leggett, said Wednesday.
IMPACT ON DEVELOPMENT
Nicolle Goodman, director of St. Paul’s Department of Planning and Economic Development, told the city council on Wednesday that developers already claim to be putting projects on hold in light of the ballot question, even though under the ballot language the new rent limits don’t take effect until May.
While rent-control policies around the country exempt new housing construction for 15 to 20 years to give developers a chance to attract financing and pay off debt, St. Paul’s new ordinance does not, which remains of concern to Carter’s office.
“We do need equity in housing. We do need more housing supply,” Goodman said. “We don’t want our equity goals to be at odds with our growth goals. As the mayor pointed out, the ordinance as written may actually put those goals at odds. I’ve received many calls from developers of projects currently in the pipeline, which would bring hundreds of units of new housing supply. And many of those development projects today, now, are on hold and at risk. And that loss of new housing supply would have a negative impact on overall housing affordability. So we need to look carefully at that.”
Goodman said the city’s planning department had already released a long-planned request for proposals seeking a consultant to study a menu of affordable-housing tools, including rent control. Two responses from prospective consultants arrived Wednesday. “That work will help inform the implementation of the ordinance,” she said.Pointing to the experiences of cities such as New York, San Francisco and Seattle, rent-control advocates have said any slowdown in housing construction likely will be temporary as the market sorts things out.
Swift blamed “generations of economic exploitation and exclusion from homeownership” for marginalizing communities of color — some 82 percent of the city’s Black households rent, compared to 39 percent of white households.
“This policy will have a dramatic and immediate impact in advancing housing and racial justice in our city,” she said.
A CLOSER LOOK
Here’s a deeper look at Tuesday’s election in St. Paul:
The St. Paul ballot question instituting rent control — a 3 percent cap on annual rent increases — won with 53 percent of the vote, buoyed by a strong show of support along the University Avenue corridor, the West Side and the North End, in particular.
It lost some traction in Highland Park north of Shepard Road and in certain East Side precincts, but more than made up for it along the Green Line, especially in areas such as South St. Anthony Park and the Summit-University neighborhood.
“Six out of seven wards voted in favor,” said Kaplan, of the Housing Justice Center.
While precincts that favored Carter generally favored rent control, that wasn’t the case everywhere. In the North End, the mayor had some of his weakest performances of the night even while voters there embraced the new rent limits.
“There was a bit of inverse, overall, with the 2019 vote on unified trash collection,” said Aaron Booth, a political consultant. “Ward 3 (Highland Park and Macalester-Groveland) voted for the trash-collection question, and against the rent-control question. There’s a higher-than-average homeownership rate in that ward, compared to the rest of the city.”
MAYORAL RESULTS
Carter handily won re-election on Tuesday with 62 percent of the vote, an even better showing in the eight-way race than during his first campaign for the seat four years ago. Carter enjoyed his strongest support along the political wards west of downtown and surrounding the University Avenue corridor, and received his weakest returns on the Greater East Side.
Other candidates in the race included Dino Guerin, who received 13 percent of the vote; Paul Langenfeld (9 percent); Bill Hosko (6 percent); Dora Jones-Robinson (4 percent); Miki Frost (4 percent); Abu Nayeem (3 percent); Scott Evans Wergin (0.6 percent); and write-ins (0.35 percent).
Carter carried virtually every precinct in the city, Booth said, and won more than 50 percent of the vote in 73 out of 95 precincts. The notable exception was Ward 7, Precinct 10 on the Maplewood border, which is located east of White Bear Avenue, between Conway Street and Minnehaha Avenue. Guerin won 144 votes there, or more than a third of the precinct vote, compared to 133 votes for Carter.
North of Battle Creek, the East Side in general leaned toward a mix of candidates in their first-choice picks. Perhaps surprisingly, Carter did fairly well in Highland Park, where Langenfeld had once served on the Highland District Council. The mayor drew softer support in the North End, where results were more mixed among the candidates.
TURNOUT DROPS BACK TO 2005
St. Paul is a growing city that has seen an uptick in registered voters, but Tuesday’s election attracted fewer of them than Carter’s first time at bat.
The mayoral race drew 59,103 votes, compared to 61,464 votes four years ago when Carter and former city council member Pat Harris led the field. Turnout on Tuesday was 35 percent of the city’s 169,950 registered voters, compared to 39 percent of the 156,543 registered voters four years ago, according to information available from the Minnesota Secretary of State’s Office.
For comparison, a tough contest between incumbent Mayor Randy Kelly and then-city council member Chris Coleman, who unseated Kelly, drew 59,500 voters in 2005. In other words, the city held a 2005 election on Tuesday, despite overall city population having grown since then by at least 35,000 people.
Shannon Brault contributed to this report.
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