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THE NATIONAL FIGHT FOR RENT CONTROL  
[[link removed]]


 

Oksana Mironova
February 18, 2024
Protean [[link removed]]

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_ Rent control is back from the dead with a vengeance, with serious
organizing campaigns underway in at least 15 states. _

Protesters at a Rent Guidelines Board hearing, Police Plaza
Auditorium June 25, 1984, Becket Logan

 

In April 2015, the _Pacific Standard_ (RIP to yet another quality
outlet shuttered) published a defense of rent control
[[link removed]]—with an
opening salvo declaring it dead. New York tenant organizers would go
on to win small, highly technical improvements
[[link removed]] to
their rent regulation system a little later that year, but in the
broad strokes, the _Standard’s_ appraisal at the time wasn’t
wrong. Localized systems in New York, California, and New Jersey were
riddled with pro-landlord loopholes, while 31 states had instituted
outright rent control bans, most at the behest of a shadowy neo-con
organization. Diego Morales, an organizer with the Lift the Ban
Coalition, remembered rent control as a “taboo” topic inside the
halls of the Illinois Capitol, unmentionable because of how
resoundingly hated it was by economists and policy experts.

Just eight years later, rent control is back from the dead with a
vengeance, with serious organizing campaigns underway in at least 15
states. There are campaigns to strengthen and expand existing rent
regulation statutes in coastal cities, to lift statewide pre-emption
laws in the Midwest, and to instate local control of rents in Western
and even Southern states. A lot has changed since 2015: the U.S. has
been through an aspirationally fascist presidency, a global pandemic,
and a national rebellion for racial justice. After multiple failures
in the housing system, more people are renting than ever, and those
who do rent are often in a significantly more precarious position.
Both tenant organizers and landlord lobbyists have adapted their
strategies to our current political moment, with high-profile
victories in some places (St. Paul and Oregon) matched by setbacks in
others (Minneapolis, Florida).

How did rent control come back from the dead so quickly?
 

Rent control has been around for as long as the landlord. Since
antiquity it has served as a tool for limiting land speculation,
especially during economic shocks. In Rome, beginning in 40 B.C.E., in
the wake of civil war, a debt crisis, and political turmoil, the
government instituted a temporary rent cap and a cancellation
[[link removed]] of
rent for one year. Likewise, imperial China under the Song Dynasty
began to use rent controls
[[link removed]] around
the year 1000 A.D. to curb speculation and stabilize the rental
market. Examples of temporary rent control measures can be found in
dozens of late medieval cities, especially during times of armed
conflict, pandemics, or great fires.

Rent control in its modern incarnation, argues historian Jo Guldi
[[link removed]],
can be traced back to the 1881 Land Court of Ireland; Guldi describes
it as an anti-British, anti-colonial measure to “reverse the racism
of an economy established under empire”—an empire that had stolen
Irish land and banned Catholic landownership. Unlike earlier
iterations, the Irish system was a permanent response to inequities
within the housing market, rather than a temporary response to an
economic shock. The law owed as much to economically crippling rent
strikes by tenant farmers as to the anti-colonial Irish intelligensia,
who had developed the concept of a “fair rent” system. The latter
aimed to replace an extractive real estate market with a
“quantifiable and objective” system of land valuation that took
tenant farmers’ productive use of leased land into account. To
operate, the Land Court depended on two key factors: a new class of
Irish civil servants trained to collect data in a systematic fashion,
and the public acceptance and legitimacy of a new judicial body that
could adjudicate between tenants and landlords.

Establishing an analogous fair rent system would later become a goal
shared by anti-colonial tenant farmer organizers in farther reaches of
the British empire, like India and New Zealand. Labor organizers in
industrialized English and Scottish cities had also began to agitate
for rent control at the turn of the century. But it was not until
[[link removed]] the outbreak of World
War I that England saw its first comprehensive rent control act, which
limited rent increases, provided urban tenants with good-cause
eviction protections, and regulated warehousing of vacant units.

The economic impact of World War I, paired with ongoing radical labor
organizing in the U.S., also paved the way for the first two U.S. rent
control laws. In New York, radical agitation around worsening living
conditions, including a rent strike organized by Jewish textile
workers that swelled to 10,000 strong, pushed the New York State
legislature to create a court-based rent arbitration process in 1920.
A year earlier, Washington D.C. created a new judicial body to
determine fair rents and resolve conflicts between tenants and
landlords. D.C.’s law was immediately challenged in the Supreme
Court, but it withstood the legal assault. Like the Irish Land Court,
these early U.S. rent control systems depended on the combination of
the perceived neutrality of judicial bodies and expert data analysis
to justify their intervention in the real estate market. Yet as a
result of pressure from landlords, both systems were quickly phased
out within just a few years.
 

