Decisive Action on the Housing Crisis

For decades, Beacon Hill has treated housing as a commodity for investors instead of a necessity for working people, funneling billions through a model that guarantees private returns while rents skyrocket and families are pushed out of the communities they built. Erika fought to change that and won, passing the law ending forced broker fees and doubling local affordable housing funding. Now we must go bigger: building 100,000 permanently affordable homes through public financing, homes that never expire and never convert to market rate, passing real tenant protections so renters can stay in their homes, and ending chronic homelessness with the proven Housing First approach, which provides a home first so people can rebuild their lives from a stable foundation.

The Market Alone Will Never House Us

Massachusetts has a housing plan, and its problem is arithmetic. The Commonwealth is counting overwhelmingly on private market-rate development to solve the crisis, and market-rate developers do not build unless a project delivers returns of 15 to 20 percent to their investors, which means every unit is priced not by what families can pay but by what investors demand. You can see the result in our own district: a new 445-unit market-rate building offers move-in deals of a month or two free because rents near $4,000 sit above what the market will bear, while down the street the waitlist for affordable homes is closed. We are producing luxury vacancy and affordable scarcity at the same time, in the same neighborhoods, and that is not a housing policy. It is an investor guarantee.

Concentrated Corporate Power Is Fixing Your Rent

Erika worked as an antitrust economist before she was elected, and she will tell you what she sees: our housing market is being cornered. A handful of the largest corporate landlords in the country now operate roughly one in ten rental units in the core of our district, with near-total control of some of our newest neighborhoods, and the consolidation hides in plain sight: regional planners traced what looked like a small single-property LLC to an ownership network holding more than $150 million in property. When ownership concentrates, the power to set rents concentrates with it.

And then the mega landlords automated the cartel. Competing landlords fed their private rent data into pricing software that pooled it and handed back daily rent recommendations, which property managers accepted roughly 90 percent of the time, and the software's own developers bragged that leasing agents had "too much empathy" compared to the algorithm. The Department of Justice sued under the Sherman Act, tenants have won settlements exceeding $200 million from landlords accused of participating, and the White House's own economists estimated the scheme overcharged American renters by billions of dollars every year. Massachusetts recovered barely $600,000 of it. Erika's antitrust training taught her the lesson that applies here: when the penalty is a rounding error on the profits, the penalty is just a business expense, and only structural enforcement changes behavior.

The Legislature's own Housing Committee advanced bills to ban algorithmic rent price-fixing this spring, and they have been sitting in Ways and Means ever since, which is exactly the quiet burial that Erika's transparency fight was built to expose and end.

Erika supported the $5.2 billion Affordable Homes Act, the largest housing investment in Massachusetts history, and she will tell you honestly what it does and does not do: much of it preserves the public housing we already have, which is essential, and only a fraction funds new permanently affordable construction. We are already spending real money on housing. We are simply not spending it at the scale the crisis demands, while too much of it flows through a model that guarantees private returns instead of permanent affordability.

100,000 Homes That Never Expire

There is a proven alternative, and it is already being built. In Chinatown, a community development corporation built 110 permanently affordable homes above a new public library branch, homes with no investor demanding returns, where the rent covers the building instead of a shareholder. Community land trusts and nonprofit developers across our district, from the Somerville Community Land Trust and Somerville Community Corporation to Just A Start, which is building 43 affordable homes at 24 Webster Ave and collaborating with the land trust on new homes near Gilman Station, are proving the model block by block. What they need is financing at scale.

Erika will fight for the Commonwealth to build 100,000 permanently affordable homes through public financing. Here is the honest number: a permanently affordable home requires roughly $250,000 to $400,000 in public capital, which means 100,000 homes will require on the order of $3 billion per year over a decade. That sounds enormous until you remember we have already proven we can raise revenue at this scale: the Fair Share Amendment, which corporate lobbies swore would wreck our economy, now brings in more than $2 billion every year from incomes above $1 million and funds our schools, roads, and transit. A comparable commitment, funded by asking more of the largest corporations and the wealthiest households and leveraged through state bonding, will finance homes that never expire, never convert to market rate, and never send a family's rent check to an investor. And Erika will fight to build them right: green, healthy, energy-efficient buildings, constructed with prevailing wage and union labor.

