At a larger scale, Healey’s proposed housing bond bill, the Affordable Homes Act, aims to pump $4 billion into the production of new homes and preservation of existing ones. The bill encompasses many programs, but the front-and-center commitment is the funding of 40,000 new homes, about half of which would be for low-income households.

There is no question that the U.S. needs a major infusion of housing stock; millions of people need homes, which won’t materialize out of thin air. Even Healey’s housing bill, the largest ever proposed in Massachusetts, purports to facilitate the construction of just one-fifth of the total estimated housing shortage in the state.

However, the trickle-down theory is subject to important limitations and caveats. For one thing, research shows that the national filtering rate masks significant variation in the speed and even direction of filtering in different contexts. For instance, one study found evidence that downward filtering is more effective at increasing the supply of middle- and higher-cost units compared to lower-cost units. In some regions and time periods, units filtered upward to become more expensive, though that may reflect constrained supply in those areas.

Meanwhile, as Herbert pointed out, the supply-focused approach remains limited by the cost of building new housing. Even if policies such as zoning deregulation reduce the cost of land (by, for instance, permitting the construction of 10 units on a plot previously zoned for one), the cost of building remains—and in a profit-driven market, housing prices will never decrease below what it costs to build.

“Building enough housing will help alleviate the pressure on rents and prices,” Herbert said. “But it’s not going to reverse them.”

Herbert said economists had never been able to answer how much housing we would have to build to make it affordable. “The technical term,” he joked, “would be a shitload of housing, in order to get prices to come down. And the problem is, as soon as you start to get anywhere near a shitload, people would stop building.”

So-called “supply skeptics” argue that building new housing increases gentrification pressures by attracting other amenities to the neighborhood, driving prices upward. When new construction leads to “large amounts of in-migration,” the Urban Institute found, downward filtering may not occur, because the influx of new residents can overwhelm the pace of new building.

“Building enough housing will help alleviate the pressure on rents and prices,” Herbert said. “But it’s not going to reverse them.”

“All of sudden people say, ‘Oh, I want to live there,’” William Wheaton, an M.I.T. economics professor told GBH. “You’re adding [housing] supply, but the supply changes the character of the community.”

Greater Boston offers an example. Herbert reported that rental housing production has markedly increased recently, especially multi-family housing. But rents and home prices have continued to rise; supply has increased, but demand has grown faster.

Upward pressures on rents are often especially strong with the advent of new transit stops—just as happened at Fairlawn. One study of Boston’s transit system found a 7 percent increase in home prices with the arrival of a new “walk and ride” station. Analyses of the Red Line extension in the 1980s and the recent Green Line expansion found that the new transit accelerated gentrification and disproportionately benefited higher-income, white residents.

Constructing new market-rate buildings and trusting the filtering process to meet the needs of America’s poorest residents preserves the very force at the root of housing instability: the market itself—and the corporations propelling it.

Scholarly arguments continue about the relative size of these competing effects of new construction; measuring these phenomena is difficult. A 2023 review of recent studies concluded that increased housing supply tends to lower rents, or at least the growth of rents, in the surrounding region. However, the authors highlighted the need for companion policies such as subsidies and mandatory inclusionary zoning to ensure that lower-income groups “are seeing the benefits” of growth. Even the champions of filtering recognize its insufficiency for meeting the needs of the country’s poorest residents.

Building more housing can yield important climate benefits, cultivate more inclusive communities, and reduce commuting distances, Herbert noted. Nevertheless, density is not a panacea for affordability. Constructing new market-rate buildings and trusting the filtering process to meet the needs of America’s poorest residents preserves the very force at the root of housing instability: the market itself—and the corporations propelling it.

