‘The public really wants this’: Despite ballot failure, rent control is popular in Massachusetts
Like many Greater Boston residents, Michelle Harrison’s life revolves around her monthly rent payment.
She has moved from town to town in Eastern Massachusetts over the past decade in search of something affordable. And when she lost her job as an office coordinator last month, her first thought was: “How am I going to afford rent?”
Harrison, 33, had pinned her hopes for relief on rent control. As a push to cap rent increases for the first time in decades appeared to gain steam this year, she found herself picturing what life in Massachusetts might look like without the specter of the annual rent hikes that have squeezed her budget ever-tighter.
“My rent is up $1,000 from when I moved in six years ago,” said Harrison, who now shares an apartment in Norwood with two roommates. “That is not sustainable. And rent control could stop it.”
She will have to keep waiting.
The state Supreme Judicial Court last month threw out a ballot question that would have installed rent control across Massachusettsfor the first time since the 1990s, dealing a sharp blow to the hundreds of thousands of everyday renters who, like Harrison, often struggle to afford this state’s sky-high rents.
The question — which would have limited annual rent increases in most apartment buildings statewide to the pace of inflation — had gathered enough momentum to bring powerful real estate groups to the bargaining table to discuss a compromise.
Renters were the force behind it.
Many young people in this state have friends who have decamped for cheaper areas. Young people who were sold a dream of homeownership are grappling with the reality that they may end up renting forever. Rent growth has so dramatically outpaced income gains in recent decades that some 250,000 renters, nearly half of all the renters in the state, are now considered housing cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their monthly income on housing.
For all its potential unintended consequences, the rent cap represented, to many, a tangible solution in a state that has done relatively little to address housing costs.
“People have started to come around to the idea of rent control because it is an opportunity to help alleviate this cost problem that is a huge influence on their lives,” said Harrison, whose parents left the state because they could no longer afford their house. “I’ve lived in this state my entire life, but if we can’t do something about [the cost of housing], I may have to move.”
Frustrations over housing costs have been building in Massachusetts for years, but have come to a head lately as the state, and particularly Greater Boston, has climbed the ranks of the nation’s most expensive places to live.
The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Boston was $2,950 in June, according to the rental listing website Zumper, making it the third most expensive rental market in the US, trailing only New York and San Francisco.
Homeownership costs are even higher, with the median-priced single-family home in Greater Boston selling for more than $1 million in April, according to the Greater Boston Association of Realtors. Most renters are trapped.
And the cost of rent is at least partly responsible for some of the biggest economic challenges facing the state: Young people are leaving, the middle class is hollowing out, and Massachusetts’ economic competitiveness is faltering.
And then there’s just the everyday experience of people living with out-of-control rents. James Cordero, a Boston Public Schools teacher, said he frequently has students who change schools in the middle of the school year because of a big rent increase. The cost of housing, he said, “is disrupting the learning and social and emotional health of students.”
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That’s why Cordero said he supported the rent control ballot initiative.
“Families can’t afford to live in the city anymore,” said the 27-year-old, who noted he also supports reforms to speed the production of new homes. “They want to. They have community here. They have jobs. But the rent is too high. So they end up moving. Does there come a point where we decide this is no longer an acceptable outcome? Or are we content to just sit on our hands while this gets worse?”
Despite skepticism from economists and outright hostility from influential real estate developers, both the broad idea of rent control and the specific policy that would have appeared on the ballot polled favorably among everyday voters. In a November 2025 Boston Globe/Suffolk University poll, more than 62 percent of the Massachusetts voters surveyedsaid they would support a rent cap policy that would limit annual rent increases to no more than 5 percent, and residents frequently cite the cost of housing as one of their top concerns.
“The public really wants this,” said Dave Foley, president of the Service Employees International Union Local 509. “We have members whose rent and child-care costs are approaching 100 percent of their monthly income. People want something that is going to meaningfully alleviate that burden right now. They don‘t have time to wait.”
Still, the ballot question represented the first real momentum toward restoring rent control here in decades. It suggested that there may be a real constituency for reforms that would help renters, even if significant opposition remains.
Critics argue that rent control may sound appealing on paper, but in practice it’s bad economic policy. Studies have shown that rent caps can slow the construction of new housing by making it less profitable and deterring investment in existing housing, causing it to deteriorate faster — part of the messaging behind the 1994 ballot question that banned rent control here.
Fundamentally, Massachusetts’ housing problem is a result of the state having too few homes for the people who want to live here, and nearly everyone agrees that the solution is to build many more homes as quickly as possible.
Rent control would complicate that, economists say, by driving down profits and scaring away investors.
While those concerns are still relevant, some renters said, they have become less resonant as housing costs have spiraled. It doesn’t help, they said, that even without rent control, Massachusetts builds homes at one of the lowest rates in the nation.
“People understand that rent control is not a market solution,” said Griffin MacWilliams, a Plymouth renter who supports rent control. “It is difficult to take seriously the people who are telling us we can’t have rent control because we need to build, build, build. It’s been 30 years since rent control was banned and we still aren’t building.”
MacWilliams, 26, earns just under $60,000 a year as a paralegal and intake coordinator for a small disability law firm on the South Shore. He rents a one-bedroom apartment with his fiancee for $2,550 a month, which he said effectively has them living “paycheck to paycheck.”
Meanwhile, he’s been watching asrents keep rising and legislation to boost housing production stalls on Beacon Hill.
Ultimately, MacWilliams is left to consider whether he can continue to live in Plymouth, where his family has been for four generations.
“We don’t build any housing, and now we’re told we can’t have rent control,” said MacWilliams. “It feels like the people guiding the policy in this state are totally out of touch with what it’s like to actually live here.”
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