While rent control was only applied to a limited extent in the U.S. of
the 1920s, nations across the world contended with the fall of
empires, wars, colonialism, and disease by experimenting with
rent-regulating laws. World War II changed the U.S. relationship to
rent control; the federal government taking a highly interventionist
role in the economy overall through the Office of Price Administration
(OPA). In parallel, the federal government enacted a comprehensive
rent control standard to prevent “rent profiteering,” which would
“undermine civilian morale.”

After the war, the federal government delegated the responsibility
over rent regulation to the states. The majority, with a couple of
exceptions (New York among them), chose to phase it out. The second
Red Scare was underway, and opponents of rent control were quick to
decry rent control as a key part of a communist conspiracy to
overthrow the U.S. A state representative in Tennessee testified that
an effort to continue controlling rents in 1949 “had its origin in
the minds of men who hate our free institutions. It is shrewdly
drafted and designed to give the Government power over the property of
our citizens, and thereby give it power over the lives of our
people… The act is more Russian than it is American… It is
un-American.”

After that die-off of U.S. rent control in the late-1940s, it wasn’t
until the 1970s that local tenant organizing campaigns managed, in
some areas, to resurrect it. A new wave of laws went into effect in
New York City and its suburbs, as well as 13 localities in California
[[link removed]],
five in Massachusetts, and 120 in New Jersey
[[link removed]].
Unfortunately, this moment was equally short-lived. As Rebecca Burns
wrote in _In These Times_,
[[link removed]] “real
estate interests quickly organized a powerful countermovement that
pushed through a slew of so-called preemption laws, which allow states
to overturn or prevent municipal-level progressive policy, beginning
in the 1980s.”

The anti-rent control push was part and parcel of a revanchist
political turn that championed deregulation, austerity, and carceral
solutions over measures that not only were of no benefit to
marginalized people, but also dehumanized and actively harmed them. As
the social safety net frayed, rent control became a convenient
scapegoat for declining housing conditions, increased homelessness,
and even increases in street crime.

This belief permeated deeply into American culture, helped along by
real estate dollars. For example, Burns found that the California
Association of Realtors spent $14.2 million to fight rent control in
the mid-1980s. Still, the Supreme Court affirmed its constitutionality
in 1986, and a nationwide tenant mobilization pushed back Ronald
Reagan’s attempt to cut off community development funds to states
without rent control bans.

Over time, 31 states passed rent control preemption laws, often using
a model law written by the highly influential American Legislative
Exchange Council (ALEC). Oregon effectively ended
[[link removed]] its
preemption law in 2019 with the passage of SB 608, a statewide rent
control ordinance. Five more states have de facto rent control bans.
These are Dillan’s Rule [[link removed]] states,
which require local governments to seek explicit permission from the
state legislature to perform many types of functions, including
regulating rents. In these five states, no localities have sought to
enact rent control policies, because they would immediately be
preempted by rightist state governments.

ALEC has been an enduring villain for rent control and innumerable
other campaigns. In a deep history
[[link removed]] of
the rent control ban in Illinois, Maya Dukmasova described ALEC as a
platform where “conservative causes ranging from abortion
restriction to rolling back environmental regulations to fighting
labor unions to rent control get pitched to state legislators or find
sympathetic allies among moneyed special-interest leaders.” The
sanctity of property law and fear-mongering about state overreach,
echoing earlier red-baiting rhetoric, were central to the success of
these ALEC rent control bans.

It should come as little surprise that traditionally liberal states
were not immune: Massachusetts banned rent control in 1994. And
although California and New York did not pass outright bans (despite
the best efforts of landlord lobbies), a mounting number of loopholes
were incorporated into the policies, weakening them significantly.
Some states, like Illinois and Tennessee did not pass bans until the
late 1990s. By that time, a strong association between rent control
and vaguely defined urban maladies had calcified in the minds of
policymakers. Unproven and under-researched anti-rent control policy
truisms were propped up by economics textbooks and self-appointed
policy experts
[[link removed]] alike.
 

