In November 2021, St. Paul, MN passed a ballot measure to implement rent control. Since then, investment in the city's housing supply has crashed. Meanwhile, neighboring Minneapolis, which did not implement rent control, has seen a dramatic increase in housing construction and a decrease in rental prices.

Please tell your legislators to oppose the return of rent control to Massachusetts and instead support growth-oriented housing policies to make housing more affordable for everyone.

As many of you know, a number of state and local policymakers in Massachusetts have been pushing to bring rent control back to our state. Some of them want a full repeal of the statewide ban on rent control that SPOA helped pass in 1994, while others want city-specific exemptions from that ban. Either way, allowing rent control anywhere in Massachusetts would have disastrous ripple effects on nearby parts of the state--even if those areas remained free of rent control themselves. This graphic provides information on the issue of local-option rent control in Massachusetts, and on SPOA’s goals more generally.