Op-ed by Tram Hoang, a senior associate at PolicyLink, a national research and action institute and Mark Paul, associate professor at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.
Massachusetts is losing its working families. Not just to states with warmer weather, but because of crushing rent increases. For more than half of the Commonwealth’s renters, housing has literally become unaffordable, as they now find themselves dishing out at least a third of their income to a landlord. Teachers, nurses, restaurant workers, and all the other people who make this state run are being priced out of the communities where they work and raise their families. If residents want a Massachusetts that works for everyone, then something has to change.
This year, Massachusetts has the opportunity to adopt a simple policy that can greatly improve housing affordability and promote the crucial neighborhood stability everyone cherishes: rent control.
Housing is not a commodity like milk or blue jeans. People’s relationships to their homes — their neighborhoods, their children’s schools, their community ties — are central to their lives, their happiness, and their economic security. When rents spike, it is rarely because a landlord invested in the property. It is usually because the neighborhood became more desirable — often thanks to the very tenants now being priced out. Rent control ensures that longtime residents, disproportionately working-class families, are not displaced as areas become more desirable simply because a landlord has the power to jack up the rent.
And the evidence is clear: Rent control works. When Cambridge had rent control from 1970 to 1994, stabilized tenants paid 44 percent less than their non-stabilized neighbors. In Los Angeles, the discount is roughly $3,650 per year. In New York City, it’s $6,000 — and upward of $18,000 in Manhattan. These are not small crumbs that will marginally improve people’s lives; rather, rent control can be the difference between being able to pay rent every month and losing a family home.
Last December, the Keep Massachusetts Home campaign gathered more than 124,000 signatures to place a rent control measure on the November 2026 ballot. The measure would limit annual rent increases in Massachusetts to the consumer price index with a maximum of 5 percent, exempting owner-occupied buildings with four or fewer units and new construction for the first 10 years after the units become available. State legislators have the opportunity to act on the measure during the current legislative session; if they do not, advocates can try to advance it to the ballot.
From an implementation standpoint, rent control in Massachusetts could take effect almost immediately and have tremendous reach, at essentially no cost to taxpayers. If rent control covered all state renters in the private market, more than 900,000 renter households would be stabilized.
It is also worth remembering that the fixed-rate, 30-year mortgage, which stabilizes housing costs for Massachusetts homeowners and has helped build the middle class, was not created by the free market. It was created by the federal government during the Great Depression with the introduction of the Federal Housing Administration, and expanded in the late 1940s and early 1950s by Congress, to enhance housing stability and affordability. Rent control extends protection to renters, in a logical extension of a principle this country has relied on for nearly a century.
Critics warn that rent control will scare developers away. There have been threats from the corporate real estate industry: Regulate us, and we’ll flee the state. But the evidence is clear that the industry is simply fear-mongering to protect its profits.
When Massachusetts nearly doubled the minimum wage from $8 to $15 over the last decade, Massachusetts voters heard the same story: Employers threatened to slash jobs, but those threats didn’t materialize.
Time and time again, jurisdictions have passed common-sense rent control measures, and the sky has not fallen. Portland, Maine, passed the strongest rent control law in the country in 2020, with no exemption for new construction. What followed? A 176 percent increase in permitted units the next year, and record highs in 2023 and 2025. In the Bay Area, cities with rent control — containing just 5 percent of the region’s land — accounted for half of all new apartment construction between 1996 and 2005.
Massachusetts knows this firsthand. Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge all had rent control, and it was working. Their voters chose — in large numbers — to keep it. In 1994, the real estate industry, unable to overcome rent control’s popularity locally, spent lavishly to put repeal on the statewide ballot and convince the rest of the Commonwealth to override those communities’ ability to regulate their housing market and protect tenants. The industry promised a construction boom would follow. It never came. Instead the market tightened. Rents soared. Tens of thousands of families lost a protection that was working for them — not because the policy failed, but because the industry didn’t like it.
Rent control is not a silver bullet. Massachusetts also needs to generate more housing, especially truly affordable options. But building that supply will take years, likely decades. Families simply cannot wait.
Rent control is the fastest-acting tool available: It would require virtually no public expenditure and would protect tenants immediately. Massachusetts should not let the same special interests that stripped rent control from Massachusetts 30 years ago dictate the terms of the debate again. The evidence supports rent control. The Commonwealth’s renters deserve it.