Land use regulation is the most significant barrier to economic growth in many large US metro areas today. Zoning restrictions impede new construction as a function of direct prohibitions of many types of needed housing and of uncertainty and delays resulting from the opacity and capriciousness of the approval process. This exacerbates the already severe housing shortages in many of these cities, making them less affordable and accessible for both current and potential future residents.
SPOA supports reforming the zoning process in Boston and nearby municipalities to make it more transparent and to allow more multi-unit construction than is currently possible. Solving the area's affordability crisis in a way that benefits both tenants and landlords will ultimately require increasing the supply of housing, and zoning reform will be the most important step towards achieving this goal.
Zoning Reform
During periods of rapid cost increase, price restrictions like rent control are often suggested as a method of keeping goods and services affordable. Unfortunately, while these policies may be intuitively appealing as slogans and helpful for getting politicians elected, in reality they produce substantial negative side effects without addressing the root causes of the problems they seek to fix.
In most cities, high rates of rent increase are caused by growth in the demand of housing outstripping the growth of its supply. Housing policies that don't increase the supply of housing can help subsets of the population, but only by imposing costs on other parts of the system. In other words, they don't decrease the fundamental cost of housing; they just change who's paying for it. In the case of rent control, the lower costs enjoyed by tenants in rent-controlled units come directly at the expense of property owners, many of whom are small landlords who depend on rental income to be able to afford their mortgages. More broadly, converting market-rate units into rent-controlled units results in a smaller remaining supply of market-rate units, making those units more expensive. Rent control also suppresses long-term supply growth by deterring investment, causing market rental rates to climb even higher. All of this may benefit a subset of current renters, but at the expense of future renters and anyone who might want to move into the city in question but can't because of supply restrictions.
For these reasons, SPOA opposes rent control. Instead, we favor policies like zoning reform that increase the overall supply of housing and actually decrease the true cost of housing, benefitting both tenants and landlords.
Rent Control
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in many people, including (and perhaps especially) renters being deprived of their normal sources of income through no fault of their own. In response, governments at many levels imposed temporary eviction moratoriums as short-term protections against displacement. For over a year, these policies remained in place, with the US Supreme Court narrowly upholding the federal moratorium in June 2021 to allow it to wind down in an orderly manner before its scheduled termination at the end of July. In August, the Court struck down the federal moratorium on the grounds that it exceeded the CDC's statutory authority, but many other polities--including Boston and a few other Massachusetts municipalities--implemented their own moratoriums after the federal one expired. In November, the Boston moratorium was overturned by the Massachusetts Housing Court, but the city has continued to fight the decision by seeking a stay.
No one, including SPOA, likes evictions, but they are a necessary part of a well-functioning system. An outright ban on them warps the legal system and the economy in ways that create a number of undesirable side effects. When tenants know that they cannot legally be evicted, they may refuse to pay rent even when their income is more than sufficient to do so. They may also decline to avail themselves of COVID relief funds that have been made available to assist renters whose income has been negatively impacted by the pandemic. The moratorium represents a major infringement on the rights of property owners, and is especially harmful to small property owners for whom a single delinquent tenant can be backbreaking and who are less likely to be able to afford the kind of legal firepower necessary to challenge the policy in court. There are many better solutions to keep renters housed without targeting landlords--including, as always to make it easier to build more housing.
Eviction Moratorium
For more information on SPOA's stance on property transfer rights, please see this essay by SPOA Vice President Amir Shahsavari.