A depleted Boston City Council voted 6-4 yesterday to accept its committee’s recommendation to reject Mayor Thomas Menino’s plan to re-introduce rent control in Boston.
According to the proposed legislation, landlords would have only been allowed to raise rents for multiple-year tenants every 12 months, but rents could also be raised after one tenant left and before the new one moved in. Low- and moderate-income renters as well as the elderly and disabled would have seen their rents increase by a maximum of five percent or the maximum increase of the Consumer Price Index, whichever was lower. The rents of other tenants could be raised by a maximum of 10 percent or twice the CPI, whichever was lower.
Maureen Feeny, Michael Flaherty, James Kelly, Stephen Murphy, Paul Scapicchio and John Tobin, in opposition to rent control, voted to accept the recommendation while Maura Hennigan, Michael Ross, Chuck Turner and Charles Yancey voted against it. Francis Roache and Rob Consalvo were not present.
Supporters and opponents of Menino’s proposed legislation packed Iannella Chamber in City Hall to listen to their councilors explain their reasons for favoring or opposing rent control. All councilors agreed the lack of affordable housing in Boston is a crucial problem, but disagreed on the best way to remedy it.
Feeny, the chair of the committee, said rent control legislation would be ineffective, since it must be approved by the state legislature, as well. The legislature has already indicated it would not pass the legislation. She also said the base rent, which would be set according to the monthly rental rate of last September, would be the highest rent in Boston, with a two-bedroom apartment renting for $1,477 a month and a three-bedroom apartment renting for $1,848 a month.
Kelly recalled the last time rent controls were imposed on Boston nearly a decade ago, saying they actually led to less housing.
‘Every fourth house was boarded up and desolate,’ he said. ‘Rent control doesn’t work in the long run or short run.’
Rent controls would have an adverse effect on the mortgage industry and discourage production in general, as well as hurt landlords, Scapicchio agreed.
‘The legislation offers predictability for the tenants, but not for the landlords,’ he said.
However, Turner said rent control would encourage construction of more apartments, which would ease the housing crunch.
‘During the last time we had rent control, we issued 25,000 building permits, twice as many as we have issued now,’ he said.
The opponents of the committee’s recommendation agreed the main reason they supported rent control legislation was that it merely represented some action being taken to deal with the lack of housing.
‘The proposal is no panacea, but it’s a start,’ Yancey said. ‘People are forced out on the street or outside the city. It’s unreasonable.’
However, Flaherty pointed out that taxes account for 54 percent of the city’s revenue, which would significantly decrease if controls were to take effect.
‘If rent control happens, we get a property tax abatement,’ he said. ‘Where are we going to get the dough?’
Councilors on both sides of the issue, though, agreed one of the largest contributors to the housing crunch was the continued influx of college students.
‘We have responsible and irresponsible landlords,’ Murphy said. ‘In Allston-Brighton, you might have a two-family house that instead of renting $800 a month to each family, they rent to college students at $400 a head.’
Backers and opponents were not overly jubilant or disappointed at the outcome of the vote, as the legislation can be proposed again in January, but instead remained committed to their respective causes.
‘I’m outraged the majority sided with the rich, but we’re going to stay focused,’ said Kathy Brown, coordinator of the Boston Tenant Coalition who attended the council meeting. ‘We’ll make the mayor resubmit [the legislation] in January.’
Ed Clancy, a landlord in Roslindale who was in the audience, said he was not sure the committee’s recommendation would be approved, but was happy with the results.
‘This would just bog down the city,’ he said. ‘They should give the $4 million they were going to spend on the bureaucracy and subsidize rent for the poor instead.’