Providence City Council hears from the public about its proposed rent stabilization ordinance
"Our housing system isn’t failing because we forgot how to build. It’s failing because it’s been hijacked by landlords monopolizing the land and overcharging - because they can.”
It would be easy to reduce last night’s five-and-a-half-hour HOPE Committee1 meeting of the Providence City Council on the subject of a proposed rent stabilization ordinance to a difference in opinion between landlords and tenants, but it runs much deeper than that. At a top level, landlords centered their arguments against the ordinance on the financial impacts individual landlords and the city as a whole might endure.
Here’s the video:
The City’s Chief Financial Officer, Lawrence Mancini, testified on a fiscal note his office prepared on what he called “the unknown potential financial obligations” that Providence might incur.
Mancini’s finance team estimated that enforcing the ordinance could cost the city more than half a million dollars per year. Currently, Providence budgets $88 million a year for the police department to enforce laws considered important, and nearly eight million for the legal department. In this context, half a million dollars, or even double that, to protect renters from exploitation, seems like a bargain.
Mancini also had information on what he called “a limited analysis of the potential impact to the City of Providence’s tax revenue, and hence the budget, based upon information gleaned from a similar study from the City of Portland, Maine, based on rent control provisions.” [Note that Mancini used the term rent control. The Providence ordinance is about rent stabilization. Many speaking in opposition used the less precise term rent control.]2 He concluded that the impact could range from 1.9 million to 3.25 million dollars in lost revenue, but importantly, this is a loss of future projected revenue, and revenue projections have large margins of error. Mancini cited studies from other municipalities that enacted rent ‘control’ ordinances, speculated that projected revenue losses could reach $17.5 million, and threatened that the impact of those losses would be borne by homeowners suffering “significantly higher tax bills for the median value single-family home.”
Landlord arguments:
Arguments made against rent stabilization by landlords include:
Rent ‘control’ policies in other cities, such as St. Paul, Minnesota, have led to a sharp decrease in new housing permits, worsening Providence’s core problem of an insufficient housing supply.
In fact, “no study, anywhere in the country, has shown a decline in new construction as a result of rent stabilization.” See here.
Small “mom and pop” landlords, who make up a significant portion of the city’s housing providers, would be disproportionately harmed as they could not absorb rising costs of taxes, insurance, and maintenance under a 4% cap.
In fact, small “mom and pop” landlords in owner-occupied buildings with 1–3 units are exempt under this ordinance.
One weird argument made by landlords is that passing rent stabilization will do nothing to stimulate the construction of new, affordable housing. This is facilely true, and a little like saying that a law against shoplifting will do nothing to lower the murder rate. A rent stabilization ordinance is meant to keep people in their homes and eliminate economically devastating rent hikes. Ordinances passed to increase housing production are a different beast, and completely necessary.
Landlords would be incentivized to raise rents by up to 4% per year, potentially leading to more consistent rent increases for tenants who previously had stable rents.
This leads me to the next section, Landlord Threats.
Landlord Threats:
“All I hear from the landlords here is threats,” said Ward One resident Casey Gruppioni. “Threats that they will raise the rents at the maximum every year. Threats that not making a profit will mean they will not maintain their units. Threats that they will leave the city. Threats they will not be as benevolent and kind. Threats that they won’t be able to maintain their historical properties. How is it my fault that you made a bad business investment and can’t afford your lead removal bill?”
Gruppioni made her comments around 90 minutes into the meeting. Landlords repeated similar threats for three more hours.
Tenants:
It’s important to keep in mind that tenants have very little power in a landlord/tenant relationship.
“We are told a fairytale in Providence,” said Providence resident Vivian Sutherland. “We are told that the market alone can fix the housing crisis. Landlords want us to believe that a right to housing is less important than their right to a profitable return on investment. But let’s be honest about what’s actually happening in Providence: Our housing system isn’t failing because we forgot how to build. It’s failing because it’s been hijacked by landlords monopolizing the land and overcharging - because they can.”
Sutherland continued:
“The Landlord lobby hides behind the mask of the so-called mom and pop housing provider. They don’t want you to see the LLCs, the shell companies, the massive accumulation of land. We are told they provide housing. No, the working class built the housing. Landlords simply gatekeep it.
“Providence is standing on a cliff. Over 55% of our homes were built before 1940. The iconic triple-deckers, the backbone of our neighborhoods, are being pushed towards demolition by neglect. What is the market solution? Wait for the buildings to be condemned and develop luxury condos with only 10% affordable housing in 15 years. By 2040, our city will be a gentrifying corporate playground for the rich in some neighborhoods and slum apartments costing probably about $4,000 in others, not a place to raise a family. These won’t be homes. They’ll be investment vehicles for real estate developers and investors to park cash while our neighbors are priced out of the city.
“Rent stabilization is often called market interference. I call it a stay of execution. It would provide the foundational stability required to live a life not defined by the terror of and impending 30, 40, or 50% rent hike. If rent stabilization makes landlording less profitable for speculators, that’s great. It should. We need to prevent price gouging.
