By CHRIS POWELL
New Haven has no city motto but as the proletarianizing and collectivist instincts of its political class consume the city, the Board of Alders might well consider adopting the old sayings “What’s yours is mine” and “Property is theft.”
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The latest enthusiasm of that political class is an ordinance to prohibit short-term home and apartment rentals in private residential buildings, the sort of rentals offered by Airbnb and other internet services that match homeowners with travelers who want choices for temporary lodging other than traditional hotels and motels — lodging more elaborate or less expensive or more conveniently located.
The complaints about the short-term rentals aren’t what might be expected — the fear of greater bustle, noise, and strangers in the neighborhood. No, the complaints strike a pose of social justice.
As the senior warden at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Joseph Carroll, put it the other day at a Board of Alders committee meeting: “The economics are simple. Every apartment or house converted into a short-term rental is one less home available for a New Haven resident or family.”
New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker agrees and has endorsed the ordinance, though its drawbacks are obvious.
For all apartments or houses used for short-term rentals produce income for the property’s owners, many if not most of whom are also New Haven residents, many of whom needing the income to afford to remain in the city amid its high property taxes and terrible schools and Connecticut’s high cost of living generally.
The ordinance would constitute a substantial expropriation of their property, insofar as they acquired it before the collectivizers decided to impair its capacity to be productive through short-term rentals.
The ordinance also would blame these small-scale resident landlords for the high cost of housing, a problem for which they have no responsibility, a problem caused in large part by a combination of inflation, exclusive zoning, government’s inadequate facilitation of housing, and individual selfishness, since anyone who owns adequate housing has a financial interest in limiting new supply to keep prices from falling.
Less obviously but still substantially, the housing problem is also caused by the failure of public education to produce graduates skilled enough to support themselves adequately, as well as by the failure of welfare policy to bring welfare recipients to self-sufficiency. New Haven’s schools are a supreme example of this, given their graduates’ horrifying lack of academic proficiency. Housing prices will always be too high for people who lack the skills necessary to support themselves.
Besides, New Haven’s prosperity seems to require a good supply of short-term rental housing, what with Yale University, a top national institution, bringing thousands of people from across the country to the city every year, and state government promoting tourism for sampling New Haven-style pizza, whose reputation is almost as high as Yale’s.
Where will the ordinance’s expropriation of private property lead? Will it stop with privately owned housing?
After all, if, as the pious say, every apartment or house converted into a short-term rental is one less unit of housing available for New Haven residents, then every slice served in New Haven’s pizza parlors and every delectable meal served in New Haven’s many elegant or trendy restaurants represent food that could be expropriated and given to the hungry poor, and every dormitory room at Yale could be taken by the city for housing the homeless.
There could be no end to expropriation if it is chosen as the mechanism of elevating the less fortunate.
But expropriation is the policy of people’s republics, which usually punish and destroy individual enterprise and always destroy personal liberty.
In any case an ordinance prohibiting short-term rentals in private residential properties will do little to reduce the housing shortage, whose underlying causes will endure, unaddressed, in New Haven and throughout Connecticut. The proposed ordinance is just more tinkering with symptoms, tinkering that is undertaken because addressing causes — becoming relevant — is difficult and political courage is even scarcer than housing.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
