Ending rent control:
Diversity goes up, not down!

Those who moved out were the rich whites.
     They said it over and over again. There would be a great exodus. Ending rent control would force poorer tenants out of their homes — even out of the city — in the face of rising rents. That’s what they predicted.
     So what do they do when it doesn’t happen? What do they do when a scientific study, commissioned by the tenant-sympathetic city of Cambridge, finds that the turnover rate in apartments since rent control’s end three years ago has been perfectly, perfectly normal, no blip, bump, spurt, jump or any sign at all of tenants moving out faster?
     They don’t announce it. They don’t say their prediction failed. They keep saying “housing crisis”. And they just report the turnover rate (no one knows what’s normal) and say it is consistent with other data.
     In this way, officials and leaders in Cambridge have carefully avoided every implication of their very own study.
     And now the final story can be told: Ending rent control in Massachusetts did not throw people out of their homes or lead to crushing rent burdens.
     In fact, two and a half years after decontrol, the survey depicts a surprising degree of rental “normalcy” in Cambridge (the study’s focus) and more economic and racial diversity in the city — not less. No one is telling the facts, so here are key findings from the study.

• No increased turnover. Tenants moved out of their newly decontrolled apartments at exactly the same rate (15% a year) as they moved out while under rent control. That turnover rate is also in line with typical tenant turnover across the state. Almost two-thirds (62%) of rent-controlled tenants are still living in their old apartments.
• No “skyrocketing” rents. Actual rent increases did not, on average, create abnormally heavy rent burdens for the tenants affected by decontrol. In fact, quite the opposite, former rent-controlled tenants ended up with normal-to-light rent burdens.
• The rich moved out.The tenants that moved out of their newly decontrolled units had an average annual income of almost $51,000, making them by far the richest of all tenant groups. They earned almost $10,000 a year more than the next-highest-income tenant group. They were also more likely to be white and to have advanced graduate degrees. All in all, the tenants who moved out were a select, “dominant white culture” group, leaving when the system no longer benefited them.
• The less-well-off stayed. In sharp contrast to those that moved out, the tenants who stayed in their decontrolled units were the lowest in income of all tenant groups ö earning $15,000 a year less than the high-income tenants who moved out. Many of these tenants who stayed (53% of them) were single-person households, however, so they are not as poor as they sound. And here’s the real test: after paying their new, freely set rent increases, the tenants who stayed paid the same percentage of income for rent as any other tenant group. They had a normal rent burden on average, and were least likely to have cases of excessively heavy rent burdens. Landlords did not “gouge” them even though they now had to chance.