“What tenants really need is a rent freeze, a permanent cap that actually lowers the rent and ties it to the quality of the housing. The city needs a first right of refusal to take more housing into public ownership and municipalize the corporate landlords and the slum lords. Housing should be a human right, a positive utility. Rent stabilization is the floor, and our demands are not the ceiling. We are not asking for a discount. We are asserting our right to a dignified life in the City of Providence.”
“I support rent stabilization because I support stability and predictability in the rental apartment,” said Ward Five resident Elizabeth Saldaña. “I lived for five years in a beautiful apartment on the east side. We were exemplary tenants, never missed a payment, took care of the place and, I thought I had a good relationship with my landlord. But in 2022, he informed my partner and me that he would be raising our rent by $1,000 a month, up from $ 1,950 a month, for those keeping track of home; that is a 51% increase. We did our best to negotiate with him. We tried to request a smaller rent increase, but he insisted that the market had changed since we moved in and that he now needed to charge market rates.”
Saldaña continued:
“As a tenant, I had no recourse. I felt totally powerless to fight back. There was no one I could complain to. There was nothing I could do. My options were leave or be squeezed for another $12,000 a year. The six months that we ended up spending trying to buy a home in Providence were some of the worst months of my life, I saved every last penny for a down payment and I spent every waking moment looking at real estate websites or going to open houses, whether as a renter or as a buyer, finding a place to live here is a full-time job on top of the full-time job I already have. It exhausted me. Everything here was wildly overpriced or literally falling apart. I stopped sleeping and sincerely believed that I would not find a place to live. I was low-grade sick for months, and I was running a hundred-degree fever when I closed on my home.
“What should have been a happy moment was a desperate race against a rent hike that I had no control over…”
And Saldaña’s experience was one of the better outcomes.
“I’m a social worker and ... most of my clients live on fixed income,” said Ward Three resident Jacob Kramer. “I have one client who lives with his partner in a one-bedroom. Three months ago, the rent jumped over 25% - from $1500 to $1900. There were no improvements, just pure extraction. This client earns less than $1,000 a month on SSDI. He is on the brink of eviction, and so are thousands of our neighbors. An eviction essentially means you can never rent again. If you have an eviction on your record, it’s over for you.”
Kramer continued:
“I have witnessed the homelessness crisis firsthand. Rhode Islanders are crowding into the shelters or are pushed into patches of woods or highway medians. People are at constant risk of exposure, hypothermia, and death. What’s worse is that Mayor Smiley has consistently gone out of his way to actively persecute unhoused people: bulldozing tents and encampments in the name of public health. In 2024, 54 people experiencing homelessness died. Just last week, Irina Kozav, age 75, and her son Stanislaw Kozav, 49, froze to death in the cold outside of the Miriam Hospital. They appeared to have been living out of their car.
“The unregulated rental market is literally killing our neighbors, and for what? For a return on a speculative investment. The ruinous increases in rent are due to unregulated housing construction and huge neighborhood purchases by corporations. Corporate landlords effectively act as a cartel, hiking prices in unison to maximize profits. Providence should do everything it can to eliminate this parasitic behavior.
“I also want you to think about who is here to testify, who is not. For instance, one of my coworkers works three jobs, so she didn’t have the time to be here. She experienced a doubling of her rent over six years. Landlords who passively extract more and more money from working people are sure to come out if they feel like their future speculative profits may plateau. They have plenty of time to advocate for themselves. Some of ‘em have lawyers to do it for them.”
Here are some of the arguments laid out in favor of rent stabilization:
The housing crisis in Providence had reached an emergency level, and the city has been named the least affordable metro area for renters in the nation.
Tenants faced sudden, massive rent increases (40-50% or more) with no explanation or recourse, leading to displacement, instability, and homelessness.
Many rental units suffer from poor conditions, such as mold, lead, lack of heat, and pests, yet rents continued to rise.
Rent stabilization is the moderate position. It is not a rent freeze, but provides a predictable 4% cap to protect families from shocking increases.
Housing is a fundamental human right and a public health issue, not just a market commodity.
“The city’s Department of Housing and Human Services shares the deep concerns of so many neighbors here in Providence who are struggling with unaffordable rents and a real housing shortage,” said Emily Friedman, Providence’s Director of Housing and Human Services, speaking near the begining of the meeting. “The Department understands why [rent stabilization] sounds appealing, but to be clear, rent stabilization does not freeze rents or lower them. It simply regulates the pace of future increases.”
So far so good, but then Director Friedman misinformed the City Council about rent stabilization:
“In St. Paul, Minnesota, strict rent control, adopted in 2021, like that proposed here, led to an over 80% drop in new housing permits while rents still increased. Colleagues there have shared how difficult it has been to unwind the unintended consequences. In contrast, nearby Minneapolis experienced a building boom and declining rents after pursuing zoning reforms to increase supply. This is one of the clearest real-world case studies we have available.”
