Amid Boston Area Housing Crisis, Rent Control Gains Momentum, But Troubled Cambridge Legacy Poses Obstacles
By Jack R. Trapanick, Crimson Staff WriterThough flanked by three cities that have put forth rent control measures in the past year, Cambridge has seen no comparable discussion of the policy so far.
Rent control policies — which regulate the cost of rent and its rate of increase — dramatically shaped the Boston area’s urban landscape in the 1970s until they were banned by a ballot initiative in 1994. Now, though rent control’s legacy remains heavily contested, cities are revisiting the policy as a means to combat the region’s housing crisis amid sky-high rents and rising evictions.
The 1994 ballot initiative forced all future efforts to implement rent control to receive approval from the state legislature, meaning that cities seeking to reintroduce the policy must submit home rule petitions and gain authorization from Beacon Hill.
Previous efforts to bring back rent control since the ballot initiative have floundered, failing to advance even past the municipal level. In 2003, The Crimson reported that a proposition to bring rent control back was “handily defeated” by Cambridge voters, with just 40 percent voting in favor. Similar attempts at shoring up tenant protections have repeatedly failed in the Boston area.
Since February, Boston, Brookline, and Somerville — representing nearly 1 in 11 Massachusetts residents — have sought to reimplement rent control on the heels of a successful 2021 Boston mayoral campaign by Michelle Wu ’07 that heavily promoted the policy.
Cambridge, however, is a notable exception to this trend, despite a longstanding reputation for progressive policymaking. The issue did not feature prominently in the 2023 Cambridge City Council election and city leaders have thus far given no public indications they plan to put it on the agenda.
The Crimson asked 10 local lawmakers and policy experts whether a rent control initiative was on the horizon in Cambridge and what the state of advocacy around the issue looks like.
An Experiment with Mixed Results
For 25 years, Cambridge had a strict series of measures in place that became famous, or infamous, for how thoroughly they confined landlords’ actions — memories of which now give city leaders significant reservations over anything resembling the old order.
Each year, a rent control board determined how much the rent for controlled properties would increase based on inflation. Any other attempt by a landlord to increase the rent, — for example, on the basis of a significant repair made to the property — had to be presented to the board.
“Landlords found out that they weren’t even getting their out-of-pocket expenses paid for by rent increases,” said Ralph “Skip” Schloming, the former executive director of the Small Property Owners Association. “So you don’t do larger repairs.”
“The housing over time shows it,” he added.
The result, opponents argue, was a cumulative decline in the quality of the housing stock over the years — though some advocates and housing experts dispute that idea.
Steve Meacham, an organizing coordinator at City Life/Vida Urbana, a local organization that focuses on activism around evictions and affordable housing, said that the housing was not necessarily sub-par — it just wasn’t high quality.
“The ultimate goal is not the most beautiful housing stock, the ultimate goal is to benefit the people who live in housing,” Meacham said.
He said that the sharp rise in property value documented following the fall of rent control in Cambridge came largely from speculation and “gold plating” fix-ups, or turning the stock into more upscale housing.
“Fantastic fortunes were created by the end of rent control,” he said. The rise in property values “touted as a benefit of getting rid of rent control, is a bad thing, not a good thing if you’re trying to protect people's homes.”
“Studies of the impact of rent control after it was lifted found, in fact, that there was an increase in the quality of housing afterwards from the flow of investment,” said Chris E. Herbert, managing director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies.
“It wasn’t from the housing being substandard to being standard — it was from the housing being decent, but not expensive, to being invested in to become expensive,” he added.
Stories of privileged residents allegedly taking advantage of the system were highly publicized as well, including Cambridge Mayor Kenneth E. Reeves ’72 and several Harvard professors living in rent-controlled units.
Four years after rent control’s defeat, the Washington Post published an article on how the reopening of the rental market had transformed the city, with descriptions that illustrated how corporate and wealthy much of Cambridge was becoming — an almost prescient picture of Harvard Square today.
Thousands of lower-income residents left the city, the Post reported, while others who remained faced rising rent burden and a rapidly changing environment.
Independent pubs and diners were replaced with Starbucks and Au Bon Pain franchises. Rents doubled in just four years, while lifelong residents of the city griped over the influx of “yuppies” who had recentered local politics onto “the problems of more affluent citizens: traffic, crime and dog waste,” according to The Post.
