The real Boston-New York rivalry is no longer about baseball — it’s a race to see which city’s mayor can destroy the housing market faster. Zohran Mamdani made “freeze the rent” one of his central promises, and now his Beantown counterpart is one-upping him with support for statewide rent control.
On Tuesday, Mayor Michelle Wu came out in favor of a November ballot initiative that would cap rents throughout Massachusetts. The measure would be one of the strictest in the country, capping annual increases across the state at 5 percent or the rate of inflation (whichever is lower). Newly constructed housing and owner-occupied buildings with four units or fewer are exempt, at least for now.
Last year, Wu criticized the initiative as “quite restrictive” and worried that it would discourage construction. She explains her change of heart with cliché: “I’m not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
Boston’s rents are stubbornly high in part because demand for housing outpaces construction. The answer is to implement policies that make it easier to increase supply. Wu supports doing the opposite.
Even the state’s progressive governor understands. In December, Maura Healey explained that housing investors have already pulled out of Massachusetts because they’re concerned about rent control. She rightly worries about housing production stopping outright.
Artificially capping rent results in shortages. Some landlords might stop renting to residential tenants altogether. Landlords also are more likely to cut back on maintenance as costs rise. Faced with slimmer margins, developers won’t stop building. They’ll just move to other states where they can turn a profit.
The reality is that rent control is a proven economic failure, but it’s making a comeback as a political tool. Who could oppose cheaper rent?
Yet Massachusetts has already run this experiment. In 1970, the state authorized large cities to implement rent control. The number of available units predictably declined along with quality. By the mid-eighties, about 11,000 rentals had been lost to vacancy in Boston, while 6,000 people were on a waiting list for public housing. The political potency wore off as reality set in, and voters approved a 1994 ballot initiative banning the practice.
Wu, who moved to the state in 2003, says she’d rather see legislation passed and admits that a ballot initiative is more of a blunt instrument. “But,” the mayor declared, “we need to see something happen.” Something indeed will happen, and those who lived through the last rent control experiment know exactly what.
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