Sustaining our Momentum!

Yesterday, the Saint Paul City Council amended the City’s rent stabilization ordinance to permanently exempt new apartment buildings, and restore an updated version of the tenant protections ordinance that was originally passed in 2021. These policies send a powerful statement about our values as a City: that we care for the short-term needs of renters, and we are committed to building more homes to remain an affordable, welcoming city for current and future residents for generations to come. 

These outcomes were not a sure thing, and Sustain Saint Paul members like you helped to make it happen. Thank you! Together, we submitted written comments and offered  in-person testimony, but our organization’s advocacy went beyond public comment. Sustain Saint Paul members met with members of the City Council, attended community meetings, and even wrote commentaries that were published by the Star Tribune and the Reformer. In spite of how divisive and rigid the public discourse about rent control in Saint Paul has been for the past four years, Sustain Saint Paul advocates successfully reframed the conversation. That’s something to celebrate.

But our work is far from finished. Exempting new apartments from rent stabilization was a small, necessary step towards rekindling the growth of our housing supply in Saint Paul, but it will not be a panacea for Saint Paul’s problems. There’s more work to be done to achieve more abundant housing, transit oriented development, and sustainable land use in our City. We need to support our local ecosystem of “small-scale” housing developers to build in our communities, not just corporate developers. We need our city to streamline administrative processes and reduce the existing red tape. We need to pilot Land Value Tax districts to make sure vacant property owners and speculators are taxed in a way that spurs development rather than rewarding neglect. And we need to make sure that this November, voters in Saint Paul support the administrative citations ballot initiative so our city has the tools they need to hold bad actors accountable. 

Thank you again to the volunteers and advocates who made this win happen, especially the renters who showed up in force to support these measures. Thank you also to the City Councilmembers who listened to the community and the data and made the right decision, particularly Councilmembers Noecker, Jost, Bowie, and Privratsky.

Together, we can build Saint Paul's long-term prosperity and livability through abundant housing, low-carbon transportation and sustainable land use.