A 1999 article from The Crimson noted that much of Harvard Square’s “trendy, quirky” character had migrated to the other squares like Central, the new home to the city’s more “experimental” businesses.
“When you look out the window, you see TV personalities walking by as opposed to kids with mohawks,” local business owner Kathleen M. White told The Crimson at the time.
A New Beginning for Rent Control
Local support for rent control policies has increased markedly since the 2000s, in part due to the Boston area’s increasingly dire housing crunch. While the state legislature has so far avoided votes on cities’ home rule petitions, debate on the policy has returned with new momentum.
A February poll by Northwind Strategies conducted after Wu introduced a rent control measure — which was a key feature in her 2021 election campaign platform — found that nearly two-thirds of Massachusetts voters supported the policy.
In Boston, that support has translated to legislative action — the Boston City Council overwhelmingly approved Wu’s measure in March on an 11-2 vote.
“Rent stabilization, and ensuring our communities can stay and afford to live in our city, has to be part of our growth in Boston,” Wu told the Boston Globe in January.
Proponents of the policy had adopted the new term — “rent stabilization” instead of “rent control” in part to overcome the negative connotations of the rent control policies of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.
“Calling it rent control is not the best strategy. It conjures up these arguments in these debates from the past,” Cambridge City Councilor Marc C. McGovern said, citing a host of problems rent control previously brought about, including a depressed housing market, lower quality housing stock, and exploitation of the system by well-off residents.
Boston’s policy would cap annual rent increases at 10 percent at most, allowing landlords to raise rents slightly above the rate of inflation. Several categories of housing units would be exempt, such as units over the last 15 years and owner-occupied small properties.
With a consensus that the new policy is less stringent than those of the past, the Boston proposal has served as a model for its neighbors — though opponents charge it with hidden dangers.
“That gets the camel’s nose in the tent,” Schloming said. “It gets your foot into the door for control, and then it can get worse as time goes on because you’ve got this tenant voter base.”
Efforts to revisit rent control policies have not been confined to Boston.
Representative Mike L. Connolly, whose district encompasses parts of Cambridge and Somerville, has led the fight in the State House to unban the policy and also led an effort to place a repeal of the ban on the 2024 ballot.
Brookline’s Town Meeting narrowly voted in November to approve a similar proposal 112-107. The Somerville City Council voted in March to draft a rent control proposal and is set to vote on final approval Thursday.
Massachusetts Governor Maura T. Healey ’92, too, has said she supports the right of municipalities to adopt rent control. According to the Massachusetts state constitution, a home rule petition must be approved by both the legislature and the governor.
As the cost of living continues to climb in the Boston area, desperation to preserve affordability may be slowly opening the door to a new era of rent control across Massachusetts.
Housing on the Agenda
Though rent control has not been on the Cambridge City Council’s agenda, much of its work this session has been defined by the issue of affordable housing — a topic that drove much of the discourse around last month’s municipal elections.
Nearly all of the current councilors and those who campaigned for a seat support steps to mitigate and address what they view as the causes of the crisis, but their solutions vary and progress for renters on the ground is still materializing.
Experts point to a decades-long failure to construct housing on pace with population growth in the United States as a key factor in the nation’s urban housing crisis. In the Boston area, the shortage has been especially severe — Cambridge’s affordable housing waitlist stretches thousands of names in length, while some lists in Boston have wait times of more than a decade.
Carl Nagy-Koechlin, executive director of Cambridge affordable housing developer Just A Start, said in an interview last month that a crucial component of the issue is the city’s desirability. Boasting world-class universities, a thriving biotech industry, and regularly topping lists of walkability and quality of life, the city’s amenities create an overwhelming demand for housing.
Nagy-Koechlin said the city’s attractiveness is “working against” its attempts to make itself more affordable. High demand for housing in the area means landlords can fetch steeper prices for units on the market.
“What’s working in our favor is everyone seems to get that and want to do something about it,” he said.
To cope with demand, local governments like Cambridge’s are adopting policies to increase housing supply over the long term — given the time-consuming process of bringing new units to market — and prevent soaring rents from displacing residents in the meantime.
Cambridge has sought in recent years to facilitate more construction and development by relaxing restrictions on the development of affordable housing — though these efforts have not come without some resident backlash.
The 100%-Affordable Housing Zoning Overlay — first passed in 2020 and then controversially amended in 2023 — has consistently been among the most contentious policies in the city, with critics spilling gallons of ink in local publications to condemn what they described as attacks on the “character of the city.”
