Holyoke Mayor Joshua Garcia and Springfield City Council member Michael Fenton appeared alongside political lobbyists and real estate investors on Wednesday to tell members of the press, and by extension the larger public, that they oppose a grassroots initiative to implement rent control across Massachusetts.
“We need thoughtful, balanced solutions, not policies that are risky for communities already working hard to rebuild,” Garcia said.
Dozens of pro-rent control demonstrators, who’d shown up unannounced to the event, stood outside holding signs with slogans like “PEOPLE OVER PROFIT” and “LANDLORDS = THE NEW CARTEL.”
With only eight months to go until Mass voters could decide to make rent control the law of the land, both sides are organizing support however they can. In addition to rallying elected officials, Housing for Massachusetts, the committee that sponsored Wednesday’s event on Race Street in Holyoke, has raised about $460,000 from five donors representing landlords and commercial real estate investors, according to their year-end filing with the Office of Campaign and Political Finance. One of those donors, MassLandlords, stated they plan on “waging a multipronged campaign against the rent control initiative on legal, legislative, political, economic and historic grounds” in its January newsletter.
Other donors to Housing for Massachusetts include the Commercial Real Estate Development Association of Massachusetts, Greater Boston Real Estate Board, Massachusetts Association of Realtors, and Nordblom Management Co. Inc.
Keep Massachusetts Home, the pro-rent control coalition, spent 2025 collecting signatures from voters to get statewide rent control on November’s ballot. In December, the state Election Division certified 88,132 signatures submitted by the group in support of a ballot question that would repeal a 1994 prohibition on rent control and regulate the rate of annual rent increases for residential units. If passed, the proposal would limit yearly rent increases to the annual increase in the consumer price index or 5%, whichever is lower. Certain properties, including owner-occupied buildings with four or fewer units, would be exempt from the rule.
“The reality is it doesn’t roll rent back, it doesn’t make it any more affordable,” Katie Talbot, the organizing director of Springfield No One Leaves and one of the demonstrators at the Holyoke event, said of the ballot initiative. “What it says is that you can’t raise rents higher than our incomes are being raised,” Talbot said.
As of February, Keep Massachusetts Home has raised $57,000 from about a dozen donors, with roughly half of that money coming from 1199 SEIU, a healthcare workers union. Community groups like Springfield No One Leaves, which also helped draft the ballot question, have contributed staff time to the campaign, as well.
Talbot criticized the landlord group — Housing for Massachusetts — for their naming choice. “It’s gross that the name of their campaign of Homes for Massachusetts is so closely related to Keep Massachusetts Home, which is the pro-rent control title.”
The state’s certification now puts the question to the state Legislature, who have until May to vote to adopt the proposal as written. If they do not, organizers will then need to submit an additional 12,400 signatures by July in order to allow voters to decide on the measure in November.
Polls have found that a majority of Massachusetts residents support the rent control proposal, and its backers say that imposing limits on how quickly landlords can increase rents is necessary in a state where someone earning the minimum wage would need to work 101 hours per week in order to comfortably afford a one-bedroom apartment.
Real estate interests seemed panicked in Holyoke on Wednesday, warning of cataclysmic consequences.
“If this rent control bill passes, projects like this one up and down the Pioneer Valley will not be possible,” Vadim Tulchinsky, an area developer, warned those gathered. “Those buildings that would otherwise become new apartments for families will instead stand empty until they are reclaimed by time or fire. And then they’ll fall down or be demolished and turn into a vacant lot, just like the one next to this building. It’s not that rents will become cheaper, there will be simply nothing left to rent.”
“Do you have an apartment that needs maintenance? A new roof? Pest control? Leaky pipes?” asked Conor Yunits, the chair of the committee. “There will be no incentive for the property owner or the manager to invest and make those upgrades.”
Springfield City Councilor Michael Fenton made similar claims. “There’s nothing in this proposal that incentivizes developers to build here, and nothing that incentivizes property owners to reinvest in the maintenance and repairs of their homes,” Fenton said.
“Slowly but surely, the political voice of Massachusetts will get drowned out by the engines of moving trucks headed to Florida and Texas,” Tulchinsky warned.
But those engines are already whirring. Massachusetts loses tens of thousands of residents each year to domestic outmigration, figures which are typically offset by international migration to the state. Though data on reasons for outmigration are scarce, Massachusetts ranks sixth in the nation for net population loss to other states, behind other expensive states like New York, California, and Hawaii, according to analysis by Commonwealth Beacon.
Holyoke’s median rent increased 55% between 2013 and 2024, according to census data, and in Springfield it increased 42% over the same period. Inflation as tracked by the Consumer Price Index rose a cumulative 34.5% over the same time period.
The language of the ballot initiative does exempt some types of rental housing from the blanket rent control it would impose, including new construction: newly built housing units would be exempt for 10 years after they are built. Housing developers say that’s not enough.
“No real estate company or individual investor makes decisions based on a 10-year timeline — even personal mortgages for property are typically 30 years,” Julianne Hester, a spokesperson for the public relations firm retained by Housing for Massachusetts, told The Shoestring via email. Gov. Maura Healey and Massachusetts Speaker of the House Ron Mariano have issued similar warnings that the ballot measure would slow new housing development in the state.
Hester said that the threat of rent control has already caused some developers to pull out of projects in Massachusetts, but declined to name which developers. She then followed up to share a profile of a real estate investor The Boston Globe published on Monday, in which the investor says he and other developers will take their business elsewhere if Boston doesn’t “roll out the red carpet” for them.
Garcia said at the press conference that he thinks the issue “is a rather complex one.” He said he doesn’t support the initiative, not because he disagrees that rents are too high — “too damn high,” he quipped — but because he fears that if landlords abandoned Massachusetts, property values would decline, which would mean less revenue for the city.
“That limits our ability to invest in public spaces, infrastructure, and our schools. We’re already operating at the limit. It’s already hard enough for communities like ours to keep up with just even the most basic services,” Garcia said.
Garcia is not the only mayor weighing in on the initiative. Boston’s mayor Michelle Wu has expressed similar concerns as Garcia, telling Boston.com last month that she wished there was a local option rather than a blanket regulation. Still, unlike Garcia, Wu said she intended to vote yes on the ballot measure.
“I’m not going to let perfect be the enemy of the good in this case when there is so much urgency and pressure from housing costs on our residents,” said Wu.
Talbot, the Springfield No One Leaves organizer, saw Garcia’s quip as part of a larger narrative.
“If you care that the rent is too damn high, then put a cap on what is able to be profited off of it,” she said.
Correction: This story has been updated to correct Michael Fenton’s role on the Springfield City Council. He is no longer the body’s president.