Rent Control Explained: Debunking Your Landlord's Myths

Rent across the country is reaching record highs–11% nationwide and over 40% in some cities. Tenant organizers in St. Paul, Minnesota think they have a solution. In November 2021, they passed a bill with a 3% cap on annual rent increases. The movement was led by renters like Cynthia Brown, a local resident who became homeless for two years after her husband passed away and she couldn’t afford her rent.

St. Paul’s bill is the kind of rent control that landlords fear and economists hate.

Landlords want you to think that rent regulation will make housing prices go up. But that’s not true. We found that rent control can help keep tenants in their homes and doesn’t hurt most landlords — it just cuts into the profits of the most predatory ones. And a bill like this would help tenants like Cynthia Brown stay in their homes. We debunked the common myths about rent control and what the bill will mean for St. Paul.

To understand more about how rent stabilization impacts communities, read the entire report from the University of Southern California:
https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/242/docs/Rent_Matters_PERE_Report_Final_02.pdf
And the study on rent stabilization in Minneapolis from the University of Minnesota Center for Urban and Regional Affairs:
https://www.cura.umn.edu/research/minneapolis-rent-stabilization-study

To understand more about patterns of gentrification in cities, read:
Samuel Stein’s Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2870-capital-city
P.E. Moskowitz’s How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood
https://www.boldtypebooks.com/titles/pe-moskowitz/how-to-kill-a-city/9781568585246/#:~:text=Peter%20Moskowitz's%20How%20to%20Kill,destructive%20housing%20policies%20are%20devised.

As of July 2022, neighboring city Minneapolis is also considering rent regulations modeled on St. Paul’s bill. St. Paul mayor Melvin Carter is currently seeking an exemption for new construction on the St. Paul ordinance, in spite of resistance from the activists that helped pass the bill.
https://www.governing.com/now/can-the-twin-cities-reinvent-rent-control
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