Protecting the Neighbors We Have

Building takes years, and families are being displaced now, which is why protection and production must move together. Every month, Erika hears from renters who open the dreaded notice that their rent is jumping several hundred dollars at the next lease, and some neighbors have watched their rent double in just a few years. When more than 124,000 residents signed to put rent stabilization on the ballot, the real estate industry showed us exactly how the game works: a ballot committee founded with the industry's own trade association as a member raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and backed the court challenge that got the question struck from the ballot, and several of the corporate landlords accused in the rent-fixing litigation are dues-paying members of that same trade association. And it is the same industry money that lobbies Beacon Hill against the climate-resilient, net zero building codes our communities have fought for, because every standard that protects tenants and every standard that protects the climate comes out of the same 15 to 20 percent return. This is what it means for moneyed interests to control the government's housing agenda, and it settles only one thing: the courts will not deliver rent stabilization, so the Legislature must, and Erika will fight to lift the statewide ban so communities can protect their tenants.

Erika has already delivered protections that put money back in renters' pockets: she passed the law ending forced broker fees, saving renters thousands of dollars at every single move, doubled local affordable housing funding, and secured funding to rebuild grassroots tenant organizing in the district. In the Senate she will fight for the full toolkit: tenant opportunity to purchase, condo conversion protections so tenants are not displaced when their building is flipped, a right to counsel for every tenant facing eviction, and a ban on the price-fixing software corporate landlords use to inflate rents across entire neighborhoods.

Ending Homelessness with Housing First

Chronic homelessness is solvable, and the solution has a name. Housing First provides permanent supportive housing without preconditions, and the evidence is overwhelming: people access housing faster, stay stably housed at far higher rates, and from that stable foundation are far better able to find work, rebuild savings, and address mental health and substance use disorder. It is the right thing to do and the cost-efficient thing to do, because a home costs the public less than the emergency rooms, shelters, and jails that homelessness cycles people through. Erika will fight to fund Housing First at scale, defend the right-to-shelter law that makes Massachusetts a place where no family sleeps outside, and support the frontline organizations doing this work in our communities, including the Somerville Homeless Coalition.

The Unfinished Agenda

In the Senate, Erika will keep organizing with tenants, community land trusts, nonprofit developers, and housing justice organizations across the district. And she will fight to:

• Lift the statewide ban on rent control. The courts will not deliver rent stabilization, so the Legislature must, and cities and towns deserve the tools to keep their residents housed.
• Finance 100,000 permanently affordable homes. Public financing at the scale of the crisis, funded by taxing the largest corporations and wealthiest households fairly and leveraged through state bonding, building homes that never expire and never convert to market rate.
• Pass the full tenant protection toolkit. Tenant opportunity to purchase, a local option transfer fee so luxury real estate sales fund affordable homes, condo conversion protections, and a right to counsel in eviction cases.
• Break up concentrated corporate control of our housing. Ban algorithmic rent price-fixing, require full beneficial ownership transparency so mega landlords cannot hide behind shell LLCs, and strengthen state antitrust enforcement with penalties that exceed the profits, because a fine smaller than the overcharge is just a license to keep price gouging.
• Make every community do its part. Defend and enforce the MBTA Communities Act so that solving the housing crisis is a collective effort across Massachusetts, not a burden carried by a few cities while others zone the crisis out.
• Repair and green our public housing. Continue the historic investment in repairing and modernizing more than 43,000 public housing homes, with the decarbonization and accessibility funding to make them healthy places to live for another generation.
• End chronic homelessness with Housing First. Permanent supportive housing without preconditions, funded at scale, and a right-to-shelter law defended without apology.