There’s been a lot of talk about guinea pigs and rent stabilization lately. In fact, the Minnesota Multi Housing Association recently sent me a picture of a guinea pig! They even hired someone to come to my house and give me a second picture of a guinea pig! It’s almost like the Minnesota Multi Housing […]
I recently reviewed a commercial real estate report from the first half of this year. Takeaway: Vacancy is steady at around 7 to 8 percent. The report got me thinking about home prices and rental rates across the country and what the humble dollar gets you in different cities. Check out all the Zillow data […]
Apartment department Conrad Zbikowski offers another preview of a new mixed use building going up with the Iron Clad Mixed-Use Development Opening “Mid-June” at the southeast corner of Chicago and Washington Avenues in the Mill District. More policy-related, he also crunches some numbers to find It’s Impossible to Afford Rent on the Minimum Wage both […]
Minneapolis and St. Paul both recently passed municipal minimum wage ordinances that were intended to lift up the working poor. In Minneapolis, the current minimum wage is $11.25 for large businesses, and that is scheduled to increase to $15.00 by July 1, 2022. The current minimum wage in St. Paul is the state minimum of […]
Whole Foods announced recently that they were planning on reducing prices store-wide as part of Amazon’s campaign to combat the image of a “Whole paycheck” grocery store. The Whole Foods media release gloated, “Starting Wednesday, customers will find new lower prices on hundreds of items throughout the store with an emphasis on high quality, peak-of-season […]
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Lyndale neighborhood in Minneapolis contains a full healthy stock of small, medium, and large buildings that have been invested in and stabilized over many decades. At the height of 1980s urban decline and until 2007, various civic organizations pressed deadbeat landlords into cleaning up their properties and/or selling them to the neighborhood itself. This […]
Keeping with this week’s theme of affordable rental housing, here’s a chart from Howard Blackson’s Twitter page (not sure its original source) showing the percentage of income paid in rent, on average: In general, one should not pay more than 1/3 of one’s income to the landlord. The idea behind this chart is that you […]
This is part 3 of a series on the interaction between the rental housing market and rents. Read part 1, “How I Set Apartment Rents,” and part 2, “Housing Markets? Humbug!“ I’ve dedicated the last 15 years of my life working on affordable housing policy. Mostly, I’ve worked where some sort of subsidy helps make it (more) affordable. In […]
This is part 2 of a series on the interaction between the rental housing market and rents. Read part 1, “How I Set Apartment Rents.” Housing markets are complex, and here I attempt to explain how there can be a broad market trend and submarkets bucking that trend. I’m also going to imagine what might happen on a […]
In Minneapolis, there is an active discussion about rising rents, whether supply and demand affect rents, and what to do about providing enough affordable and work-force housing. Related issues — markets, incomes, land use controls, local politics and processes, public subsidy and how it’s used — are all complex. No blog post, tweet, or newspaper article […]