LAST MONTH, Gov. Maura Healey held a signing ceremony for her administration’s housing bond bill, describing it as “the most ambitious legislation in Massachusetts history to tackle the state’s greatest challenge – housing costs.”
But if this bill is the pinnacle of our ambition on housing, Massachusetts is in big trouble.
It’s important to recognize just how enormous our housing crisis is. Since 2010, landlords have raised rent by 55 percent on average for a two-bedroom apartment in Massachusetts, making our state one of the most expensive in the nation. As a result, the majority of renters in Massachusetts pay a rent they struggle to afford, and thousands of us are facing displacement from our homes as a result. Eviction filings have exceeded pre-pandemic levels, and no-fault evictions more than doubled from 2019 to 2022.
One of us, a mental health counselor and renter in Medford, recently experienced the frightening state of our housing market when the building’s corporate landlord, the Hamilton Company, moved to evict all 34 tenants in the building. With little warning, families were expected to come up with first and last month’s rent, a security deposit, and a broker’s fee to find a new apartment: $13,600 for the average two-bedroom unit in Medford.
Now, the residents are being displaced to communities as far away as Quincy due to high rent prices, and being ripped away from their children’s schools, their doctors, and the communities they rely on.
The other, an organizer with NEU4J, routinely helps Boston tenants who are facing rent increases as high as $800 a month, as building owners seek to maximize their profits by raising the rent substantially. Every month we see tenants who are thousands of dollars behind on their rent, with very few resources available to help them get back on their feet. Often, these drastic rent increases lead to residents moving out of Boston because they simply cannot afford to remain, even when they receive the resources needed to pay off back rent.
Nothing in the housing bond bill will do anything to stop those evictions and massive rent hikes. And without significant changes to protect tenants, low-income people won’t be here in 30 years to benefit from the new affordable housing the bond bill will help build.
The bond bill has been portrayed as an unprecedented investment in housing. But while it will certainly support the construction and renovation of much-needed affordable housing, and contains some policy changes that will improve housing production on the margins, it doesn’t come anywhere close to addressing the state’s enormous housing crisis.
Although the bill carries a $5.16 billion price tag, much of that bonding capacity it authorizes will never translate to actual spending. The Healey-Driscoll administration has already released a capital expenditure plan that would spend only $2 billion in bonding for housing over the next five years.
The administration estimates that the bond bill would enable the “production, preservation, and rehabilitation” of around 65,000 housing units over the next five years. That’s just a fraction of the 200,000-plus new homes state officials say are needed merely to “accommodate growth and achieve a healthy vacancy rate.”
And much of that housing would be sold at market rates that are not affordable to the average Massachusetts resident. The National Low Income Housing Coalition estimates that Massachusetts needs more than 200,000 additional homes that are affordable to very low income households — even before considering the additional needs of the state’s middle-income families.
With that big of a hole to dig out of, the bond bill is merely a recipe for rents that continue to rise, and a housing market that continues to drive low- and middle-income people out of our communities.
It’s clear that it will take decades to build enough housing to make a real difference in our housing crisis, especially for the state’s lower-income residents. Healey and the Legislature need to get right back to work — and be willing to consider a number of more ambitious policies to address the housing crisis, from a local-option transfer fee on high-value real estate transactions and tenant-opportunity-to-purchase legislation, to inclusionary zoning and greater investments in social housing.
Most importantly, they must pass a strong rent stabilization law to protect working families and seniors during the decades it will take to make housing more affordable in Massachusetts.
Rent stabilization won’t solve all the problems in our housing market — no single policy will. But it’s an immediate lifeline that will allow local communities to protect people from drastic rent hikes while we pursue long-term reforms to create more affordable housing. No other policy provides that kind of immediate relief for tenants.
Rent stabilization legislation supported by Homes for All would allow cities and towns to stabilize rents by limiting rent increases to the rate of inflation with a cap at 5 percent. The legislation would also allow cities and towns to protect tenants by banning no-fault evictions and clarifying for tenants and landlords what qualifies as a legal reason to evict. Exemptions would be included for owner-occupied buildings with four or fewer units, as well as new construction for five years.
This is a common-sense policy to keep rents stable for families who are renting today, and for our future neighbors. Corporate landlords and their lobbyists will try to mislead people by pointing to outdated rent control policies from 50 years ago, but states and communities across the country are proving that 21st-century rent control policies are a cost-effective, flexible solution to the economic and social harm that housing instability has on everyone in our communities.
If Massachusetts is going to truly tackle our housing crisis, the housing bond bill must be just the first of many, larger steps. And rent stabilization must be part of the solution.
Darya Mangeym is a mental health counselor and renter in Medford. Rebekah Stovell is the housing justice organizer at NEU4J. Both are members of Homes for All Massachusetts, a statewide formation of grassroots housing justice groups working to halt displacement, increase community control of land, and win housing justice.
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