The Whole Commonwealth Is Underwater

We need rent control on the ballot, no matter what the cranks say

The following is a piece written by my Worcester Sucks Election Squad co-organizer Gillian Ganesan. Next election squad is tentatively scheduled for Oct 16, 7 p.m., Steel and Wire. more on that soon.

Please consider paying me so I can pay contributors like Gillian! —Bill

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Taken from the volunteer form for the rent control ballot q campaign, which you should fill out and get involved

On next year’s ballot, if all goes well, we may be called upon to make a decision about rent control. Massachusetts has a fraught history with the policy, including at the ballot initiative level, and I wanted to pull together a little state political history as we launch into the first phase of what will undoubtedly be a dramatic clash between the people and Big Real Estate.

The first thing to know about rent control in Massachusetts is that it is functionally banned at the moment. In the mid-90s the Massachusetts Rent Control Prohibition Act passed via statewide ballot initiative by a pretty narrow margin. The law does exactly what the name says—it prevents local control over rents. The only exception to that would be affected property owners opting into a proposed rent control law or local ordinance. As you may have guessed this never happens.

Technically the legislature could enact a statewide policy but they almost certainly won’t, at least not anytime soon, though not for lack of trying. In the past few years, because of the steep incline in rent, there have been multiple failed attempts to pass rent control. For instance, just in 2024, the legislature passed a housing-specific bond authorization bill that conspicuously left out any stabilization on existing rents, or landlords’ ability to hike rent prices year to year. If there was any question about who might be to blame for that, look no further: after the 2023-2024 legislative session ended, the Massachusetts Association of Realtors publicly gloated that they had “successfully blocked” rent control’s inclusion in the bond bill. Legislators tried again in the 2024-2025 session, this time with a standalone bill, and it failed again, probably because of the same interest groups. Advocates warned that if it did they would take rent control to the ballot, and folks… have you heard the good news?

On September 3rd (a day-early birthday present to me, I think), Attorney General Andrea Campbell certified an initiative petition brought by the coalition Homes For All Massachusetts. If passed on the 2026 mid-term ballot, the new law would bypass the legislature on rent control and enact it statewide. Rent increases would be tied to the Consumer Price Index’s estimated cost of living, and would never exceed more than 5 percent of the previous year’s rent even for new tenants. So, if you pay $2,000 a month, your landlord could not raise your rent by more than $100 a month in your next lease term; if you move out, they can’t fuck over the next person who signs a lease, or gentrify the neighborhood as easily. You can see the summary and full text here.

This certification does not mean that the question will be on the ballot, however. In Massachusetts, an initiative petition needs almost 75,000 signatures by mid-November—two months from now—in order to be considered by the legislature, which is given the opportunity to pass the petition as-is, propose a substitute, or do nothing. If, after consideration, the legislature does not pass the initiative as written (they won’t), the initiative effort needs approximately another 12,500 signatures before mid-June to get onto the ballot. On most signature collection efforts like this one, it’s to be expected that a good chunk of signatures will be thrown out, so they will need to build in a buffer. This means that the coalition will likely need to gather at least 100,000 signatures to get on the 2026 ballot.

The rental market is increasingly captured by speculative investment. In many places, 20-30 percent of residential sales are made to investors, and in some communities that number jumps to more than 50 percent. Almost one in ten apartment units in Massachusetts is owned by private equity. I got a chance to ask Jonathan Morales at Homes For All a few questions about the ballot initiative. He breaks it down really well:

“Because Massachusetts has no limit on how much rents can be increased each year, profit-seeking corporate real estate investors are increasingly buying homes and hiking rents astronomically, raising the price of housing for everyone else.”

But Gillian, you might say, the reason we don’t have rent control now is because of a ballot initiative that was voted in by a narrow majority. Why would it be any different this time?

The difference is that now, no matter where you live in Massachusetts, cost of living has become unmanageable. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies has determined the entire state of Massachusetts to be cost-burdened using 2023 data, meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their monthly paycheck on rent. Around a quarter of renters statewide are designated as “severely cost-burdened,” meaning they spend more than 50 percent of their income on rent. It’s not just a Boston metro area problem anymore; the whole commonwealth is underwater.

