Boston Suggests Rent Control for Olympics

Proposal dropped after immediate opposition from all sides

The Boston Olympics committee quickly dropped plans to impose rent control on some private rental housing in order to give housing to 2024 Olympics visitors in that summer. The change occurred shortly after SPOA executive director Skip Schloming learned of the rent control plans and expressed strong opposition to the scheme to the city’s “point person” for the proposal.

The proposed use of rent control showed up in a single paragraph in the City of Boston’s official proposal to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. The paragraph indicated that the city would impose rent control (“reasonable rates”) on Boston’s landlords of student-occupied housing. Landlords would be forced to end tenancies for that summer and rent their units to Olympics visitors and spectators.

Here is the paragraph:
“Using a third-party specialist to manage the operation and create a streamlined program for Boston-area landlords [of student-occupied housing], leases signed for September 1 of the year preceding the Games could be executed as 9-month leases, as opposed to typical 12-month leases. Regulations would then be in place to support reasonable rates for spectator accommodation for the duration of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.”

Our response: We need to fight hard against it so that the city does not walk all over us.

In comments to the article, Globe readers overwhelmingly agreed that the rent control idea was deeply flawed and should be dropped. Some wondered how anyone in the Walsh administration could have come up with such a wrong-headed idea and suggested that the Walsh administration is still too inexperienced to make a proposal to host the 2024 Olympics. Some feared financial disaster for the city.

Clear opposition came from several directions

It turns out that, besides SPOA’s opposition, the Boston Tenants Coalition and the Allston-Brighton residents association also opposed the plan, not because they don’t like rent control.  For these groups, the issue was people being displaced from their homes. Hearing opposition from many quarters, the city backed down.

We told a Globe reporter who interviewed us that we vigorously opposed any form of rent control. In this case, it would be the camel’s nose into the tent, a three-month period of rent control that tenant activists will fight hard to expand to full-scale, permanent rent control: the whole camel in the tent.

The activists’ argument, we said, would be: “If you can do rent control for well-off visitors and spectators coming to the Olympics, why not for the poor?” – even though rent-controlled apartments seldom go to the poor.

We were right on the mark. Kathy Brown, coordinator of the Boston Tenants Coalition, told the Globe reporter: “If they can do some restrictions for spectators, let’s see about some protections for hard-working Bostonians, as well,” she said.

The mere presence of rent control, we also said, would bring rent control into the consciousness of Bostonians, and bring us into a difficult battle, a minority of us landlords against a majority of tenants. It would be best, we concluded, to fight it now.

Thankfully, the battle appears to be won. The Globe reiterated the city’s response several times: “We will not be pursuing it further,” said one official about the plan. “I don’t know where it came from,” said another official about the plan, “but it’s not something that will be contemplated or considered at all as either necessary or desirable.” Schloming further noted that off-campus student housing in vacated condition would mean stripped beds with no sheets or blankets, no curtains, no wall decor, perhaps no other furnishings except beds – conditions that would not be desired by Olympics visitors.

Treatment of landlords shows we are considered second-class citizens

It is quite disturbing that rent control was the first thought that came into their minds when the proposal’s drafters considered where to house Olympics visitors and guests. These landlords were not consulted about the proposal just as other owners in the city were apparently not consulted about an Olympics takeover of their properties.

The owners who were consulted were Boston-area hotel operators, for whom the city “hosted a meeting on October 1 [2014] to discuss our accommodations requirements with the region’s largest hotel operators.” The proposal includes a copy of one hotel’s voluntary agreement to make 80% of their rooms available and limit the rates charged.

Impose rent control? Not consult with us? Landlords clearly are second-class citizens in the eyes of many city officials.