The 2023 municipal elections brought out a slew of candidates who sought to rein in some of the city’s most expansive efforts to produce affordable housing at a faster clip — though affordable housing advocacy groups like A Better Cambridge pushed the city to redouble its efforts on the issue.
The Council also voted in October 2022 to ax all mandatory parking minimums from the city’s zoning code and charge commercial real estate developers to support the city’s affordable housing fund.
While hundreds of units have been approved under the new policies, the results are not yet a reality for renters on the market. None of the developments approved under the AHO have yet produced new housing stock for the city.
The AHO, which streamlined the approval process for developments composed entirely of affordable units, was passed in 2020 but had yet to see any units actually completed as of October this year.
Overall, just 39 units of housing have been added to the city’s supply in 2023.
Despite voting 8-1 in March to support a state bill repealing the prohibition on rent control — which was largely a question of self-determination, instead of endorsing the policy — the city has not taken direct action to follow suit with its neighbors.
Where The City’s Leaders Stand
Though the city has not put forth a home rule petition, nearly all Cambridge councilors told The Crimson they were open to rent stabilization policies. A slim majority of five councilors said they supported the idea in principle.
Councilor Patricia M. “Patty” Nolan ’80 did not respond to a request to comment while Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui declined to do so.
McGovern, Burhan Azeem, E. Denise Simmons, Jivan G. Sobrinho-Wheeler, and Ayesha M. Wilson all said they supported the idea of rent stabilization, though several offered significant caveats. Nolan has previously told the Cambridge Day that she is open to supporting rent stabilization.
The interviews and statements from seven of the city’s nine incoming councilors showed reservations over the viability, divisiveness, and potential market harms — factors preventing the policy from becoming a priority for any one leader, much less the Council as a whole.
McGovern, who campaigned on his support for affordability measures such as amendments to the city’s 100%-Affordable Housing Zoning Overlay stressed his opposition to rent control as previously implemented in Cambridge through the 1990s, adding that he would be reluctant to proceed without guarantees about its viability.
“I would prefer to find out from the legislature whether we’re gonna be allowed to do this or not before I put the community through what's going to inevitably be a divisive, gut-wrenching, difficult conversation,” McGovern said.
Connolly, the state representative, said in an interview that he encourages Cambridge to pass a home rule petition, stating that it would help “build the political support” and momentum for state legislative approval.
Azeem, who supports rent control, said he expected a majority of residents to back the policy as well. But Azeem also echoed concerns over feasibility given inaction so far from the legislature.
“Those home rule petitions don’t really have any legs, they’re not going to pass,” he said of the petitions from Boston, Brookline, and Somerville.
“I would bet $100,000 on that,” he added. “The Massachusetts State House passes the least number of legislation of any state house in the country, and then on top of that, they hardly ever pass any home rules.”
Azeem said he is hopeful for an anticipated effort to place allowing rent stabilization on the 2026 ballot in Massachusetts.
“If you want it to happen, you have to go through a ballot initiative,” Azeem said.
Meanwhile, Wilson — who will join the council in January after serving on the Cambridge School Committee — cautioned that she had hesitations despite the promise of the policy.
“In talking to a lot of our older residents, neighbors, that really seemed like a luxurious time for folks,” she said of Cambridge’s previous era of rent control. “People were able to actually live here, raise a family here because the rent was affordable.”
But Wilson added that “with everything comes impact versus intent”
“I want to make sure I’m being well informed as to the implication of moving a policy forward,” Wilson said.
Of the remaining councilors, Joan F. Pickett did not commit to a position on rent control and Paul F. Toner said he was against it.
“I’m going to be really cautious about it just because I know what happened in Cambridge the last time,” Pickett, who is also joining the council in January, said.
Pickett, who also has expressed opposition to the AHO amendments, referenced concerns about the potential for rent control to undermine the quality of housing or depress the rental market as landlords convert rentals into condominiums.
In an emailed statement, Simmons wrote that the urgency of the housing crisis meant that all options must be on the table.
“No tools should be considered ‘off limits’ when it comes to exploring how to tackle our affordability crisis,” Simmons wrote.
Correction: December 14, 2023
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that triple-deckers are exempt from a new Boston policy that will cap annual rent increases at 10 percent for several housing units. In fact, triple-deckers are not exempt from the policy.
—Staff writer Jack R. Trapanick can be reached at jack.trapanick@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @jackrtrapanick.