Portland voters have made it clear time and again that they believe tenants need more protections, not less.

In November of 2020 and again in 2022, Portland voters overwhelmingly passed some of the strongest rent stabilization and tenant protections on the eastern seaboard. Yet proponents of Question A, coming up on the June ballot, are actively working to dismantle those protections. Question A is not a law drafted with Portland’s tenants in mind. It was written by landlords, for landlords.

The central premise of the initiative – that landlords in Portland are unable to recoup their investments and have to forego capital improvements due to concerns about their bottom line – is patently false. Under the existing law, Portland landlords are not only able to increase their rents by 70% of inflation annually, but can appeal to the Rent Board if they make substantial renovations or improvements to their properties or are not obtaining a fair return on their investment. This process just requires oversight, which the Rental Housing Alliance of Southern Maine appears to be trying to sidestep with this initiative.

Vacancy decontrol, or the practice of allowing landlords to increase rent as much as they want after a tenant voluntarily vacates a unit, has been proven time and again to significantly harm renters and cause a spike in rental housing stock prices.

Vacancy decontrol results in empty units being priced at prohibitively high levels, and also incentivizes landlords to encourage tenants to vacate. Just ask the residents of Toronto, a city with a longstanding policy of vacancy decontrol, where housing costs increased four times faster than income from 2008 to 2019; or the residents of Berkeley, California, where vacancy decontrol had the effect of greatly reducing the supply of affordable housing units. It’s no wonder New York opted to eliminate a vacancy decontrol provision in June 2019.

The problem with this measure is not only that it would cause rents to skyrocket as people go through the natural cycles of moving around and in and out of the city, but that it would actively encourage the worst kind of predatory behavior on the part of landlords. By enabling sharper rent increases on turnovers, this measure would incentivize landlords to pressure tenants out of their lower-rent apartments through extralegal measures like neglecting upkeep or threatening eviction. This will undoubtedly fall hardest on the most vulnerable residents in our city.

It’s also no coincidence that the Rental Housing Alliance of Southern Maine picked the June election to put forth its ballot initiative.

Historically, June elections, especially those in off-cycle years, have some of the lowest turnouts. Of the six summer elections between 2017 and 2022, average turnout was 10,010. The average turnout for November elections, in the same time span, was 28,551. If this initiative is truly a good-faith effort, why is it happening so soon after Question C passed? Why not wait until another election, with similar turnout, rather than an election that many Portland residents may be unaware is even happening?

This is not to mention the fact that many who signed the petition to get Question A on the ballot were misled by claims that this would prevent rent increases and/or lower rents across the city. Both the title and the summary of the initiative had to be changed to be less obviously misleading for this very reason.

Rents are already too high for the majority of workers in our city. We shouldn’t be making concessions for landlords – we should be safeguarding the tenant protections we have. Rent control protects tenants. Question A does not.