When the Morton Village apartment complex was put up for sale last year, during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Kwesi Matthew found out about it by word of mouth – from a UPS deliveryman.

A native of Trinidad and Tobago, Matthew has lived in the Mattapan development for about 15 years, and her mother has lived there for more than 20 years. Fearing that their current rent of less than $1,700 a month would spike under new ownership, Matthew was quick to join the tenant mobilization organized by City Life/Vida Urbana.

“We were able to collect a vast amount of signatures to move forward, to show them that we would not be moved, or that we are not going to be displaced,” she said, “but we are also not going to see high rents at this time.”

The organizing paid off. In October of 2020—after being managed by the same family since the 1960s—the development, with its 207 units of workforce housing, was sold for $41.1 million to Avanath Capital Management, a socially conscious investment firm with plans for what its legal representatives called “a mixed-income, deed-restricted affordable housing community.” Thanks to the additional help of $4 million from the city, residents would also have rent increases capped for at least three years.

Though limited by time and place, the agreement was a form of rent stabilization. City officials and activists claimed a victory, but the agreement was also one more signal that the surge in housing production under former Boston Mayor Marty Walsh wasn’t enough to stop displacement – or rebuff efforts to bring back rent regulation throughout the city.
According to the 2021 Housing Report Card, the share of renters in Boston paying more than 30 percent of their income for housing between 2000 and 2019 had increased from 40 to 48 percent.

The report was produced by The Boston Foundation, the Massachusetts Housing Partnership Center for Housing Data, and the Donahue Institute for Economic and Public Policy Research at UMass Amherst.

Authors of the report found that, before the pandemic, there was a higher rent burden among Black and Latinx households, with stagnant wages and high costs adding up overall to a “chronic housing affordability crisis.”
Researchers also found that, through 2020 and early 2021, Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, and Hyde Park had some of the region’s highest eviction filing rates.

“We need controls in the market,” said Kathy Brown, the executive director of the Boston Tenant Coalition. “Supply-side is not working.”

Public investment and market gains
By October 2019, the city reported that the surge in housing production had created more than 30,000 new units, 6,000 of them income-restricted, partly due to linkage payments from developers. Many of the units were near public transportation, in Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, South Boston, Dorchester, and East Boston. If the locations appealed to renters and buyers, they also appealed to developers hoping to build with more density and less square footage for off-street parking. But, as policy experts noted, the “transit-rich neighborhoods” were also hot spots for gentrification.

That concern was raised as early as 2010, in a report by the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy on the connection between transit investment and neighborhood change. “While patterns of neighborhood change vary,” the researchers wrote, “the most predominant pattern is one in which housing becomes more expensive, neighborhood residents become wealthier, and vehicle ownership becomes more common.”

For Morton Village, the connection to transportation went back even further. More than fifty years ago, access to bus routes and transit lines was among the attractions listed for the complex in real estate ads, which also touted “luxury living” with a swimming pool, saunas, gymnasium, tennis tables, and a balcony for every unit.

By the 1990s, after a leading supermarket chain closed an adjacent store, a development once promoted as “magnificent” was being shopped as “modern.” Instead of amenities and access to transportation, the ads highlighted security, in a “gated facility with around the clock guard service.”

In 2021, Morton Village still has a gated entrance and guard post that are surrounded by a chain link fence with barbed wire. But even neighbors beyond the development are noticing more recent changes, including the fresh layer of pavement in the outside parking area.

Matthew could point to improvements that came earlier, such as the new Dunkin’ replacing a vacant lot just outside the development, on Morton Street. In addition to a litany of bus routes she knew by heart, there was the rebuilt platform for the improved – and more affordable –rail service on the Fairmount Line, only a short walk from her unit. The rail improvements came after a long campaign by grassroots organizations that led to new public investment.

“We lobbied for the transition that’s here,” she said. “And this company comes in and tries to sell it back to us.”

Improvements funded by the public sector and nonprofits are also in play in East Boston, including the rebuilt public housing development near Maverick Station and, within walking distance, the conversion of a former industrial pier into a waterfront park with a picturesque view of the city’s downtown skyline. Less than three blocks from the station, there’s access to recreation and commuting along the East Boston Greenway.

And just a few blocks from the station is a four-unit property on Gove Street, where residents organized by City Life/Vida Urbana have been trying to limit rent increases under a new owner. The previous owners were members of a family that bought the units in 1976 for $6,000, with mortgages soon after totaling $40,000. In January of 2020, they sold the property for $1.3 million, with the new owner—a limited liability corporation headed by the developer Fernando Dalfior — securing a bank mortgage for slightly more than $1 million.

“It’s usually at the point of sale that the things take a sudden turn for the worst,” said City Life/Vida Urbana organizing coordinator Steve Meacham. “Many of the organizing efforts that we have supported follow a sale to a flipper or real estate corporation seeking to extract more profits from a property.”

