Rent Control Ballot Initiatives Won Almost Everywhere
In California, New Jersey, Maine, and Minnesota, voters opted to cap rents and impose more restrictions on landlords.
Across the country, voters approved ballot initiatives that cap rents and impose new restrictions on landlords' ability to rent to whom they please.
The most eye-catching of these was a successful initiative in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where 68 percent of voters revived a cap on annual rent increases of $20 per month that the city council had axed back in 2023.
The 2023 reforms had allowed landlords to claim annual rent increases of up to 3 percent. The new voter-approved law allows them to raise rents by the lesser of 3 percent or $20.
This year's initiative was placed on the ballot by activists organized under the Democratic Socialists of America-linked Freelizabeth campaign.
Landlords had attempted to remove the rent cap from the ballot with a lawsuit that argued the $20 rent cap amounted to an uncompensated taking of their property in violation of the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment.
A Union County judge dismissed that lawsuit in July.
The New York Post reports that the $20 cap is a temporary measure. The city's rent regulation regime is scheduled to expire in 2027, and the city council will once again have to decide whether to keep the cap.
In California, the municipalities of Redwood City and San Pablo considered similar initiatives that proposed capping annual rent increases at 60 percent of inflation or 5 percent (whichever is lower) and requiring landlords to pay tenants up to $12,000 in relocation assistance for no-fault evictions.
As required by California state law, these rent caps would not apply to single-family homes or to buildings constructed after 1995.
Redwood City's Measure E would have also expanded the city's "just eviction" protections, which generally prevent landlords from not renewing leases with their tenants unless they can cite some city-approved reason like non-payment or a desire to occupy the unit themselves.
Because it's California, votes are still being counted. But Redwood City's Measure E appears headed for defeat, with 55 percent of voters voting "no."
That appears to be the only defeat for rent control at the ballot box this year.
San Pablo's Measure S is set to pass, with nearly 60 percent of voters supporting it thus far.
Meanwhile, in Salinas, California, a measure that would have repealed the city's rent stabilization rules was handily defeated.
Ballotpedia lists a handful of other local ballot initiatives that tighten rent regulation in California, Maine, and Minnesota as passing.
Voters in Augusta, Maine, approved a 3 percent rent cap on mobile homes. In Saint Paul, Minnesota, voters passed a measure that will allow renters to deduct their home repair costs from their rent.
Rent control proponents have an easy story to tell voters. Rising rents are a problem, and city hall can do something about it by literally capping rent increases. Landlords' arguments that rent control reduces housing quality and new housing supply might be true, but they also require more elaborate explanations from self-interested parties.
When property owners devote considerable resources to campaigning against rent control measures, they can win, and win handily. Three times now in California, statewide rent control ballot initiatives have lost by large margins.
In smaller, local races, however, the pro-rent control laws keep winning the day.