Doug Quattrochi

Advocates for rent control announced last week that they would begin signature-gathering for yet another rent control law. This time it’s a ballot initiative for 2026. We will need industry-wide coordination to fight it now.

Rent control keeps coming up because the housing crisis is real and because “rent control” sounds good. For many, home ownership is elusive or impossible for lack of supply and high prices. Housing costs are rising quickly because of underwriting losses due to climate change, interest rates, looming tariffs and tight labor markets. And as I’ve written about previously, the safety net is full of holes. So why not freeze rents, the logic goes?

Well, we’ve tried rent control in Massachusetts. It failed. When it was repealed by statewide ballot initiative in 1994, it created an economic shock for science to study.

What Made Rent Control So Bad?

Rent control is known to have reduced assessed values, tax revenue and municipal budget for the City of Cambridge by around 20 percent. The effect didn’t stop there. There was “spillover effect,” meaning non-controlled properties lost value by proximity to rent-controlled properties, which tended to be deferred-maintenance dumps.

This effect cascaded further outward statewide through state aid to municipalities. In Massachusetts, the state guarantees that if one town can’t afford to operate, others pitch in. Other towns effectively paid Cambridge through state aid to make up for the budget Cambridge lost to rent control. One community had rent control and we all suffered.

Rent control also harmed the people it was meant to help. It had an unintended, discriminatory disparate impact on the basis of race. People of color rented 12 percent of rent controlled apartments, despite being a quarter of the population. Why? Because landlords held apartments vacant longer waiting for the perfect applicant. We had and still have an unfair Black-white gap on household wealth, credit, income and other factors that weigh on a rental application.

Rent controlled apartments also went disproportionately to wealthy people: Judge Ruth Abrams, the city’s Mayor Ken Reeves and the then-prince of Denmark all qualified for or lived in rent-controlled apartments in Cambridge.

This history is all documented at RentControlHistory.com. We’ve scanned thousands of pages of minutes from Cambridge rent board meetings we hope to post someday. We also scanned the results of Boston Mayor Ray Flynn’s boarded-up property search. This will go live this fall. When it does, it will provide a compelling visual of rent control’s failures.

The Public’s on Our Side

The good news is the public, by and large, remembers this history. In 2023, a similar rent control initiative run by representative Mike Connolly gathered only 10,000 of the 75,000 signatures required. He blamed a split with the Homes For All Coalition. Now the Homes For All Coalition are doing it their way. Their bill calls for a draconian, “every town must have rent control” approach, with 5 percent caps.

Their press release makes use of what you might call “distraction pricing.” Homes for All claims rent increases will be limited to inflation, but then later on state “or 5%, whichever is lower.” I hear inflation can sometimes be very bad (anyone remember the 1970s?), but this shows rent control’s backers hope to lower rents in real dollar terms.

Based on this structure, advocates appear to expect inflation will run faster than 5 percent over the medium term. This makes rent control a recipe for disaster. Housing is not free. If we cannot keep up with operating costs, rental housing will fall into disrepair and eventually will be removed from the market.

Now is not the time to shoot ourselves in the foot, budget-wise. We have an urgent need to decarbonize millions of units of housing because of climate change. We have an urgent need to build accessory dwelling units and more rental housing to solve the housing crisis. And we have to make up for lost support: Massachusetts and our role as a driver of the U.S. knowledge economy are under attack federally.

The advocates for rent control could not be more misguided as to messaging or timing.

We’ve Put Resources Online

In my view, there is a crisis of not knowing whether an idea is true or false. We see this with vaccines, tariffs, immigration and rent control, with left- or right-wing populism pointing to this or that study.

There is a difference between peer-reviewed academic literature and a “study” someone with undisclosed motivations chucked onto the web. Homes For All only link to “studies.” With RentControlHistory.com, we were careful to give citations to peer-reviewed literature.

We can wish a thing to be true, but only the scientific process and its careful, nuanced communications can show us how complex the world really is. Rent control sounds obvious, but it has non-obvious, disastrous consequences.

Join our fight. Housing providers and affiliates are welcome. We’ve stopped rent control before. With your help we’ll stop it again.

Doug Quattrochi is executive director of MassLandlords.