We are in a sinking ship. Rent control is filling a bucket and throwing it overboard into the ocean. Increasing supply of market rate housing is patching the actual hole that creates the problem in the first place. Cities that do that do not have housing crises in the first place, because they are meeting the actual demand for housing that exists.

Rent control prioritizes current residents at the expense of new ones, by disincentivizing housing construction. It does not stop displacement. It changes who is displaced. Instead of the people who currently occupy the housing, it’s the people who are looking for a place to live, broadly, in the metropolitan area. It is the “fuck you, I got mine,” of housing policy.

Massachusetts attracts the brightest, most talented people from around the world every single year who come to attend one of our many world-class universities. It is where many come to escape from places where their civil rights are substandard. The idea that newcomers are less valuable, that we should close off to anyone who comes after us, is not a great value system. If you think those people should be priced out to other, cheaper parts of the country, where abortion is restricted, where lgbt people are villianized, where there is rampant racism, you cannot claim to care about groups facing those issues.

We can accommodate pre-existing populations while also adapting for growth in the future. It’s by increasing housing supply to meet the demand that exists for new homes.

I will concede, the problem you describe relates to the trend that new housing only seems to get approved in low-income communities. Thus, they face an overwhelming portion of the burden in accommodating new residents. The real solution is to permit housing at a large-scale, which is predominantly what motivated the state legislature to require 175 Boston-area municipalities to ALL relax zoning conditions. Because when every rich, small town is so heavily incentivized to block any development, we have seen that nothing gets done to address our current housing crisis.

So instead of thinking less needs to be built in any particular neighborhood/town, it’s important to realize that more needs to be built across the entire region, and that each community needs to do their part to accommodate growth.

Luxury housing is just new housing. It has to be built. You don’t expect new cars to be less expensive than identical used cars. As that new housing stock becomes older, it BECOMES more affordable. With “affordable housing,” market rate units subsidize the income-restricted ones, causing the very problem you mention of middle-income people being too poor to afford market-rate, but too rich to qualify for the subsidized homes.

We need to do whatever it takes to have more housing be built. Housing doesn’t have to be this zero-sum game that we have created in MA.