Just more than a year ago, the City of Madison enacted an inclusionary zoning ordinance mandating that all new residential buildings consisting of 10 units or more offer 15 percent of their inventories at reduced prices to those who otherwise couldn’t afford them. The guiding motivation, surely as commendable as it is philanthropic, is that Madison should not only be fully diversified but that such a zoning law would help elevate the economically disadvantaged.

Unfortunately, this ordinance — which is currently facing a legal challenge — is little more than a disguised vehicle for the strategic redistribution of wealth, a notion that worked so marvelously on the pages of Karl Marx, but that has time and again proven a miserable failure upon implementation.

In this instance, the first victims will not be the wealthy landlords or comfortably retired upper-class citizens of Madison but rather students. The value of land and buildings — as well as raw operational costs — cannot easily be molded at the City Council’s whim, and landlords will therefore be forced to hike non-inclusionary prices. With rent already high in Madison, this is not what most economically-stretched students need. The reality remains that while some students may qualify for such discounted units, the majority likely will not. That this move comes as downtown development is peaking — a trend that should lower prices across the board through laissez faire means if left unperturbed — adds only insult to economic injury for the student-tenant population.

There will also be negative implications for local developers and landlords. Inclusionary zoning disturbs an economy otherwise striving to achieve equilibrium, and the end result will surely be disadvantageous to landlords as well as students. The practical implications of this deter further development in Madison — a city otherwise enjoying a boom — and tighter bottom lines that will likely result in the aforementioned rent hikes and stingier maintenance and operation.

The lawsuit currently facing this ordinance centers around the prohibition of rent control, and we hope this point is sufficient to eliminate this zoning law. Rent control is originally an idea borne from efforts to ensure people could properly save for their retirement and not risk inflation-driven evictions once on a fixed income. The end result, however, has been 80-year-old women living alone in glorious three-floor brownstones at the heart of Manhattan for less than $150 a month. This is damning to both landlords and potential tenants, and while surely nobly-intentioned in its origin, has proven nightmarish with the growth of inflation and decline of the dollar.

Given time to run its due course, this will interfere grossly with tomorrow’s generation of students taking up residence in Madison. We have little doubt that good intentions lay behind the inclusionary zoning ordinance. But in this case, good intentions have flown out the penthouse window.