The debate over whether Massachusetts should lift its ban on rent control will no longer play out as part of next year’s elections after a push for a statewide ballot initiative fell short. Instead, it came to a State House hearing room on Tuesday where proponents and critics of the policy made their cases to lawmakers.
More than 100 people signed up to testify at a hearing on legislation proposing various tenant protections, including bills that would let cities and towns adopt local-level rent control policies.
Supporters told lawmakers that rent control is a policy lever they can pull now to help keep people in their homes, while it will take many years to build new homes at a large enough scale to make a dent in demand.
Jeanine Wood, a Littleton resident, said suburbs are feeling the squeeze as well as larger cities.
"We also have issues around keeping and maintaining homes for our physical therapists, for our teachers, for our firefighters," Wood said. "We need results sooner rather than later."
Groups representing landlords and the real estate industry testified against rent control measures, urging lawmakers instead to focus their efforts on housing production.
“We are in the middle of a housing crisis driven by excess demand and insufficient supply,” said Chris Lehman of the Small Property Owners Association. “The only way to solve that problem is to increase the supply by allowing the production of more housing. Rent control acts contrary to this goal by suppressing investment in both new housing and investment in the maintenance of existing housing.”
Rent control is banned statewide in Massachusetts under a law that narrowly passed at the ballot in 1994.
That means that communities like Boston and Athol — both of which had bills on the agenda Tuesday — that want to adopt their own local rent-regulation policies have to first get permission from the state Legislature. Officials in Athol want to be able to regulate rents in mobile home parks, and the Boston City Council approved Mayor Michelle Wu's plan that would bar rent increases beyond 10%.
Other bills before the Housing Committee are broader, allowing any community to opt in to local rent control if they wish.
Lawmakers in recent years have been cool toward rent control bills, letting them die quietly without votes on the House or Senate floors. But convincing the Legislature to pass a bill is now the only path forward for those who wish to revive rent control.
Last Friday evening, Rep. Mike Connolly, the organizer of a campaign to put a rent control question on the 2024 ballot, announced he was dropping that effort. He said housing advocates disagreed over whether now was the right time for a ballot question and that the campaign had gathered about 10,000 signatures from registered voters, well shy of the nearly 75,000 it would need to submit to local election officials by next week.
Connolly, who testified on his bill Tuesday, told GBH News that the next steps for rent control supporters will be “all about educating legislators and really bringing people together to understand.”
“This is a very reasonable, moderate piece of a larger puzzle, and as we were out there collecting these 10,000 signatures, we found tremendous support from the public,” he said.
Carolyn Chou, director of Homes For All Massachusetts, said she's seen the dynamic change around rent control discussions in the past few years. The Homes For All coalition convened a rally outside the State House before the hearing, where renters and housing advocates shared stories of displacement in their communities and held posters with slogans in English, Spanish and Cantonese.
"For so long, you couldn't even say 'rent control' anywhere in Massachusetts," Chou told GBH News. "But now it is a viable solution and a real conversation, so that's huge to begin with, and I think that everyone knows that something has to be done about the housing crisis, so I'm hopeful the Legislature understands that this is part of what we can do now that will immediately help stabilize communities."
Gov. Maura Healey has said she supports letting cities and towns adopt their own rent stabilization policies. She did not include rent control language in a major $4 billion housing bill she filed last month, which her administration said was focused on housing production.
