Earlier this week, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu endorsed a restrictive version of rent control that supporters are pushing for a November statewide ballot referendum in Massachusetts. “There is so much urgency and pressure from housing costs on our residents,” she said. “Something’s got to give.”
“Something” must indeed be done about the housing crisis in Boston and its metro area. But rent control is a bad solution, particularly as it’s being proposed. While apparently popular among voters, it is likely to worsen the housing shortage, not ameliorate it. Wu and allies should push to strengthen inadequate zoning-reform efforts instead.
Massachusetts’s legislature prohibited rent control statewide in 1994. This year’s ballot proposal would undo that law, instead capping annual rent increases statewide at the lesser of 5 percent or the rate of price inflation. Owner-occupied small homes with up to four units would be exempt, as would new housing for the first decade of its existence…