The fallout from such major policy changes, of course, only comes into
focus after considerable time has elapsed, often outliving the careers
of the politicians that instituted them. By 2008, as the mortgage
market collapsed, the cumulative impacts of more than two decades of
Reaganite financial and housing deregulation and social safety net
cuts were finally coming to a head. The collapse created a feeding
frenzy for investors, who, in the wake of the crisis, scooped up real
estate across the U.S.—often at a deep discount, and while enjoying
the benefit of financial support from the federal government.

In New York City, they bought
[[link removed]] 100,000
low-rent units. In Atlanta
[[link removed]],
Orlando, and other sunbelt metro areas, investors scooped up
foreclosed single family homes with the help
[[link removed]] of
a federal program and turned them into rentals. In Utah and New
Hampshire, investors used federally backed mortgages to buy out
[[link removed]] manufactured
home communities. While their methods varied according to local legal
frameworks and political conditions, the new corporate landlords
instituted business models that squeezed profit out of their newly
acquired assets: milking properties by withdrawing services and rising
rents, passing costs for water and pest management on to the tenants,
and/or overleveraging and pulling out equity.
[[link removed]] More
Americans were renting then ever before—and more began to struggle
under the mounting toll of austerity.

Rising rents, stagnating wages, and the indignity of corporate
bailouts, paired with ever-deeper cuts for social services in the wake
of the mortgage crisis, laid the groundwork for a new era of left
organizing in the U.S.—one less encumbered by both New Left
factionalism and a fear of red-baiting. As organizers looked around
for day-to-day issues impacting regular people, rents almost always
rose to the top.

Controlling rents just made intuitive sense to Ritti Singh, who
organized with the City-Wide Tenant Union of Rochester, a city in
upstate New York that is not covered by the state’s rent
stabilization law. Said Singh, “Telling tenants that rents don’t
need to rise every year is really easy for door-knocking… it gets
back to basics that aren’t super wonky.”

As tenant leaders and organizers once again resurrected rent control
as a legitimate goal, the left experienced, in the words of Sumathy
Kumar, an organizer with New York’s Housing Justice for All
campaign, an “electoral moment.” Rent control became a popular
plank for city and state office candidates running with support from
organizations like Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the
Working Families Party. Left candidates gained legitimacy from
supporting issues important to tenants, while rent control gained
legitimacy as a very serious housing policy by crossing over into the
electoral realm, including a big boost from Bernie Sanders’s promise
of a national rent control system
[[link removed].].

The professional class, which has been an important validator of rent
control systems since the earliest Irish efforts in the 1880s, did
indeed register these larger social and political shifts, if only
incrementally. While deregulatory brain worms continue to muddle the
minds of many an economist, Ruth Gourevitch, who has worked as a
policy advisor in the federal government and now works with the
Climate + Community Project, saw the political moment open up policy
possibilities to see the “end user of our policy responses as
renters, not landlords.” It allowed policy people to become unmired
from the kinds of complex tax incentive schemes that have defined
housing policy since Reagan’s era.

At the same time, the slow relegitimization of rent control did not
translate into an immediate instantiation of tenant power in the
political sphere. In 2015, when Richmond and Mountain View became the
first localities in decades to opt into California’s rent control
system, landlords counter-organized. In 2018, they ended up spending
[[link removed]] nearly
$80 million to protect Costa-Hawkins
[[link removed]],
a 1995 law that severely weakened the state’s rent control system.
In 2017, efforts to lift ALEC rent control bans in Illinois and
Colorado failed. The same year, landlords also outspent tenants in
local referenda—like the one in Portland, Maine—and won. 

Still, two big state-level victories in 2019 did help shift the tide a
bit. In Oregon, a coalition [[link removed]] of
labor, housing, and racial justice groups helped pass a rent control
bill, which prohibited no-cause evictions and rent increases higher
than 7 percent above inflation. Significantly, this was the first new
statewide rent statute since World War II—a resounding victory and
precedent-setting development in the rent control fight. Later that
year, after decades of chipping away at mid-1990s anti-tenant
loopholes, Housing Justice for All, a statewide coalition
[[link removed]] in New York, strengthened and
expanded the state’s rent stabilization system.

The pandemic, in tandem with the largest
[[link removed]] mobilization
for racial justice in U.S. history, further put the housing question
into the limelight. Nowhere was this more apparent than in St. Paul,
Minnesota, where organizers collected signatures to get a rent control
referendum on the ballot during the uprisings and demonstrations over
the murder of George Floyd in neighboring Minneapolis. As they knocked
on doors and spoke with local tenants, tenant organizers often found
opportunities to point out the links between state violence and the
housing precarity experienced by Black residents of the Twin Cities.

