State delegation needs to support rent control along with governor’s Affordable Homes Act
Massachusetts is in the throes of a terrible housing crisis. A family trying to rent an available two-bedroom apartment in our expensive state (costing, as of February, $2,949 a month on average, according to Apartment Advisor) needs an annual income of at least $117,960. At $56.71 per hour, this is almost four times the state’s $15 minimum wage. (Here in Cambridge, which boasts some of the highest rents in Massachusetts, the average available two-bedroom unit rents for a staggering $3,592 a month, which requires an annual household income of $143,680.)
Meanwhile, waiting lists for rent-subsidized, affordable apartments are vastly oversubscribed, with applicants forced to wait at least three years – and in many towns as long as 10 years.
In response to this crisis, Gov. Maura Healey has introduced the Affordable Homes Act, which addresses the housing crisis in several useful ways, among them:
- Making it easier to use public land for housing development;
- Enabling cities and towns to establish real estate transfer fees as a means of raising funds for affordable housing development;
- Enabling cities and towns to pass inclusionary zoning ordinances by simple majority rather than the currently mandated two-thirds vote. (Inclusionary zoning bylaws are those that require developers of new housing to include a certain percentage of affordable units.)
One critically important issue the bill doesn’t deal with, though, is repealing the 30-year-old statewide ban on rent control so those decisions can be made locally. Surely cities and towns can be trusted, and should be permitted, to make their own decisions on this as they do on other local matters.
I’m sure Cambridge’s state House members and senators will support the Affordable Homes Act. Equally if not more important, I hope they’ll make a strong effort to get the ban on rent control repealed. We in Massachusetts need to be able to do everything possible to provide affordable housing and keep people from being displaced.
Nancy E. Phillips, Rice Street, Cambridge
>>Surely cities and towns can be trusted… to make their own decisions.
Cambridge made terrible decisions in the 1970s and 80s about rent control. That was one reason (among many) that the housing stock went down the tubes. Leave property rights as they are.
>>Surely cities and towns can be trusted… to make their own decisions.
I find this comment bewildering. Cities and towns have proven, without a doubt and w/ ~100 years of evidence, that they cannot be trusted to make good decisions. Cities and towns have consistently made choices that have caused this housing crisis.
I’m curious why a non-regional strategy is the way to handle a region issue? Local councils make politically motivated decisions all the time that are contrary to the public good and are often just constituent service to a vocal minority. So surely I do not agree that local governments can responsibly handle something as important as a regional housing strategy. The move for rent control … again … is very similar in approach and messaging as Brexit and will be just as positive if adopted.
Rent control is “very similar in approach and messaging to brexit”
Those certainly are words. Incredible if you have convinced yourself of that. What a truly absurd thing to say.
Anonymous peanut gallerians need not type. Rent control is poison for future housing growth and will absolutely set us back another couple of decades forcing even more bad housing decisions. Letting individual municipalities all race to the bottom is as dumb as Brexit. It is incredible however that anonymous people are allowed to chime in or worse people wish to remain anonymous and chime in. What could you possibly be so scared of?
NYC has rent control and added enough housing to add the entire population of Boston since the last census. Boston also did not see a spike in construction after rent control was removed. The idea that rent control blocks housing growth is pushed by developers like yourself who want to charge exploitative rents, but the evidence supporting that claim is incredibly thin.
Letting municipalities with affordability crises address those crises for the people who currently live there and struggle to afford to pay rent is not a race to the bottom. Letting landlords do whatever they want regardless of the consequences is.
Rent control brought Cambridge to its knees, the State wide ballot erased it, saving Cambridge. The City recovered and flourished within a couple of years and has continued to this day when rent control was banished. Learn from history people. Yes, I’m not a newbie, my family has been here since the 1880’s.
What utter nonsense. Cambridge, like Brookline and Boston (the other communities that actually had rent control) voted to keep it. The only people in Cambridge who were against rent control were the landlords who are not profiting off extortionate rents. The state did not save Cambridge it decimated its working class and sent it into the crises of affordability we are still struggling with today, while enriching a few property owners (seemingly like yourself and Barret).
*were not
They certainly are profiting off extortionate rents now.
