The Providence city council is considering a rent control ordinance. To learn more about what that could look like, Boston Globe reporter Steph Machado traveled to Portland, Maine.
As the debate over the issue heats up, morning host Luis Hernandez spoke with Machado about the chances of rent control being adopted in Providence.
Interview highlights
On the rise of rent prices in Rhode Island
Steph Machado: After the pandemic, we consistently saw rent prices rising in Providence, and we keep landing on all these lists, right? There was one year where Providence had the highest rent growth of any city in the United States. Another year, Providence landed on a top-five list of the median income not being able to support the median rent price. So it’s not that Providence has the highest rents in the country, by any means – Boston and New York remain more expensive – but it’s that the median salaries in the city are not supporting what apartments are going for right now, and the rent is growing at a fast rate.
On the concept of rent control
Machado: It is just the idea that the government would regulate how much a landlord can raise the rent on an apartment every year, or in between tenants. The Providence City Council is going to call it “rent stabilization,” so you may have heard that term before. “Rent control” is sort of a more common term. It’s the idea that the government would tell landlords, “Here’s how much you can raise your rents each year.”
On a proposal for rent control in Providence
Machado: (The Providence city council is) working on a rent stabilization ordinance. They have not put out the language yet, and they haven’t really said a lot of details about what it would do. The number 4% has been thrown out there as a possible rent increase limit, but they could also do something that’s tied to inflation, which is what they do in Portland, (Maine), so that if inflation is really high one year, the landlords would be able to raise the rent a little bit higher to account for their own expenses.
The other thing that I’m watching for is who is going to be exempt from Providence’s ordinance because there’s no question that some apartments will be subject to rent control and some will not. One of the things that the council president, Rachel Miller, tells me is that they’re looking at exempting new construction so that developers aren’t afraid to build housing in Providence. So for a certain number of years, they’d be able to set the rent at whatever the market will bear.
On the controversy over rent control in Providence
Machado: This is going to be a big political fight, and I think this is why we haven’t seen the language yet, even though they’ve been talking about this for more than a year now. (The city council) needs to find a version of rent control – rent stabilization – that could potentially get 10 votes because that’s how many you need to override a (mayoral) veto.
(Mayor Brett Smiley) has not explicitly threatened to veto it because he has not seen the language yet, but he has signaled a lot of concern about rent control and whether it actually works and what it might do to the quality of the housing stock. So I think it’s fair to say that a veto could happen and therefore they would need a two thirds majority, which is 10 votes, to override it…
I think a key issue, and I heard this from a lot of landlords, is how much do you let them raise the rent? When the unit is vacant, what’s the enforcement going to be? Are we going to have a rent board in Providence like they have in Portland, which is hearing complaints and hearing requests from landlords to raise the rent? How much money do we have to put into this? There’s going to have to be staff hired to enforce this. Providence is in financial straits, so will the council be able to get a strong enforcement mechanism into their ordinance?
They will introduce (an ordinance) at some point, the council president said, hopefully by the end of the year. There will be hearings, and then we’ll see what happens with the mayor if there’s a negotiation to make it more favorable to him.
