Voters in Massachusetts will not decide this November whether to end the state’s decades-old ban on rent control, after the state’s highest court killed a proposed ballot question in a win for landlords and real estate groups.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on Tuesday ruled that the proposed initiative was unfit for the ballot because it included an exemption for housing units in “facilities operated solely for religious purposes.” Under the Massachusetts Constitution, certain subjects, including religion, cannot be decided through the initiative petition process.
In a 27-page opinion, the court’s seven justices unanimously found that the rent control proposal violated that restriction.
“The petition ... concerns a generally secular subject matter—rent control. But, by including an express exemption for facilities operated solely for religious purposes, the petition impermissibly makes religion ‘a factor in [the petition’s] application.’” Justice Frank Gaziano wrote for the panel.
“Further, the petition would confer preferential treatment on religious institutions by allowing them to increase rent prices, while limiting rent increases for secular facilities,” he said.
The proposed ballot question was drafted by Homes for All Massachusetts, a pro-tenant advocacy group. The initiative would have repealed a 1994 voter-approved ban on rent control in Massachusetts and barred most landlords from raising rents by more than the rate of inflation or 5 percent per year, whichever was lower.
In addition to religious facilities, the proposal would have exempted owner-occupied buildings with four or fewer units. Newly constructed buildings also would have been exempt for their first 10 years.
A 5-percent cap would have made Massachusetts the strictest statewide rent-control regime in the United States. Its proponents argued that the measure was necessary to ease the state’s high cost of living and help prevent residents from being pushed out of their homes and communities.
“Out-of-control housing costs driven by corporate real estate investors are pushing people out of their homes and neighborhoods, and families across the state can’t make ends meet,” Homes for All Massachusetts said on its website.
The proposal drew swift opposition from several real estate groups. The Greater Boston Real Estate Board, the Massachusetts Association of Realtors, and the Massachusetts chapter of NAIOP (the Commercial Real Estate Development Association) condemned the measure as “ill-conceived and damaging,” arguing that it would exacerbate the housing crisis by discouraging construction of new homes.
“The state’s housing plan has identified that Massachusetts needs to build an additional 222,000 housing units by 2035 to meaningfully address our housing affordability crisis,” the groups said in a joint statement. “Rent control will make that goal even more difficult to achieve.”
The rent-control measure was certified for the ballot by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell.
The Epoch Times has reached out to Campbell’s office for comments.
Campbell, in an interview on the Boston Public Radio podcast, acknowledged that her office erred.
“We got the rent control initiative, we certified it. But we, of course, have to respect the court’s decision, which was against us, and we got that wrong,” she said Tuesday.
It was the second ballot initiative struck down by the Massachusetts high court in less than a week.
Last week, the court removed from the ballot a measure that would have gradually lowered the state income tax, citing a “misleading summary” written by the attorney general’s office.
In May, the justices ruled that a ballot initiative concerning legislative stipends should not have been certified by Campbell’s office.
The court did, however, side with Campbell’s office in three other challenges to ballot initiatives it had certified.
As of 2026, three Pacific Coast states—California, Oregon, and Washington—remain the only ones in the nation to have statewide rent-control laws.
California limits annual rent increases to 5 percent plus local inflation, with a hard ceiling of 10 percent. Oregon, which enacted the nation’s first statewide rent-control law, caps annual increases at 7 percent plus the local inflation, also subject to a 10 percent maximum. Washington’s 2025 law caps annual rent increases for most residential tenancies at 7 percent plus inflation, up to a maximum of 10 percent.