Tram Hoang, who led the Keep St. Paul Home campaign, explained that
the coalition first built out its structure and working relationships
during an earlier campaign in 2017 that had sought to institute a less
robust set of tenant protections. When that effort succeeded, the city
council rolled it back almost immediately—because of a legal
challenge from landlords. The coalition, recognizing the apparent
spinelessness of their city council, worked to out-organize the
landlords by appealing directly to voters in a referendum. Referenda
can be a risky undertaking, since heavy spending by political
opponents can easily sway public opinion. But ultimately, in 2021, the
coalition’s deep relationships in St. Paul and its effective
organizing made it possible to push through the most comprehensive
rent control law in the U.S.

Around the same time, the local DSA chapter in Portland, Maine
launched a campaign for a slate of progressive referenda questions.
The chapter built a loose coalition of housing, homelessness, legal,
and workers-rights groups around five questions: on rent control, fair
wages, facial recognition surveillance, a local Green New Deal, and
short-term rentals. Like in St. Paul, the campaign ran concurrently
with racial justice organizing. Broadly, it was a response to a
compounding displacement crisis in the city, according to Ana Laguna
and Jack O’Brien who were active in the campaign. Despite
landlords’ 2017 success in killing the earlier rent control effort,
the cross-issue coalition was able to push through four of the five
planks of their slate. Jack O’Brien said that the local landlord
lobby received support from national realty groups and conservative
D.C. think tanks. The local landlords “clearly called someone in
Washington and got a script… it worked initially, but over five
years it become less and less effective.”
 

Today, there are three types of rent control campaigns that are
ongoing in, as of this writing,  fifteen states: state fights, local
fights, and fights to defend existing laws. On the state level, there
are a few campaigns to institute statewide rent control systems in the
handful of states that do not preempt rent control, like Rhode Island
[[link removed]].
More common are campaigns to repeal rent control bans in states across
the political spectrum. Some, like those in Georgia, New Mexico, and
North Carolina have stalled in 2023; others, like the one in Illinois,
is in the works
[[link removed]] for 2024.

In all cases, organizers have worked hard to adapt their strategies to
local conditions. In Michigan, there is what Ruth Gourevitch called
“a new Dem trifecta… proud Dem unification for the first time in
many years,” which has created the momentum for bold action.
There, The Rent is too Damn High Coalition
[[link removed]] is mobilizing for three key goals:
to repeal a rent control ban, to direct $5 billion in funds to social
housing and Housing First initiatives, and to pass a comprehensive
tenant bill of rights. In Colorado and Illinois, organizers seeking to
repeal bans have focused their messaging on local control. These
fights have not been easy, with organizers sent back to the drawing
board multiple times, learning from missteps and the examples of other
campaigns. Carmen Medrano, Executive Director of Colorado’s United
for a New Economy, a coalition member of Colorado’s campaign to
establish local control over rents, looked to the successful minimum
wage fight in the state, as well as the fight over abortion access in
Ohio. Despite the challenges, a repeal of a rent control ban somewhere
in the U.S. seems likely in the next few years. Diego Morales, an
organizer with the Lift the Ban Coalition in Illinois, said, “No one
has been able to lift one of these ALEC bans… how we win this thing
can be precedent-setting for other states.”

In addition to these state-level fights, there are dozens of local
ones. They look different depending on whether the state has an opt-in
framework, like New York does. Other factors include the absence of
pre-emption laws, like in Maryland. Local organizers work to identify
the mechanisms and organizing strategies that make the most sense
within their state’s legal and political context. In Connecticut,
which has a rent control ban, Ruth Gourevitch described the push by
the CT-DSA Housing Justice Project and the Connecticut Tenants Union
(CTTU) to revive the state’s Fair Rent Commissions, which are a
CT-specific bodies that can adjudicate tenant/landlord disputes over
rent.

Local successes in one place also create space for campaigns in
others. Tram Hoang told me that “once we won 3 percent [in St.
Paul], the number of cities that said ‘It’s been done before’
skyrocketed.” And, indeed, in a recent successful campaign to pass a
rent control law in Prince George’s County, Maryland, experts argued
that a 3 percent cap was a rent control standard
[[link removed]].

