After months collecting signatures, mobilizing and rallying, supporters of a rent control ballot question in Massachusetts suffered a decisive blow. Last week, the state’s highest court ruled the question can’t move forward due to language regarding religious exemptions.
Advocates tell WAMC, their fight for fairer rents continues nevertheless.
As the sun beat down and courthouses let out for lunch, foot traffic in Springfield’s Court Square picked up quickly early Friday afternoon.
With locals coming in and out of court as well as Springfield’s city hall, members of the housing rights group Springfield No One Leaves were there to greet them – all part of an emergency awareness campaign that was entering day three.
Community Organizer Tyler Jones was among them, trying to rally support for rent control after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s decision left him and others reeling days earlier. It scrapped almost a year’s worth of work.
“… I've been on staff since October, and it's been our whole life since then - people have taken time off work, folks have traveled to Boston to speak about rent control,” Jones said while carrying signage downtown. “We've sunk so much energy into it and the reality is, we're going to keep sinking energy into it. Just because the question’s been taken off the ballot doesn’t mean we don’t need rent control.”
Jones and other advocates had hoped to bring rent control back to Massachusetts in general, some 30 years after a previous referendum did away with it. This, in a state with some of the highest rents in the country.
Most of the higher averages are in the Boston area – about $3,200 in May, according to WBUR – but Springfield rates have been rising as well. The average one-bedroom rent recently hit almost $1,300 in one of the state’s most affordable cities, says Apartments.com – a 2.7 percent increase compared to last year.
It’s not a complete picture, especially when rents can vary by neighborhood, but virtually all listings are a far cry from the city’s median gross rent a decade ago - $871, according to a 2018 housing study.
Rising rents and a steady uptick in limited liability companies purchasing properties have been part of Springfield No One Leaves’ rent control pitch, along with a number of similar groups seeking signatures across the state.
“In the fall, we collected 25,000 signatures… which is crazy,” Jones recalled.
The organizer added that around 150,000 signatures were ultimately collected statewide, all part of an effort to, per the initiative, “establish a limit on any annual rent increase for a covered dwelling unit in the commonwealth, which shall not exceed the annual increase in Consumer Price Index or 5%, whichever is lower, in any 12-month period.”
But, it was seemingly all for naught.
Language in the ballot question dealing with religious facilities ended up being grounds for scrapping the whole thing, the Supreme Judicial Court said in its ruling last week.
The SJC found exempting religious institutions put the matter on a collision course with article 48 of the Amendments of the Massachusetts Constitution, which deals with initiative petitions and how if said petition relates to “religion, religious practices or religious institutions,” the petition is to be “excluded.”
Organizers like Mona Shadi of the Easthampton Tenants Union say the dream of rent control is not dead – but to see the latest effort crater over language was more than frustrating.
“This was huge for us, because this was a way for us to ensure - not just in our organizing or going community-by-community - [that] this was going to bring the state in to protect people and to make sure that they had secure and affordable housing,” Shadi said. “And that’s been dashed.”
For the past year, the tenants union has only been growing in Hampshire County, attracting dozens of renters while supporting various tenant associations at different buildings.
Shadi says the city has become a hotbed for such associations, given the number of LLCs that own properties in the city and have raised rents by hundreds of dollars at a time.
Both Shadi and fellow member Ben Taylor say rent hikes aren’t showing any sign of slowing in the Pioneer Valley, forcing tenants to organize.
“This is not an idle matter for us. Fighting against extortionate rent hikes is an existential question,” Taylor said Thursday, June 25, minutes before kicking off another weekly tenants union meeting. “With every $100 rent increase, the rate of homelessness increases by about eight percent. We know that being unhoused is a great way to increase your risk of mortality … this is life or death, and we're going to keep fighting.”
For now, options are somewhat limited. Springfield No One Leaves and others are still promoting legislation that overlaps with the ballot question – S.1447, which leaves the matter up to municipalities to adopt rent control themselves.
Taylor and others say they support the bill, but the tenants union member adds that their hopes are “mixed,” given state leadership’s lack of appetite for rent control.
Both Taylor and Shadi say, regardless, the matter is from over.
“The vast majority of people are with us: the ballot question had a 69 percent approval rating, and … there are definitely people in state governance that have the right ideas and that care and there are people who have a vested interest in a status quo that is actively harming people, and so, the way to address that is by talking to your neighbors, organizing and building your own power and coalition… now's the time to get involved in organizing,” Shadi added.
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This piece originally aired on Tuesday, June 30, 2026.