Dr. Molly Richard and Reclaim Rhode Island’s Daniel Denvir rebutted Director Friedman’s claim:
“I research the causes, consequences, and prevention of homelessness and housing insecurity,” said Dr. Molly Richard, an Assistant Professor in Public Health at the University of Rhode Island. “I’m here in support of the ordinance.”
Dr. Richard continued:
“First, rent stabilization is a public health intervention. My research shows that for every hundred-dollar increase in median rent, homelessness, specifically unsheltered homelessness, increases by 28%. We’ve seen that lived reality in Providence in the past month alone. We’ve a few times that three people died outside. We can invest in shelters and supportive housing, and we should, and we are, but without addressing the rising cost of housing, we’re bailing out the water from a boat that is still filling and we really need to move upstream. Homelessness is only part of that harm. Rent burden is associated with food insecurity, depression, increased hospitalizations (especially among children), and even early death. The cost of rent is actively harming our neighbors’ health, right now.
“Second, and really importantly from a public policy perspective, the design of the policy matters enormously. The current policy is moderate and carefully structured when evaluated againmst the research on rent stabilization, . This isn’t the kind of failed policy, scary headlines that so many people are repeating from AI searches and Googling.
“Opponents often cite St. Paul or Montgomery County. But these aren’t fair comparisons. St. Paul’s ordinance had no new construction exemption. A hard 3% cap in its construction slowdown began before the law took effect. Montgomery County is an investor dominated market of more than a million people. Its permitting slowdown coincided with historically low interest rates and workforce cuts among federal government employees. My testimony includes data on Portland, Maine, showing that housing construction increased and has remained steady. The debate among researchers is absolutely not settled, even when we’re talking about the recent examples, but I linked to reports by economists from MIT, Columbia, UMass, Rutgers, and more who have publicly supported rent stabilization. There are letters signed by more than 30 economists.”
Richard ended her comments with a comparison: A few years back when the state was debating the impacts of raising the minimum wage, the standard Econ 101 models opponents presented in opposition to the bills were not predictive. Rent stabilization, predicted Richard, used to be seen as radical, like raising the minimum wage, “but today [raising the minimum wage is] accepted as an important part of having a healthy community.”
“Rents in my neighborhood have increased truly dramatically over the past five years, speeding along spectacular gentrification that will soon spell the end of Mount Hope as one of the city’s most diverse neighborhoods, a place where Black, white, Latino, Asian, working, and middle class families call home,” said Daniel Denvir, co-chair of Reclaim Rhode Island and Ward Three resident. “The landlord lobby argues that rent stabilization won’t work. We know that’s not true. If rent stabilization had been in place in 2020, just six years ago, Mount Hope families and our community would’ve been stabilized. And I really want to emphasize this because both sides of this debate argue over all sorts of things and cite different academic studies, but there is no academic debate over whether rent stabilization achieves its core goal of slowing rent increases and stabilizing people in their homes.”
Denvir continued:
“On my block, triple-deckers are being bought up by speculators, who are charging twice as much for the same square footage as longtime owner-occupiers. And you can tell which houses are which because the speculative absentee landlords own the homes where no one bothered to shovel the sidewalks.
“Rent stabilization will keep people in their homes. It will also slow down speculation and runaway rents that we see driving corporate landlords like 02908 and Strive to gobble up properties all over the city. If this was about anything other than landlord profits, why don’t we see anyone but the landlord lobby here in opposition to this ordinance?
“Is rent stabilization enough? No, supply does matter. The landlord lobby says this ordinance will stifle development. They point to St. Paul, Minnesota, over and over again. We just heard from a representative of the Mayor that this was a clear cut real world example. That is false.
“Check out the Boston Globe. University of Minnesota Professor Ed Goetz just published an op-ed. [The oped is behind a paywall, but this article summarizes the arguments.] He’s one of the country’s most eminent housing scholars and lives right next to St. Paul. He made it clear that this was an absolutely misleading example cited by RIPEC (the Rhode Island Public Expenditures Council] and now the mayor’s office, against rent stabilization.
“It is very clear that sky-high rent is never going to incentivize sufficient development to solve this crisis. That’s why we need to develop a new generation of mixed-income public housing. Finally, we know rent stabilization is popular. In a URI poll from last year, 72% statewide support it. In working class, progressive Providence, we know that number is far higher, so the evidence backs us, and the people of Providence support it.”
I’m going to end this piece quoting Professor Goetz’s op-ed:
“No single policy will solve the problem in Providence. Preserving the existing affordable housing in the city is an important challenge that needs to be met. Building more housing is also critical. But, there is no reason to frame housing policy approaches as an either/or proposition. To best meet the challenges facing the city, rent stabilization, affordable housing preservation, and new housing production need to be pursued together.” [emphasis mine]
Special Committee on Health, Opportunity, Prosperity, and Education
In simplest terms, rent control caps rents for long-term tenants, freezing rates that change only upon vacancy. Rent-stabilization caps annual rent increases by a set percentage (in the Providence ordinance, at 4%) and provides lease renewal rights.