This is why it’s Brexit-ish. Anonymous populist spouts off factoids that have answers but require me to write for the next day. However your argument further reduces to some phony identity tactic designed to discredit people who actually have the requisite experience and knowledge to discuss said topic. Have the courage of your conviction and post with your real name and I’ll take you seriously. Otherwise you’re just another dsa coward using Maoist tactics pushing ideology over people. Rent control may have a sugar high of keeping $3k/mo for a studio at 2% or less increases but the net effect on housing and construction is pretty clear and it’ll set us back decades. Further we have rules and regs that didn’t exist during rent controls last wave and I’m not sure anyone would build a residential structure with 20% inclusionary and a cap on future growth. What I do know is that we don’t have rent control now … and people still aren’t building anything. Maybe a regional 5-10% cap might be gentle enough to work but you kids aren’t really about results you’re about identity and ideology. If you changed your handle to “Clown Shoes” it would make more sense.
“factoids that have answers but require me to write for the next day”
You can admit you don’t actually have answers, it’s ok. If anything is brexit like it is the refusal to admit an obvious error (such as removing rent control or claiming it stops housing construction).
“However your argument further reduces to some phony identity tactic designed to discredit people who actually have the requisite experience and knowledge to discuss said topic”
Not identity. Class. The class of people who personally profit from unaffordable housing are not in fact impartial experts we should all trust for our own good. You are advocating for an oligarchy by appealing to technocracy. But there is no technical expertise required to be a landlord just access to capital.
“Otherwise you’re just another dsa coward using Maoist tactics pushing ideology over people.”
You don’t know what any of these words mean and speaking of discrediting people who actually have the requisite experience and knowledge to discuss said topic (aka renters).
“but the net effect on housing and construction is pretty clear and it’ll set us back decades” you can keep claiming this if you want but you have given no reason for anyone to believe you. You have provided no evidence of this claim, and there is considerable evidence contradicting it locally and globally. This is fear mongering by the profiteers of injustice who want to continue to reap those profits unimpeded.
“Further we have rules and regs that didn’t exist during rent controls last wave and I’m not sure anyone would build a residential structure with 20% inclusionary and a cap on future growth.”
That requirement came 20 years after the repeal of rent control and there is if anything more construction now than there was in the 20 years before it. Your claims do not stand up to even the most basic of scrutiny.
“What I do know is that we don’t have rent control now … and people still aren’t building anything.”
If this is the case then what’s the harm of rent control. You claim it stops building (despite evidence to the contrary) but if building isn’t happening anyway why not do it and at least make the existing housing stock more affordable? This part of your argument is simply incoherent.
“Maybe a regional 5-10% cap might be gentle enough to work but you kids aren’t really about results you’re about identity and ideology”
That’s what’s actually being proposed. You are opposing in practice the very thing you claim to support in theory. Who is the one who is only about their own identity and ideology here?
Rent control forces developers to build because if they want to increase profits they need to build more buildings instead of just jacking up rents.
@PatrickWBarrett
We’ve got a winner here.
Slaw on Friday, March 29, 2024 at 2:33 pm
Rent control forces developers to build because if they want to increase profits they need to build more buildings instead of just jacking up rents.
On Cambridge Day, we’ve seen a lot of unbelievably stupid comments with regard to housing development. However, nothing has come close to this comment. Nothing. I don’t think you have any idea of how dumb that statement was because if you did, you wouldn’t have said it.
Notice how neither of you have any actual coherent arguments just Econ 101 dogma disproven by reality a thousand times over and personal insults.
If what I said is actually so stupid you should be able to explain why but you can’t. Instead you throw out insults in place of any substance.
Slaw,
Once again, you got it backwards.
You made the statement:”Rent control forces developers to build because if they want to increase profits they need to build more buildings instead of just jacking up rents.”
And “disproven by reality a thousand times
over.”
Why don’t you provide numbers that back up those statements. Tell us what those numbers are that validates your assertion. Give us the sources that back up those numbers. You’re always good with providing sources, even if the sources are suspect, but nonetheless show us the numbers as to how how rent control forces developers to build. And, make sure you differentiate between developers and existing landlords, how they differ, and how rent control affects them in very different ways.
Again you have provided no evidence for any of your claims but I must do so as always.
