By Peter Vickery, Esq., Legislative Affairs Counsel This article reviews the story of Vincent and Laura Bologna, landlords who were famously bankrupted by Massachusetts rent control. Massachusetts had rent control from 1970 to 1994. In 1994, the voters of Massachusetts voted in favor of Question 9 and abolished rent control.…

Massachusetts is in many ways a leader when it comes to solar power incentives, but we have paid little attention to landlord-tenant solar. The new SMART program subsidizes solar power and improves on the old SREC program in one major way, discussed below. But SMART still leaves landlords with little…

On April 16, the MassLandlords.net website was transferred from Site5 cloud hosting to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Site5 was the second and longest-running host MassLandlords employed, offering services from April 2014 to April 2019. Several factors drove the migration. First and foremost, MassLandlords.net will start to offer market certifications to…

In April we completed a laundry list of smaller items: continued to develop the helpline, gave feedback the Department of Housing and Urban Development on Section 8, reordered the website sign-up flow, upgraded the core website server (discussed at length in this edition), and set up monitors for key policy…

By Peter Vickery, Esq. On Sunday, February 19, 2019, the Boston Globe magazine published an article about evictions in Massachusetts. The reporters, Jenifer McKim and Alejandro Serrano, implied their support for providing tenants with taxpayer-funded lawyers, a position that should come as no surprise. But in support of their policy…

This article gives an inside look at an ongoing gut renovation of a three-decker, particularly one that needed structural repairs. The building was constructed circa 1890 and followed a “two-and-a-half” floorplan, with a pitched as opposed to flat roof. A Grim Engineer’s Report A structural engineer reviewed the property for…