The other thing is that rent control does work. Study after study has found that it lowers rents and increases rental market stability; basically, people don’t get priced out of their own neighborhoods as easily. When local control over rent was banned in Massachusetts, all of the places that had it at the time voted to keep it. The rest of the state, which did not have rent control, pulled the rug out from under them.

But this time the conditions are different. From Cape Cod to Pittsfield, we’re all getting screwed.

Ballot initiatives are an enormous undertaking, requiring massive amounts of funding and organizing capacity, and so they usually need the support of a broad coalition. Politically, rent control is kind of perfect for it. Outside of labor, housing is the issue that touches the widest swath of the general population; everyone is in the housing ‘base’ so to speak. I’ve personally rented in Somerville, Boston, and Worcester over the past 10 years; no matter where I go I get gouged, and my friends all over the state experience the same. Everyone either experiences the consequences of a landlord-controlled housing market, or we know other people who do.

Unwilling legislatures can disappear something like rent control into endless committee meetings at the behest of their big donors. A ballot question can’t be so easily smothered by special interests—if it gets on the ballot we are all going to be talking about it.

Homes For All is taking the lead on this initiative effort, and I would say it’s well situated to do so. H4A is itself a coalition of housing justice organizations, and the campaign for this ballot question, Keep Massachusetts Home, includes an even broader cross-section of groups, including labor unions, community organizations, and faith-based groups from across the state. We’re still in the very early stages—I’d be willing to bet that this effort is going to grow by orders of magnitude. More than 100 groups joined an early organizing call with Homes for All, hundreds of volunteers have already signed up to collect signatures, and they only put boots on the ground this past weekend. They’re going to need a lot more though; this is about as grassroots as it gets. If you want to get involved, click here.

There’s something about the thought of rent control coming back to the ballot that I find meaningful. In 1994, rent control died on the ballot. It’s a little bit poetic. Maybe next year, like a phoenix, the policy will be reborn from its own ashes.

On the flip side, we need to prepare ourselves for a well-coordinated and highly funded opposition campaign—our friends at the Massachusetts Association of Realtors put out a distinctly pissy press release on 9/3 announcing their intent to “work with our industry partners to build a strong and diverse opposition committee.” I suspect that means we’ll be seeing some vewy scawy ads coming our way next October.

I think we can likely anticipate their narratives, because opponents of rent control have used the same talking points for decades now. Rent control as an issue is uniquely sensitive in Massachusetts, precisely because it has existed here before. Even though it currently does not, big real estate is still extremely traumatized about the whole thing, and regurgitates the same set of talking points about it over and over. Their favorite narrative/veiled threat is condominium conversion. Basically, if you rent control us, we’ll just convert all your apartments to condos and sell them off. However, this ‘market-based’ presumption, which supposes that increased condominium conversion is necessarily a direct result of rent control, relies heavily on a case of historical happenstance, and does not account for condominium conversion policies that exist now.

In the late 70’s and 80’s an economic upturn and the Baby Boomers’ coming-of-age ushered a glut of new homebuyers into the real estate market, leading to a nationwide condominium boom, including in Massachusetts. This gutted the supply of rental properties as they were converted quickly into condominiums faster than they could be replaced with new rental stock. In Mass, the condo boom overlapped with a time when rent control existed in Cambridge, Brookline, and Boston. Most opposition narratives in Massachusetts fixate on Cambridge specifically.

In 1991, the city of Cambridge released a report, titled Rent Control Reform in Cambridge: A New Agenda For Fairness. It made suggestions for improvement to a long-standing rent control system within the city. Today, opponents of rent control love to pick it apart and moan about how many problems there were not only with Cambridge’s system, but with the very idea of rent control. However, no one, not even the opponents, can say rent control didn’t work. The report directly credits rent stabilization with keeping Cambridge affordable. This would be proven correct four years later when rent control disappeared and rental prices immediately skyrocketed citywide. While condo conversion was inarguably an issue during the rent control years, it became a much bigger issue immediately after rent control disappeared. The MIT study linked above found that the condominium stock in Cambridge jumped by 32 percent after the repeal of rent control—this supposed nightmare condo hell world that big real estate is selling us actually got way worse immediately after rent control was gone.

