Massachusetts has made significant housing policy progress over the past several years. The most promising reforms were not merely new subsidies or financing mechanisms, but changes that made it easier to build housing in the first place.
Although the Supreme Judicial Court removed the proposed statewide rent-control initiative from the November ballot because of a defect regarding religious exemption, the political campaign for rent regulation has not ended. Governor Maura Healey’s openness to allowing localities to adopt rent control still raises an important question: has Massachusetts forgotten the lesson behind its own housing reforms?
Healey and the legislature should be congratulated for continuing to make housing a priority, including by implementing statewide reforms and enforcing the MBTA Communities Act enacted under Governor Charlie Baker. Those reforms deserve recognition. More importantly, they deserve to be continued.
Consider what Massachusetts has actually done.
The MBTA Communities Act recognized that housing shortages are not merely local problems. When one community refuses to allow new housing, the consequences do not stop at the town line. They are borne by workers who commute farther, employers who struggle to attract employees and families priced out of their communities. Housing supply rightly became a state concern.
The legislature reached the same conclusion when it legalized accessory dwelling units statewide. Rather than creating another subsidy or housing program, lawmakers simply made it legal for homeowners to build an ADU that many communities previously prohibited
These reforms are promising because they don’t attempt to make housing more affordable by addressing downstream effects such as cost. They go directly to the problem of affordability by making it easier to build. The Commonwealth has increasingly recognized that local land-use decisions increase costs.
The renewed interest in rent control, however, weakens that focus on addressing the problem by trying to manage the effects.
Supporters of rent control are responding to a genuine problem. Housing costs have risen faster than incomes across much of Massachusetts, and many tenants face real hardship.
But rent-control policies address a symptom of inadequate housing supply — high prices — rather than the underlying shortage. Even if it succeeds in limiting rent increases for some existing tenants, it does not create more housing. Over time, Massachusetts would risk the same negative effects rent control has produced elsewhere: less investment, a smaller rental supply and reduced mobility. To the degree it fails to address housing costs, it can leave current and future tenants competing for an even smaller supply of rental housing.
Rent control is not just a different policy prescription, it is a different diagnosis. In one important respect, it reverses the direction of recent reforms. Where the MBTA Communities Act recognized that municipalities cannot always be relied upon to produce zoning outcomes consistent with statewide housing needs, the rent-control compromise would return more consequential authority to those same municipalities.
The policy distinction matters because it determines what leaders do next. If Massachusetts believes in its own reforms — and I think it should —the logical next step is to continue reducing unnecessary barriers to housing construction, expanding opportunities to build by right and limiting the ability of local processes to discourage housing construction.
Massachusetts should be congratulated for thinking bigger on housing and by focusing on root causes. Housing affordability starts with housing availability. It should not now undermine those successes by weakening its resolve, or reversing course altogether.
