Given how close Election Day and Halloween are, it is no surprise that some of the candidates are resurrecting zombies. In the 1990s, Massachusetts voters put a badly needed stake through the heart of one housing’s worst policy monsters, rent control. That stake killed – at least temporarily – a monster that caused havoc nationwide.
Just like kids in horror sequels forget the lessons of the original, Worcester’s progressives have forgotten what Boston, Cambridge, and most of America already learned. Rent control is bad public policy. It leads cities to decay, and it hurts the very people it purports to help.
In a TWIW election profile, at-large candidate is Cayden Davis is listed as calling for “enacting rent stabilization,” a softer way of saying “rent control.” Mayoral hopeful Khrystian King says similarly, “We have to stop building luxury housing and instead invest in rent stabilization.”
On his website, candidate for District 2 Rob Bilotta lists as a goal “Support rent stabilization measures that prevent displacement while allowing reasonable returns.” District 1 candidate Keith Linhares calls for the same. In District 5, Etel Haxhiaj signed on to a petition for a referendum to reverse a state law banning rent control.
It is true that the rent in Worcester is “too damn high.” The city has the third worst market in the country for renters. The median cost of rent was, by one estimate, $1,097 in 2019. In 2025, that price has skyrocketed to $2,050 – nearly double. 90 percent of all apartments in the city now rent for more over $1,500.
But while King, Davis, et al. are correct in pointing to the problem, they get the cause and the solution wrong. They blame “investor purchases” and “speculative ownership” and, in the words of Bilotta, “real estate developers” and their donations. Local newsletters point to “greed.”
None of the above is the actual problem, which is as simple as it is hard to remedy: increased demand.
Worcester had 153,892 residents in 1994. Now, that number has climbed to 211,286 – an astounding 37 percent increase. Given the law of supply and demand, there is simply no way that Worcester’s rent would not have increased dramatically. Rent does not increase linearly. As renters compete for ever scarcer housing, it increases exponentially. Rent is not a proxy for “greed,” but for how scarce housing is.
One might point out that Worcester did have nearly as high a population in the 1950s without such an extreme shortage of housing. That is true, but the population then was still less, people lived in much larger family units, and a surprisingly large amount of Worcester’s housing stock was torn down in the intervening years, either due to urban renewal or general blight.
As mentioned above, there is no quick solution – as much as King, Davis, Bilotta, Haxhiaj, Linhares and others may wish. Rent control or “rent stabilization” might be quick, but it is no solution. Like all other forms of price controls, it leads not to affordability, but to shortage. Reviving it and unleashing it on Worcester would lead landlords to turn their apartments into condos or simply take them off the market. It would lead developers, no longer certain they could make a profit or even recoup their expenses, to stop building.
That is the effect rent control would have on Worcester. If the construction of new housing stops and if the current supply is reduced, a $2,050 median rent would be a fond memory. It’s possible that some people would have cheaper rent. But a larger pool of prospective tenants would, without housing in the city, forced to move. Further, studies show that landlords tend to let controlled apartments deteriorate, and that would lead to decaying neighborhoods.
Almost universally, economists consider rent control, even if under the guise of rent stabilization, bad policy. While progressives in Worcester have been sending around various studies and meta-studies, these represent a small minority of economists. And even these cherry-picked studies have important caveats – and those caveats are in line with most economists.
Much of the conversation around rent control currently seems to be based in magical thinking. For example, some of the local commentators have argued that apartments won’t be turned into condos. That only happened before, they argue, because at the height of the first round of rent control people happened to be grabbing up homes as fast as they could. But what do these progressives think is happening now? Home prices show that houses are being bought and sold in Worcester as fast as anyone can put them on the market. The very “speculative investment” they wrongly think is the main culprit for increasing rents would actually fuel the condo-ization they think wouldn’t happen.
If rent control isn’t the solution, what is? The answer is emotionally unsatisfactory, but it is true nonetheless: the solution is already being implemented. The only way to address rising costs is to address the real problem, of which increased rent is only a symptom: the housing shortage. The quickest way to increase the stock of housing is to entice developers to build in Worcester. Over the past few years, the city has increased its housing stock by thousands of units. More will be built soon, as developments are either in progress or have recently been announced.
Sections of the commentariat argue that thousands of new “luxury” apartments haven’t helped the city, because prices keep increasing. The reply is obvious. Prices are increasing because the population also keeps increasing. Construction – as much as there has been – has not kept up with it. But every unit at, say, Alta on the Row represents a unit that relieved some pressure on the cost of the rental of a three-decker.
The current situation is not ideal, but that is because the real world is itself not ideal. Policies still have to be based in reality, though. Moving the needle from “not ideal” to “good” involves enticing even more developers to come and build, so that supply satisfies demand.
Rent control, that zombie that won’t stay dead, would move the needle from “not ideal” to “worse” and then, as neighborhoods deteriorate, “bad.”