The causal relationship seems debatable, or at least multifactored, since the condo boom was a nationwide phenomenon and not specifically limited to cities with rent control. Really, the big issue was that during the boom there weren’t enough protections for people getting their apartments condo-ified out from under them, rent control or no. Now, the conditions with regard to condo conversion policy are very different in Massachusetts than they were 40 years ago. As a direct result of the chaos during the condo boom, a 1983 law introduced protections for tenants against condominium conversion. These protections were expanded in the 90’s and again very recently in the 2024 bond bill. The original 1983 law also allows localities to introduce more strident protections municipally, which many places in Massachusetts have done. Notably though, Worcester is not one of them.

Additionally, in order for something like the condo boom to happen again, people would need to have the money to buy property. By-and-large, they don’t. According to a 2025 Harvard study, a first-time homebuyer would need an annual income of $126,700 to afford the typical cost of a home today. In Worcester, the median household income as of 2023 is $69,262. Homebuying is currently at its lowest level since the mid 90’s (which is coincidentally around the time when the condominium boom finally kicked the bucket). It’s just not realistic unless prices go down and incomes go up.

Opponents of rent control ignore the different world we live in now with regards to the economy and condo conversion policy, and happily continue to use the scary PR—in Worcester, Moe Bergman, Donna Colorio, and Candy Mero-Carlson have all directly cited condo conversion as a major concern preventing their support of rent control. They do so, conveniently, in the same 2022 Telegram article. Colorio, a landlord, even pointed to Cambridge as an example. Bergman, who is also a landlord, basically said rent control is anti-capitalist (I’m paraphrasing), which made me laugh. Kate Toomey didn’t specifically use the phrase ‘condominium conversion’ when explaining why she opposes rent control, however she vaguely referred to it as “limiting housing” which I think might be partially referencing condo conversion. In any case, that article is pretty interesting, firstly because it’s rare to see a bunch of elected officials to go on-record with their reasoning, even if it is self-serving and insincere, and secondly because in this case the opponents of rent control all sound like they are reading from the same script. If rent control goes to the ballot, I would expect more of the same.

The opposition narrative really boils down to a preventative Austerity Strawman, the same strategy that’s repeated by the Right cross-policy. Any perceived or hypothetical hiccup within a system, even one that does not interfere with functionality, is blown out of proportion and catastrophized as a way to chip away at public support, justify reductions in funding, limit bureaucratic capacity, and corrode the whole system over time until it becomes unusable and eventually abolished. The Trump administration is currently doing it, Shock Doctrine style, to our entire government. Our clown show city council has been doing it about Mill Street bike lanes for god knows how long now, and as recently as last week. Opponents of rent control use austerity propaganda in an attempt to inoculate a populace against even thinking about trying to do it again. “Rent control?! But what about condos?!” they yelp, ignoring the actual policies that exist and the economic reality we live in right now, hoping that I’ll forget that this year my friend’s landlord tried to jack up their rent by $400 a month. Girl bye.

Worcester in particular has experienced a rapid escalation. As Jonathan from Homes For All points out:

“From the Forbes article in 2024 identifying Worcester as one of the most ‘competitive’ rental markets in the country, to the surge in unhoused people and families in Worcester reported in June, corporate landlord greed is destroying our communities and displacing our neighbors.”

We all see it, and it’s gotten to the point that even our city council can’t pretend it isn’t happening—Kate Toomey conspiracy-theorizing about “the towns” sending their homeless residents to Worcester is just a desperate see-no-evil attempt to come up with some other, any other, explanation as to why more and more people are being forced to live outside on the street. It couldn’t possibly be that people can’t afford their cost of living, it must be some other completely insane thing that no one has ever witnessed happening.

Of course the public opponents of rent control in our fair city are the same villains we’re used to. It makes sense. But I want more people to think about that as we inch ever closer to the city council election. Rent control will still fall under statewide jurisdiction even if this initiative makes it past the ballot next year, but the makeup of our city council determines how much further we can go. Local tenant protections, eviction bans, stringent safety regulations, equity incentives, expanded limitations on condominium conversion—all of these fall under local control and are ways that the city council could be acting on the housing crisis in Worcester at this very moment. If rent control passes, it could go a lot further if our city elected officials would be willing to work for the public interest rather than sneer down at us and wail about bullying.

On the other hand, say our city council barely changes after November. If rent control gets enacted statewide, there’s nothing those cranks can do about it.

Gillian Ganesan (@gillianganesan) is a Worcester-based organizer, writer, and concerned citizen. Former campaign strategist at the ACLU, focused on police surveillance and the First Amendment.