Then, there are fights to hold onto and expand existing rent control
laws, whether they are brand new or a half-century old. In the latter
case, the fights happen in the context of complex political
horse-trading over layered rent control systems that have been amended
dozens of times. After losing a fight to repeal
California’s Costa-Hawkins
[[link removed]] law
in 2018, the next year, tenant groups were nevertheless able to win a
set of tenant protections that limit rent increases and no-cause
evictions. And a referendum to repeal Costa-Hawkins is back
[[link removed]] on
the ballot in 2024.

In places with more recent rent control laws, “winning is only half
the battle,” as Jack O’Brien from Portland, Maine remarked. After
a victory, organizers have to ensure that the system built by the city
or county functions well—a major challenge, especially given that
the managing government agencies are often severely cash-strapped. Any
malfunctions will be seized upon by the landlords that continue to
organize against rent control. In St. Paul, Tram Hoang found that
landlords were keen to blame impacts on the housing market (likely
pandemic-related) on the new rent control law. After that, they flexed
their power over the city and its economy by going on what was
effectively a capital strike in 2022. This spooked the City Council,
which hastened to append a host of exemptions to the statute.

Like tenants, landlords work together to organize and adapt to
shifting economic and political terrain. As New York-based organizer
Charlie Dulik wrote in _The Baffler _last October,
[[link removed]] central to
landlords’ counter-organizing is “the figure of the mom-and-pop
landlord—a decades-old archetype honed into a full-fledged victim in
the era of identity politics.” In New York, this fusion—the
successful ideological weaponization of their anodyne image, paired
with the more traditional approach of buying off state and local
pols—has empowered the landlord lobby to block the passage of a
statewide no-cause eviction ban for four years. It should also be
noted that that a no-cause eviction ban is much less robust than the
rent stabilization system that the state already has in place—and
even that was vehemently opposed.

Denouncing rent control has also been incorporated into right-wing
ideology, with its innumerable cultural grievances that ultimately
serve the concerns of capital. This is true of Republican-controlled
states as well. In the past two years, Montana, Ohio, and Florida have
instituted new rent control bans
[[link removed]],
adopting well-worn red-baiting language for the contemporary moment
and presenting their campaign as a principled defense of property
rights. Florida’s ban is especially disheartening, because it
negates the results of a successful pro-rent control referendum in
Orange County (and the first in the South), won by a coalition of
labor and social justice groups in 2022.

Landlord counter-organizing is troublesome enough—but in 2024, the
upsurge in tenant organizing across the U.S. would ultimately
encounter an existential threat: the Supreme Court. While a broad
challenge to New York’s rent stabilization system was tossed out in
October 2023 , two more challenges that undercut portions of the
law—including the ability to regulate rents of unoccupied units
(known as vacancy control), just-cause eviction protections, and the
limited ability to add family members to a lease—were up for
judicial review. An unfavorable ruling would have made the
implementation of newly won statutes more difficult and raise serious
questions about the viability of future campaigns. But on February
20th, the Supreme Court rejected
[[link removed]] the
two cases from New York City’s organized landlord lobby that
challenged the constitutionality of certain aspects of the state’s
rent regulation system. Landlords cried to the sounds of a tiny
violins and vowed
[[link removed]] to
keep fighting.

In a 1960 treatise that polemicized against rent control, Friedrich
von Hayek argued that its biggest impact was not economic but
psychological, muddling the “Western mind” by encouraging tenant
dependency on a state authority, while undermining “respect for
property and the law.” As a representative of the Property Owners
Association in Tennessee put it in 1947, rent control “encourages
the spendthrift spirit among tenants and destroys individual
initiative.”

The whole swath of anti-rent control arguments deployed by U.S.
landlords essentially boil down to a common underlying logic: the
logic of enforcing and protecting the racial-capitalist functions of
U.S. property rights
[[link removed]] and
rejecting tenants as a class—as capable and deserving participants
in U.S. political and social systems. Over the past few years, tenant
organizers have put up a fight against this logic, though it remains
encoded in the fundamental structure of the U.S. political system.
With ultra-conservative courts and a vast lobbying budget, landlords
remain in a strong position. It seems clear that rent control policy
in the United States, for the foreseeable future, at least, is
destined to carry on with its perpetual cycle of death and
resurrection.♦

_OKSANA MIRONOVA writes about housing and cities. Read more of her
work at oksana.nyc [[link removed]]_

_The author would like to thank Ruth Gourevitch, Tram Hoang, Sumathy
Kumar, Ana Laguna, Diego Morales, Dr. Alina Schnake-Mahl, Jack
O’Brien, and Ritti Singh for their time and insights._

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* Housing
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* ALEC
[[link removed]]
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