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Released By: Central Massachusetts & Worcester DSA Program Committee
WORCESTER – Massachusetts has some of the most rent-burdened tenants in a country where the crisis is ubiquitous. Every year in Massachusetts, thousands of working-class people are pushed onto the streets, three-quarters of which are families with children, while their landlords continue to raise rents higher and higher. This state of affairs has forced many to leave Massachusetts altogether, but the reality for those most threatened by rent gouging is that leaving their homes, jobs, and lives behind to look elsewhere simply isn’t an option. Even for those of us with a little extra in our paychecks, rent is increasingly eating away at our ability to get by. We should not be surprised that the overwhelming majority of state residents report that the cost of housing is their top concern, and that rent control enjoys considerable support.
History
Rent control has advanced and receded in Massachusetts for over 100 years as fighting tenant movements have ebbed and flowed. The story begins with a housing crisis caused by soldiers returning from the first World War, at a time when the Russian Revolution — which redistributed the great plots of feudal lords amongst those who worked the land — inspired working-class unrest and revolt across Europe and around the world. Although the Massachusetts legislature passed a ban on “unreasonable” rents in 1919, then, as now, landlords and government officials were concerned less with the letter of the law than with capitalists’ ability to maximize profits. The law was never enforced, and was taken off the books several years later.
Rent control made a comeback in Mass as an emergency measure during the Second World War, and, after being deconstructed once again in the 1950s, became the chief demand of a massive tenants’ movement in the late ‘60s. Finally, at the height of this movement, the state legislature caved, passing a law that allowed individual communities to control rent in 1970. By then, organizations like the Cambridge Tenants Organizing Committee had long been directly attacking capitalism and the institution of landlordship itself.
As the rage of tenant struggle cooled and the movement on the streets dissipated, this policy, too, only lasted a handful of years. In Boston and Cambridge, tenants successfully petitioned the state to continue to allow rent regulation on the basis of “home rule”, meaning local options. But as the Cold War ended, the Soviet enemy of American capitalism was finally destroyed, and the neoliberal consensus was cemented at home and exported worldwide more than ever, the home rule deal wouldn’t last. In the late ‘90s, a concerted effort led by landlord organizations Massachusetts Small Property Owners Association and MassLandlords began to push for the total eradication of all rent control. In the cities, they found little traction with tenants who wouldn’t be able to survive the rent spikes landlords drooled after. One landlord described with great frustration the power that tenants — the hard-working people whose paychecks he looted once a month, every month — still have today: “In Cambridge, tenants outnumber landlords by three to one. It was like three wolves and a chicken deciding what’s going to be for dinner.”
Realizing that local campaigns were a losing strategy, opponents of rent control took to a statewide question, gathering enough signatures to relitigate the issue on the ballot in 1994. Margins were incredibly slim, but ultimately, the influence of suburban property values won out. On New Year’s Day, 1995, rent control was ended in every city across the Commonwealth.
In recent years, certain organizations, particularly a coalition of nonprofit organizations in Homes for All Massachusetts, have attempted to revive lost tenant protections through a protracted, hitherto unsuccessful lobbying campaign. Some politicians have vocalized support for a local option in individual cities, with yearly rental increase caps as high as 10%, while opposing a statewide solution — more a public relations exercise than a genuine attempt to relieve rent-burdened tenants. All of these efforts, ultimately, culminated in the fiasco of this year.
The 2026 Ballot Initiative
Last year, Homes For All Massachusetts (H4A) announced that it had managed to gather enough signatures necessary to get a rent stabilization proposal on the ballot for the November 2026 election. The initiative would have limited annual rent increases for residential units to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) or 5%, whichever lower, with large carveouts and exemptions. This modest proposal was the center of a media storm driven by seething reactions of landlord organizations like Housing For Massachusetts. Politicians like Maura Healey — who publicly brands herself as a champion of affordable housing, yet openly states full-throated opposition to rent control on the basis that it would scare corporate developers — sided with their donors over a crushing supermajority of MA voters who indicated they would “definitely or probably” vote in favor of the measure in one Spring 2026 poll.
Tenants inspired by the ballot initiative, including many DSA members tirelessly committed to working-class struggle, campaigned for it intensely. Many allies understandably expressed betrayal, however, once H4A entered backroom deal-making with property investors to withdraw the question from the ballot. The compromise was a yet weaker proposal for a 10% (or 5% plus CPI, whichever lower) cap that municipalities must opt into, with a limit to the number of apartments the policy could apply to.
The scope of the original initiative’s effect was never certain, and it would have never eliminated tenants’ existing rent burden as wages stagnate and living costs skyrocket. Even so, the compromise represented an enormous step backward, and would have implemented nothing itself. State officials sat quietly on the sidelines, as if to wait for the people in charge — the landlord and business groups H4A was negotiating with — to give them their marching orders.
In the end, the Massachusetts Supreme Court struck down the initiative entirely. Ironically, it was the proposal’s exemptions for religious institutions — one of many carveouts written to blunt resistance from moneyed interests — that provided the courts with the legal basis to kill the initiative.
Central Mass & Worcester DSA’s Alternative
H4A has led with solutions they think are most likely to be accepted by the rich and powerful. This is no accident: progressive nonprofits and non-governmental organizations take up worthwhile goals, but often rely on a web of grant funding from foundations and donors that place constraints on their activity. Push the political horizon of a campaign beyond what funding sources find acceptable, and risk the collapse of the entire organization. This forms the basis of many problems, chief among them: a lack of meaningful democratic accountability to the working-class constituencies these agencies set out to help.
We propose a different approach: we believe that by leading with our most radical and class-partisan demands, the working class can best position itself to build an organized, politically conscious movement to coerce concessions through struggle. We want to build that working-class movement — a democratic one, no less, that does not sideline tenants in backroom dealings with their enemy, but welcomes them to join DSA, determine our organization’s strategy, and challenge the rigged system head-on.
Central Mass & Worcester DSA has proposed a policy question which will appear on the ballot in the sixth Worcester State House district that instructs the district’s representative to support a measure using a tax on vacant properties and wealth and inheritances over $5 million to fund a robust, union-constructed, universal social housing program that “eliminates the role of landlords,” caps rent at 10% of household income, and places housing under tenants’ democratic management.
The State House, which itself is filled with profiteers on the human need for shelter, will not consider this proposal for even a moment. But, if landlords and developers are increasingly confronted with a working-class movement that threatens their profits and their role as the dominant class in society, the reader might find that they will become far more open to the comparatively moderate rent control measures they reject now — in fact, they’ll beg the workers of the Commonwealth to take it.
This piece was written and released with the democratic approval of the Program Committee of the Central Massachusetts & Worcester DSA chapter, which organizes the working class across the central region of the Commonwealth.
The post OPINION: Where Does MA’s Movement for Affordable Housing Go From Here? appeared first on Working Mass.
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