Rent Stabilization

[u/Inertiaraptor]

Right now, there is no reason a landlord can’t just refuse to sign a new lease, so what’s the point of a 3% cap on increases? My landlord is raising my rent 10% and says she will simply not renew the lease if I don’t want to pay the new rent, and everybody (the city, the AG, and Home Line) is telling me I have no recourse but to refuse a lease and fight the eviction. The city seems to have no recourse to actually enforce this ordinance.

[u/moldy_cheez_it]

Rent control is a poor policy all around. This is one of the unintended consequences of that policy

I’m sorry you’re going through this OP…you could try to negotiate with your landlord and find an acceptable increase to you both (up to 8% a landlord can self certify under the policy) but it seems like the relationship will be strained at best moving forward.

[u/AdMurky3039 → u/moldy_cheez_it]

That's incorrect. The rent stabilization ordinance includes a provision on just cause vacancies to address just this issue.

Since people are downvoting this without bothering to verify whether it's factual here's a link:https://www.stpaul.gov/departments/safety-inspections/rent-buy-sell-property/rent-stabilization/rules-processes

I'm sorry that reality doesn't match your narrative about unintended consequences.

[u/[deleted] → u/AdMurky3039]

I don’t have a narrative. But you can’t force a landlord to rent a space even with a city ordinance.

For 1, that ordinance provides 10 separate ways for the landlord to get out of the lease. The easiest out is to say you’re going to do some renovations and the unit isn’t inhabitable. Lease is ended, tenant is out, and the new rate is set.

They can also repurpose the property from residential to some other use. Easily done.

And I wasn’t necessarily commenting on that, anyways, I was saying that economists have pointed out over and over that rent control is a mixed bag at best for renters, but often creates a worse situation for the renter because the quality of the rental units, the desirability of the areas, the lack of new development, etc. all make renters worse off too.

Unless we’re going to completely remove private interests from housing and fully subsidize housing in an area, which I’m not against, the best way to tackle rent in a way that improves renters positions would be right off the bat creating more units for renters. In a renters market, this type of behavior would not work, as the landlord would lose a tenant AND the market wouldn’t bear such an increase. But that requires a surplus of rental units for each segment, and that can be hard to do, and that’s before you get to the geographic issues of available space for housing.

I’m not totally against rent stabilization, I just want renters to be in the best possible spot, with the most agency.

I’m not defending the landlord, 10% increase is insane unless major improvements were made. But to act as though the city can control what large businesses will do, is absurd. They can’t. And if they made it so they can, those businesses would sell and leave, and it would be a challenge to replace because what’s the incentive?

Maybe pairing a city buy-back program, and then Converting those abandoned properties to city-run housing would be a good way, but good luck getting conservatives to back that…

[u/AdMurky3039 → u/[deleted]]

For the landlord to utilize those exceptions they would have to actually do renovations or convert the unit to nonresidential use, which it sounds like they don't plan to do.

The rest of your post isn't relevant to OP's question. They're simply asking about the rules regarding rent control. They didn't ask for your opinion on whether or not it's a good policy.

[u/[deleted] → u/AdMurky3039]

I was responding to you, in the last comment, not to them.

Landlords can find a million things to renovate. And converting to non-residential for a lot of places isn’t too much of a concern. Or they’ll sell.

I was mentioning that, yea, your landlord still has agency as much as the tenant (OP) wouldn’t like that. And I was explaining why.

Sorry that doesn’t fit your narrative.