MassLandlords Website rentcontrolhistory.com Halts Multiple Calls for Rent Control

By Eric Weld, MassLandlords, Inc.

When we were constructing our educational website rentcontrolhistory.com during winter 2023-24, the charge to reinstate failed rent control policies in Massachusetts was in full force from several different angles.

The rentcontrolhistory.com masthead tells it like it is and invites viewers to scroll and click for more details, images and background. Image: MassLandlords.net.

Since we first published rentcontrolhistory.com in January 2024, as well as several articles detailing the policy’s many harms, the call for rent control – or “rent stabilization” as Boston Mayor Michelle Wu euphemized it – has stalled and quieted. The timing correlation is unmistakable. Our online campaign to educate and inform people about rent control’s ugly, inequitable, racist and woefully inefficient past coincided neatly with the recession of multiple efforts to revisit such policies. We think, humbly, it’s more than coincidence.

A statewide (and nationwide) slowdown in rent and housing costs may have also contributed to the quieting of calls for rent control. And we don’t kid ourselves that attempts to reinstate rent control in Massachusetts are a thing of the past. Demands for restrictions on rents will likely never go away completely. And anyway, in our heavily restricted state, there are always new badly considered policies that hamstring the rental business to take rent control’s place. But for the moment, at least, rent control seems on the back burner.

Rent Control Attempts from All Angles

In summer 2023, calls for rent control were manifold and momentum was leaning in its favor. Mayor Wu had proposed a law that would have limited rent increases in Boston to 6% above a given year’s Consumer Price Index (CPI), with a 10% hard cap. Wu was elected to office with rent control as a solid part of her platform. Upon taking office, she quickly appointed, under questionable circumstances, a Rent Stabilization Advisory Committee that formulated the plan, which echoed an even more draconian policy. St. Paul, Minn., had earlier passed a law that capped rent hikes at 3% in any given year, as approved by voters in 2021. Predictably, new rental housing in that city has since slowed to a crawl, and by summer 2024, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter proposed exempting all new housing from rent control.

The Boston City Council approved Mayor Wu’s proposal in September 2023 and it moved to the state Housing Committee, from which it did not emerge.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts representative Mike Connolly of Cambridge launched an initiative for a question on the 2024 election ballot to revive local-option rent control. If passed, Connolly’s referendum would have overridden the 1995 law that banned rent control statewide and replaced it with the Tenant Protection Act, which included rent control, for municipalities that opted for it. That 1995 rent control ban was itself approved by a majority of voters in an election ballot.

In a bit of irony, it was disagreement among some progressive groups about how best to reinstate rent control that contributed to the failure of Connolly’s campaign to gain the funding it needed. Connolly’s efforts to collect signatures for the ballot question sputtered, and his campaign ended in November 2023.

All the while, rent control supporters crowded on Beacon Hill calling for legislative passage of multiple bills proposing local-option rent control, none of which advanced. And in July 2024, in an effort to rein in housing costs, President Joe Biden unhelpfully called on congress to enact legislation that would force corporate landlords eligible for federal tax incentives to limit tax increases to 5% or risk losing their tax breaks.

Once Again: Rent Control Is Not the Answer

As we and others have argued for years: rent control is not the answer to alleviate rising rents. It’s a deterrent because it disincentivizes investment in and construction of new housing, which is part of the answer. Demand for rental housing is much greater than supply. Therefore, supply must increase in order to ease rent increases.

Also, restrictive zoning that has expanded over the past century deters affordable housing. In particular, single-family required zoning that allows only one dwelling on a residential plot of land for entire sections of cities, proliferates American communities and crowds out opportunities for multifamily housing. Landowners who prefer a single-family home should have that right. But property owners who wish to use their land for multifamily purposes when it’s appropriate should have that option as well without having to overcome outdated zoning restrictions. Some Massachusetts cities take it further, hampering multifamily investment by mandating large single-family-only lots of an acre or more, as well as lavish frontage requirements and off-street parking.

There is some progress in the works. Governor Healey’s recent housing bond bill includes provisions allowing accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to be built by right across the state and provides funding for several measures aimed at expanding affordable housing. The MBTA Communities Act is nudging cities across the state to build multifamily housing into their local planning. Several communities and the entire state of Oregon have passed or proposed legislation eradicating single-family-only zoning.

It’s not only us at MassLandlords who are publicly decrying rent control policies. Most economists agree that rent control is bad economic policy because it doesn’t do anything to increase supply that would serve outsized demand. The popular blogger Matthew Yglesias added his voice to the issue, recently pointing out the folly of President Biden’s rent control suggestion.

This Twitter ad, highlighting inequities of rent control, worked well to attract viewers to rentcontrolhistory.com. Image: MassLandlords ad.

A Pictorial, Educational Compendium

We have repeatedly spelled out similar arguments in articles on the MassLandlords website over several years. But last year’s onslaught of regressive rent control proposals called for something deeper and more comprehensive.

Our site rentcontrolhistory.com aims not to lecture or overtly advise against rent control, rather to demonstrate and illustrate, through numerous archival photos and descriptive captions, how rent control first emerged and has evolved. We show the racist, prejudicial motives behind early attempts to restrict housing and land use to keep certain people out of certain neighborhoods; how today’s housing crisis has been in the works for more than a century; how rent control first became law; how the policy hindered affordable housing and helped those who needed it least; how a prince, a mayor and a judge, as well as long lists of doctors and lawyers, had rent-controlled apartments while low-income renters couldn’t qualify; how residents of cities without rent control subsidized those with rent control; how rental housing conditions deteriorated in cities with rent control; how landlords suffered (and even died) because of rent control; and how it was finally fixed in 1994.

We aimed to make rentcontrolhistory.com a user-friendly, accessible, attractive compendium filled with engaging, easily consumable content that helps people of all opinions form contextualized views on the issue.

Since the site’s publication, it has been viewed more than 662,000 times. And the clamor for rent control has ebbed considerably.

We are proud of rentcontrolhistory.com and its web presence. More importantly, we are encouraged that it has made a positive impact for housing providers, and that our voice is being heard on vital issues.

We will continue to promote rentcontrolhistory.com and update its pages as appropriate. When the philosopher George Santayana famously said, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” (later paraphrased by Winston Churchill, who often mistakenly receives credit for this quote), he could have been projecting our rent control situation. And when calls to reinstate rent control inevitably arise again – as we know they likely will – we will again be positioned to push back and respectfully demonstrate why it’s a terrible idea.