Frances Amador has been a resident of the Gove Street building for 23 years. A graduate of East Boston High School who grew up in the neighborhood, she lives with two daughters, her husband, who works at two full-time restaurant jobs in the city, and her mother, an immigrant from Honduras needing access to medical appointments at Mass General Hospital — with translation help from family members. Amador says rents under the previous owner were close to $1,100 a month, but acknowledges that monthly rents close by are higher and, elsewhere in East Boston, up to as much as $3,000.

Residents and the new owner have yet to reach agreement on any limits on rent increases. Between the uncertainty and fears that the beginning of a new month will mark a turn for the worse, Amador says she worries that the family might have to move sooner or later. “If I have to move out of here,” she said, “it would be out of East Boston, for sure, because the rent is so high.”

According to the East Boston Times-Free Press, Dalfior recently tried unsuccessfully to get a zoning variance that would have allowed an increase in the building’s occupancy to eight units, with a vertical addition and roof deck. The article described the property as “dilapidated,” but a real estate listing shortly after sale described it as “well maintained,” along with mentioning its proximity to transportation “and some of THE best restaurants in Boston.”

Pros and conson rent regulation
When properties change hands after a long period without a substantial change in ownership, there are also risks for buyers. According to Douglas Quattrochi, executive director of MassLandlords.net, if the same property were under rent control, it would be “undesirable.”

“So, if the rents haven’t been going up in thirty years,” he reasoned, “and if the landlord hasn’t been doing repairs for thirty years, you’re out of luck.”

Policy experts have argued that some forms of rent regulation can shrink the supply of affordable units while benefitting even renters who can afford higher costs. Opponents of regulation also note that a tighter supply might leave renters in other units with even higher prices.

With more transit-oriented development expected along the Red Line and Fairmount Corridor, housing activists from the advocacy group Dorchester Not for Sale raised concerns about the lack of regulation, especially for multi-family houses acquired by investors operating as limited liability corporations. The use of LLCs allows buyers to have more privacy, but also less exposure to lawsuits and taxes. An organizer with the group, Lori Hurlebaus, likens the acquisitions to “a corporate takeover of our neighborhoods” that drives up prices.

Another organizer, Carolyn Chou, says the change in the market puts a squeeze on potential owner-occupants trying to take advantage of programs offered by the city and nonprofits.

“I can say that just on my own block, and across the neighborhood, we’ve seen everyday people can’t compete with the offers and the prices,” said Chou.

Michael Stella, president of Star Contracting, has been working with properties in Dorchester since the 1970s, when disinvestment and mortgage discrimination resulted in many houses being abandoned or destroyed by fire. He says some of the more recent investors might be aiming for higher returns, with a willingness to spend boosted by cash, a line of credit, or a tax incentive available for a limited time.

In his own experience with rent regulation in Boston, Stella recalled some “cumbersome” bureaucratic snafus. But he also said Boston’s later version of regulation—allowing for annual rent increases up to ten percent and exempting smaller owner-occupied properties—to be “pretty straightforward.”

“Any landlord saying, ‘I’m not satisfied trying to raise the rent nine-and-a-half percent annually,’” said Stella, “just gives landlords a bad name, in my mind.”

Supporters of rent regulation say it should be combined with other remedies, whether to boost supply and affordability, or to steer properties up for sale away from speculative buyers. When the properties are bought by a community land trust, that could allow purchase by a nonprofit or deed restrictions to lock in affordability. The city has a similar goal for the Acquisition Opportunity Program, created in 2016 and tapped for affordability at Morton Village.

The recommendations in the 2021 Housing Report Card include steps to increase supply and improve transportation. The report warned against disincentives for investment or new construction, but it also said, “Market-wide rent increase limitations recently adopted in Oregon and California (which impose a simple annual percentage cap on rent increases in excess of inflation) may be worthy of further consideration in Greater Boston.”

Waking up from a time of slumber
Despite signs of support in Boston, rent control or stabilization is expected to meet continued resistance at the State House from legislators and Gov. Baker. In recent months, activists have been more focused on state approval of emergency housing relief, but they say rent regulation—a hot topic in a recent Boston mayoral debate—is still worth pursuing.

“We know that when we stake ground on the needs of the community and fight together for those solutions,” said Chou, “then a lot more is possible than what people imagine.”

Until Morton Village was on the market, Kwesi Matthew hadn’t imagined herself reviewing a contract with property owners and organizing her neighbors by remote connection during a pandemic.

“We were in slumber,” she said. “We were made to accept our lot because we were immigrants.” But that changed when residents organized and sought a commitment from the development’s owners.

“They may own the property, but this is actually your home,” said Matthew. “You have lived here, you have contributed to their well-being or their business, or their practice or whatever, but this is also your home.”

Amador said she felt proud of her organizing work at Gove Street while admitting that she always tended to take the lead. “But,” she added, “I never thought that also I could be helping others to organize.”