Three members of the St. Paul City Council plan to introduce a major amendment to the city’s voter-approved rent control ordinance that will entirely exempt new construction, a concession to developers who have argued that the 3% cap on annual rent increases has stifled financing for their projects and undermined the goal of creating new housing.

The proposal is expected to be introduced next week by Council President Rebecca Noecker, Anika Bowie and Saura Jost and voted upon in early April, but it’s unclear if it has the votes to pass. An amendment requires four votes of the seven-member council, and one of the seven seats is currently vacant and will be filled next month by an appointee who has yet to be chosen.

Jost said Council Member Cheniqua Johnson, who chairs the city’s Housing and Redevelopment Authority, also is working on a series of tenant protections that likely will be proposed at the same time.

“We want to show we can build housing for people and we can support our renters,” Jost said. “We can do both.”

The proposed amendment will permanently exempt buildings constructed after 2004 from the rent cap, a goal first proposed by St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter during his budget address last August but that gained no traction at the time with council members.

Making existing exemption permanent

Jost on Wednesday pointed to the Highland Bridge development, where Weidner Apartment Homes of Seattle and other developers have chosen not to move forward with market-rate housing construction, citing the city’s rent control ordinance. She noted that the city council in 2022 approved a 20-year exemption for new construction, so her proposal effectively makes the existing exemption permanent.

“The urgency around it is related to housing production, and additionally, we have a lot of large development sites around our city,” Jost said. “We have downtown, the Heights, we have United Village, and of course, in my ward Highland Bridge, and every development in between. As the mayor mentioned in his address last year, about 95% of renters would still be covered under this exemption.”

Interviewed at the time of the mayor’s budget address, Noecker, who at the time chaired the city’s Housing and Redevelopment Authority, said while it was no “secret that rent stabilization has had problems,” she wanted to see more hard data that specifically links a slowdown in residential real estate development to the city’s rent control policy.

Opposition on the council

While her thinking has since evolved, at least one member of the council plans to fight the proposal.

“I’m still a hard no,” said Council Member HwaJeong Kim on Wednesday, noting that interest rates and construction costs also play a role in stalling housing construction. “We’re seeing that trend not just in St. Paul, but across the region. The slowing of the housing market is not just an issue exclusive to St. Paul. There’s so many other market factors.”

Kim acknowledged that rent control had given developers some hesitancy to start projects in the capital city, but it’s also had its benefits. “Rent stabilization has always been about how do we equalize the balance of power between the big developers and everyday St. Paulites,” she said. “We need to look at data across the board. How is rent control working for renters?”

Council Member Nelsie Yang, who voted against previous rent control amendments approved by the council in September 2022, said Wednesday she was “still talking to community members, city staff and officials” about the proposal and would not be making further comment.

Timing on the amendment

The timing of the rent control amendment could be decisive.

There are currently six voting members of the council, and an amendment requires four votes. On Wednesday, the council interviewed four finalists to fill the seventh position — the Ward 4 seat vacated by former Council President Mitra Jalali — who had been a vocal advocate for rent control and also voted against amendments in 2022.

The new council member likely will be selected March 26 and sworn in this April, possibly in time to vote on both the rent control and tenant protections proposals, which would each require public readings across three weeks. Jost noted that the council could stagger public hearings on the proposals on different weeks, which would lengthen the timeframe.

St. Paul voters in 2021 approved one of the strictest rent control measures in the nation, though the council softened it the next year, exempting new construction for 20 years, with a 20-year lookback period.

They also approved “vacancy decontrol,” allowing landlords to raise rents by 8% plus inflation once a unit is vacant, and created a “just cause” provision that emphasizes landlords cannot empty an apartment just to raise rents.

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By STAN CHOE, AP Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stock indexes are rising Wednesday as Wall Street waits to hear what the Federal Reserve will say in the afternoon about where interest rates may be heading.

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The S&P 500 was up 0.7% in morning trading. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 237 points, or 0.6%, as of 10:30 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.9% higher.

The relatively quiet trading is a respite following weeks of sharp and scary swings for the U.S. stock market. Uncertainty is high about how much pain President Donald Trump will allow the economy to endure in order to remake the system as he wants. He’s said he wants manufacturing jobs back in the United States and far fewer people working for the federal government.

Trump’s barrage of announcements on tariffs and other policies have created so much uncertainty that economists worry U.S. businesses and households may freeze and pull back on their spending.

