College freshmen have it easy. When they come to K-State, they are given many choices for living arrangements. There are the dorms, greek life, scholarship houses and even the occasional rental.

Before long, though, students start changing things up. There is a tendency to start gravitating toward apartments and houses. The reason is pretty obvious: more freedom, great choices to fit whatever budget and the ability to live with a few choice friends. Manhattan offers housing in many styles, from plush apartments to high-rises to duplexes, and you tend to get what you pay for.

So, we have this (relatively) free market right now, where landlords and prospective tenants come together — the tenant agreeing to pay rent, the landlord agreeing to provide and maintain the property. I have never seen a landlord coerce a man to buy a house, after all. But then the city decides to start adding extra stipulations.

In spite of the perfectly functioning market, the Manhattan City Commission decided that we renters were not smart enough to make our own decisions. On Tuesday, they voted 3-1 to require rental inspections for each unit in order to "protect the consumer." Right.
The ordinance will require all landlords to apply for rental inspections and have each unit inspected following an as-of-yet undetermined checklist, as reported by Corene Brisendine in Wednesday's Collegian. In that same article, Brice Ebert of Manhattan, expressed concern about the commission not even presenting a checklist to landlords before the inspections begin.

So, we've got a little confusion for the landowners. They do not know what housing will be determined sub-par, so they stop buying fixer-uppers and try selling those they do have. The market then starts going a little off-kilter. And that's even before the inspections begin.
Then Manhattan starts the inspections. Their new bureaucracy — yes, they are setting one up — starts inspecting the houses with the usual government efficiency and they do a halfway decent job, force some landlords to make necessary improvements, some to make unnecessary improvements and many landlords to give up on low-quality housing.

Now the housing and rental markets gain a new, artificial price floor. If I go over and pull out my Principles of Microeconomics textbook, I discover that this price floor means the market is no longer working as efficiently as before and we end up with renters paying higher costs and landowners leasing fewer properties.

That does not sound like the optimal situation at all, now does it? A few people manage to end up better off as a result of the new ordinance, though. That would be the owners of the more expensive rentals. They get to increase their rental prices because of the price floor causing the market to shift and they have no need to pay to fix their already perfectly acceptable units.

You know what? Mayor Bob Strawn's wife owns a bookkeeping business that handles clients like these upper-level rental corporations. Commissioner James Sherow owns rental property and so does Commissioner Jayme Morris-Hardeman. Brisendine reported on this in her recap of the commission meeting in the Collegian. Naturally, the commissioners determined they had no conflict of interest in voting on the legislation, but allow me to postulate that they realized the selfish benefits of passing the ordinance.

Whether the commissioners voted out of selfless interest for the tenants of the city or for their own pocketbooks is immaterial, though. It makes not a whit of difference for the students forced to pay a higher rent, thanks to the market shifting or for the unfortunate souls who live in a house that has been declared "deficient." The important thing is that ordinances such as these have real-world consequences and they aren't always so pleasant for the citizens.

Prepare for higher rental prices.

-Frank Male is a senior in physics and political science. Please send comments to opinion@spub.ksu.