Rent Control Failed Inspection, But It’ll Be Back

Over the last few days, I've had many landlords call me and ask the same question: What do you think about the rent control initiative being removed from the 2026 ballot?

My answer has been the same every time: landlords should not treat this as a victory. They should treat it as a two-year warning.

Yes, the removal of the rent control question from the 2026 ballot is good news for landlords, property owners, brokers, and anyone who understands the Massachusetts rental market. But it is important to understand exactly what happened. Rent control was not defeated by voters. The public did not reject it. The real estate industry did not win the argument.

The question was removed because the petition had a legal defect. The proposed law would have capped annual rent increases at the lower of inflation or 5% in any 12-month period. It also would have replaced the current statewide ban on rent control in Massachusetts. But the Supreme Judicial Court did not remove the question because it ruled that rent control itself was unconstitutional. It did not remove the question because it decided rent control was bad policy. The court removed the question because of how the petition was written.

The petition included exemptions for certain properties. One exemption said the rent control law would not apply to dwelling units in facilities operated solely for educational, religious, or nonprofit purposes. The word “religious” is what caused the problem.

Under Article 48 of the Massachusetts Constitution, ballot initiatives cannot involve certain excluded subjects, including religion, religious practices, or religious institutions. Because the petition created an exemption for units operated for religious purposes, the government would have had to determine whether a property was being operated for a religious purpose in order to decide whether rent control applied.

In plain English, religion became part of the legal test. That is why the question was removed from the ballot. That distinction matters. Rent control did not lose. It failed inspection. And as every landlord knows, failed inspections can be fixed.

Supporters now know exactly what went wrong. Remove the religious language. Rewrite the exemption. Clean up the petition. Try again. This is not a daunting legal obstacle. It is a drafting problem. And drafting problems are exactly the kind of problems political campaigns can fix, especially when a court has already identified the issue for them.

That is why I am telling landlords not to get comfortable. They will fix the wording and will try again. Their next chance is the 2028 ballot. And does anyone really believe that if it makes it on the ballot that it won't get approved? Rent control is extremely easy to sell politically. Supporters get to ask voters a simple question: Should landlords be allowed to raise rent by more than 5% a year? But rent control is still the wrong answer.

Massachusetts does not simply have a rent problem. Massachusetts has a housing shortage. We do not have enough apartments. We do not build enough housing. We make it too hard, too slow, too expensive, and too risky to create more units. Then, after years of restricting supply, delaying projects, and adding costs, everyone acts shocked when rents rise.

That is like banning new restaurants and then complaining every table has a two-hour wait.

Rent control simply caps rental income while expenses continue to climb. Small landlords understand this better than anyone. The plumber does not care that rent is capped. The roofer does not care that rent is capped. The insurance company certainly does not care that rent is capped. And no city or town is going to say, “Your rental income is limited now? No problem, we will lower your property taxes.” The bills keep coming.

When expenses rise and income is capped, owners react. Some sell. Some stop improving properties. Some defer maintenance. Some convert units. Some decide Massachusetts is no longer worth the risk. When that happens, renters do not win. They get fewer options, less supply, more competition, and a tighter market.

That is the message landlords need to start making now, not in 2028 after the signatures are collected and the campaign ads are running. The only thing that stopped rent control this time was a drafting problem. Next time, that problem will be fixed, voters may actually decide, and that outcome is predictable.

So yes, landlords caught a break. But rent control did not lose. It failed inspection. Now supporters have two years to fix the paperwork.

So when landlords call me and ask what this ruling means, I am telling them the same thing: this was not the end of rent control. It was the beginning of the countdown.

2028 is closer than it sounds.