“ According to a study of Cambridge by MIT economists, eliminating rent control increased the value of that city’s residential real estate by about $2 billion between 1994 and 2004, a boon for property owners”
https://web.archive.org/web/20240229070505/https://apps.bostonglobe.com/2023/10/special-projects/spotlight-boston-housing/rent-control/
This shows what I’m saying extremely clearly as landlords were able to massively increase their profits and wealth without doing anything at all. That comes at the expense of people’s lives (read the rest of the article). When you can increase your profits and wealth without doing anything why would you bother increasing density? Under this dynamic keeping density low helps you because you can simply increase rents as much as you want due to demand supply imbalance.
New development is also exempted from rent control for 15 years under these proposals meaning there is even more incentive to build in order to increase profits.
And again NYC has rent control and added the entire population of Boston in 10 years.
First, let’s get to your statement that NYC has rent control. It does, but to an insignificant extent. It only applies to buildings built before 1947 and requires continuous occupancy prior to July 1971. Only 16,400 apartments out of a total of more than 2 million apartments. So much for your statement that NYC has rent control (I grew up in a NYC rent controlled apartment).
It’s clear that you didn’t bother to read the MIT study that is referenced in the link you showed. You just picked out
a number, 2 billion (actually it was 1.8 billion, but you didn’t bother to read the study). I read the entire 34 page
document, as well as the appendices. You might learn something if you did read it.
So let’s see.
1. Only a quarter of Cambridge price appreciation came from the elimination of rent control. By the way,
BLS housing prices were 31% higher in 2004 versus 1994.
2. You said: This shows what I’m saying extremely clearly as landlords were able to massively increase
their profits and wealth without doing anything at all. Consider these things from the report and note “f”
a. Maintenance levels and hence housing services fall at controlled units since landlords choose maintenance levels facing a regulated price.
b. Hence, imposition of rent control causes inefficiently low maintenance and misallocation of residents at both controlled and non-controlled locations within a neighborhood.
c. Decontrol unwinds these effects. Prices rise due directly to the lifting of the cap, and indirectly due to improved maintenance and increased production of local amenities throughout the neighborhood.
d. Accompanying the increase in rents and the spike in resident turnover at decontrolled units, Cambridge experienced a sharp increase in residential property investments
e. The increase in prices at non-controlled locations net of the additional resource cost therefore reflects the gain in social surplus stemming from positive external effects of decontrol–that is, spillovers.
f. Finally, as demonstrated by Sims (2007), the fraction of units that were made available as rental properties increased by nearly six percentage points after rent control removal, reflecting the discouragement effect of the rent control law on the incentive to supply rental housing.
First, let’s get to your statement that NYC has rent control. It does, but to an insignificant extent. It only applies to buildings built before 1947 and requires continuous occupancy prior to July 1971. Only 16,400 apartments out of a total of more than 2 million apartments. So much for your statement that NYC has rent control (I grew up in a NYC rent controlled apartment).
It’s clear that you didn’t bother to read the MIT study that is referenced in the link you showed. You just picked out
a number, 2 billion (actually it was 1.8 billion, but you didn’t bother to read the study). I read the entire 34 page
document, as well as the appendices. You might learn something if you did read it.
So let’s see.
1. Only a quarter of Cambridge price appreciation came from the elimination of rent control. By the way,
BLS housing prices were 31% higher in 2004 versus 1994.
2. You said: This shows what I’m saying extremely clearly as landlords were able to massively increase
their profits and wealth without doing anything at all. Consider these things from the report and note “f”
a. Maintenance levels and hence housing services fall at controlled units since landlords choose maintenance levels facing a regulated price.
b. Hence, imposition of rent control causes inefficiently low maintenance and misallocation of residents at both controlled and non-controlled locations within a neighborhood.
c. Decontrol unwinds these effects. Prices rise due directly to the lifting of the cap, and indirectly due to improved maintenance and increased production of local amenities throughout the neighborhood.
d. Accompanying the increase in rents and the spike in resident turnover at decontrolled units, Cambridge experienced a sharp increase in residential property investments
e. The increase in prices at non-controlled locations net of the additional resource cost therefore reflects the gain in social surplus stemming from positive external effects of decontrol–that is, spillovers.
f. Finally, as demonstrated by Sims (2007), the fraction of units that were made available as rental properties increased by nearly six percentage points after rent control removal, reflecting the discouragement effect of the rent control law on the incentive to supply rental housing.
Don’t know why it was repeated. I only submitted it once.