If the economy gets too weak, the Fed could lower interest rates in order to give it a boost, as it has in so many prior downturns. It has plenty of room to cut, with its main interest rate sitting at a range between 4.25% and 4.50%.

But conditions may be more complicated for the Fed this time around. Besides goosing the economy, lowering rates would also push inflation upward, and worries are already high about inflation because of tariffs. The Fed does not have a good tool to fix what’s called “ stagflation,” where the economy is stagnating but inflation remains high.

Virtually all of Wall Street is expecting the Fed to announce no change to its main interest rate this afternoon, as it waits to see how conditions play out. For the moment, the job market seems to be relatively solid overall after the economy closed last year running at a solid pace.

What will be more important for investors is the set of forecasts the central bank will release after the meeting is over. That will show where Fed officials see interest rates, the economy and inflation heading in upcoming years.

The expectation among traders is that the Fed will cut rates at least two or three times by the end of 2025.

On Wall Street, Nvidia helped support the market after rising 1.4% to cut its loss for the year so far to 12.9%. It hosted an event Tuesday where it largely “did a nice job laying out the roadmap” and fighting back against speculation the artificial-intelligence industry is seeing a slowdown in demand for computing power, according to UBS analysts led by Timothy Arcuri.

Tesla also rose 2.7%, following two straight losses of roughly 5%. It’s still down 42.7% for 2025 so far. It’s been struggling on worries that customers are turned off by CEO Elon Musk’s leading efforts to slash spending by the U.S. government.

Big Tech has generally been at the center of the market’s recent sell-off, as stocks whose momentum had earlier seemed unstoppable have since dropped sharply following criticism they had simply grown too expensive.

On the losing side of Wall Street Wednesday was General Mills, which fell 2.3% despite reporting a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected.

The cereal and snack maker’s revenue fell short of analysts’ targets, in part because of a slowdown in sales for snacks. General Mills also cut financial forecasts for revenue and profit over its full fiscal year, partly because it expects “macroeconomic uncertainty” to continue to affect its customers.

In stock markets abroad, Japan’s Nikkei 225 slipped 0.2% after the Bank of Japan held steady on its own interest rates, as was widely expected. Japan also reported a trade surplus for February, with exports rising more than 11% as manufacturers rushed to beat rising tariffs imposed by Trump.

Other indexes were mixed across Europe and Asia.

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury edged down to 4.30% from 4.31% late Tuesday.

AP Business Writers Yuri Kageyama and Matt Ott contributed.

NEW YORK (AP) — A Columbia University student activist who was detained by the U.S. government over his participation in pro-Palestinian demonstrations has the right to challenge the legality of his detention, but the case should be heard in New Jersey, rather than in New York or Louisiana, a judge ruled Wednesday.

Mahmoud Khalil, a legal U.S. resident with no criminal record, was detained by federal immigration agents on March 8. From there, he was taken to an immigration detention center in New Jersey, where he spent the night. Then he was taken back to New York, put on a plane and flown to an immigration facility in Jenna, Louisiana.

“These are serious allegations and arguments that, no doubt, warrant careful review by a court of law; the fundamental constitutional principle that all persons in the United States are entitled to due process of law demands no less,” wrote U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman.

This review should happen in federal court in New Jersey, rather than in the New York court where his legal team initially brought the case, or in Louisiana, where Khalil is now detained, because New Jersey is state where Khalid was being held at the time his lawyers first went to court, Furman wrote.

The federal government said it had to move Khalid to Louisiana because of a lack of available detention center beds in the metropolitan New York region. It also cited a bedbug infestation at the closer lockup in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Attorneys for Khalil have disputed these justifications in a series of court filings since his arrest. They describe the transfer as a “retaliatory” action meant to deprive their client of access to counsel while ensuring the case is held in a jurisdiction that may be more favorable to the Republican administration’s unusual legal claim.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has cited as grounds for Khalil’s deportation a rarely-used statute giving him sweeping power to deport those who pose “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

While the White House has accused Khalil of “siding with terrorists,” they have yet to give any evidence for the claim. Still, President Trump has described Khalil’s case as the “first of many to come.”

Khalil, a 30-year-old international affairs graduate student, had served as a negotiator and spokesperson for student activists at Columbia University who took over a campus lawn last spring in protest of the war in Gaza.

Images of his maskless face at protests, along with his willingness to share his name with reporters, had made him a target among people who saw antisemitism in the demonstrations. In the weeks leading up to his arrest, Khalil repeatedly appealed to Columbia University’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, for protection, citing threats from right-wing doxing groups.

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