Boston Follies

… and speaking of the dubiousness of curing social ills through legislation… The city of Boston is grappling with an issue similar to what the city of San Diego is with its “mini-dorms” and zoning regulations with respect to rental units for college students.

The city fathers have enacted an ordinance that would limit landlords to renting a single unit to no more than four college students which would supposedly cut down on loud, wild, late-night parties and other related behavior said to be “anti-social” (article’s choice of word which we thought to be highly ironic).

As this article notes, there are several problems with this ordinance, chief among them from the landlords’ standpoint: it limits the amount of income the landlord can generate from his property. This can, in effect, be argued as a “seizing of property”.

And from the college student standpoint, it is discriminatory as it singles out college students only… there is no prohibition against renting to families with more than four members.

As with Prohibition, though, this legislation will result in black or gray markets as work-around solutions to a) students wanting to decrease their individual rent and b) landlords wanting to maximize their income from their rental units. The article neglects to mention the most obvious result of this ordinance which is, of course, the 4 students sub-letting to other students so that money is exchanged from student to student and student to landlord… an “invisible hand” mechanism that renders this law which would be nearly impossible to enforce anyway, moot.

We sympathise with the plight of the folks who may live next door to a defacto Delta House but this ordinance appears to be just another well-intended piece of legislation that is simultaneously on legal thin-ice and practically ineffectual if not detrimental to the current state of affairs.