Real estate speculation is hardly new, but the consolidation, commodification, and corporatization of the housing market has markedly increased over the last few decades. Between 2002 and 2012, the top 50 residential rental companies increased their total share of market revenue from 22.3 percent to 31.5 percent. Henry Gomory’s study of Greater Boston found that “largescale landlords make up less than 1 percent of owners but own more than one third of all unit-years.” An investor purchased over one-fifth of residential properties sold in Greater Boston from 2004 to 2018. In 2018, investors bought nearly half of the area’s famed triple-deckers, according to a Metropolitan Area Planning Council report.

The Great Recession and foreclosure crisis accelerated this trend. As foreclosed properties tanked in value, investors seized the opportunity to scoop up undervalued assets.

Consolidation begets more consolidation. Investors boast a great advantage over individual buyers: cash. Whereas individuals will likely puchase with a mortgage, investors can often make cash offers, which are so desirable that sellers accept them at a discount. The MAPC study found that the median sale price for cash-purchased properties is consistently lower than that of analogous properties purchased with a mortgage.

Meanwhile, large landlords tend to own buildings through multiple companies, typically limited liability corporations (LLCs), which offer further advantages. LLCs offer the best of both worlds: They shield owners from personal liability, protecting their personal assets, as a corporation does, but are taxed at the lower rates of partnerships. LLCs also shroud the owners’ identities, insulating them from accountability.

Large landlords (defined as owning 15 or more units) file 186 percent more eviction cases than small landlords (owners of fewer than four units) and ultimately execute 126 percent more evictions.

The rise in investor activity has generated harsh consequences for renters—especially the most vulnerable. Investors come in many shapes and sizes; they are not all large, corporate entities. Herbert questioned the value of dividing landlords by their size or corporate structure, noting that smaller investor-owners can be more nefarious, and they slip under the radar, not subject to public scrutiny. Regardless of size, the transfer of ownership to an investor often triggers major rent hikes.

Even so, data shows that large investor landlords behave fundamentally differently than other owners. Large landlords (defined as owning 15 or more units) file 186 percent more eviction cases than small landlords (owners of fewer than four units) and ultimately execute 126 percent more evictions. This disparity is not limited to large apartment buildings; even in buildings of six or fewer units, large landlords file 185 percent more cases.

Moreover, large landlords file evictions for nonpayment of rent over significantly smaller rental arrearages—13 percent less back rent—than small landlords, indicating that large landlords are more litigious and more eager to use evictions as a tool of tenant control. 

The increasing prevalence of larger, corporate landlords compounds the difficulties of displaced tenants finding new housing. These owners, said Peter Hepburn, a Rutgers sociologist and fellow at the Eviction Lab, are much more likely to rely on algorithm screening tools that check applicants’ eviction records, further limiting the options of people previously evicted. 

Corporate ownership also affects the quality of housing. One study of Milwaukee found a correlation and evidence of causation between LLC ownership and property disrepair, especially in high-poverty neighborhoods, given the decreased accountability that results from anonymous ownership.

The effects of corporate control over housing are not evenly distributed. Rather, investor landlords reap the highest profits—and wreak the most devastation—in the poorest neighborhoods and disproportionately displace people of color. Matthew Desmond and Nathan Wilmers found that the profit margins for landlords are higher in neighborhoods with high poverty rates—substantially so. 

In Milwaukee, for instance, the median landlord in a poor neighborhood makes $130 more per unit, per month, than the median landlord in other neighborhoods, or $1,560 per year. Over 20 years, owners in poor neighborhoods make more than double the profits of landlords in nonpoor neighborhoods, even accounting for the appreciation of prices in nonpoor neighborhoods and assuming zero appreciation in poor neighborhoods.

MAPC’s study of Greater Boston corroborated these findings: Investors are most active in high-density neighborhoods with relatively low housing prices and the highest share of people of color. These residents are already the most rent-burdened, and cash sales and rapid rent hikes are common.

The situation at Fairlawn encapsulates many of these dynamics. DSF, a large real estate investment company, owns a portfolio of luxury multi-family buildings from Virginia to New Hampshire, and it boasts on its website that one of the “keystones” of its success has been “envisioning and maximizing the opportunities of under-performing properties.” One of its hallmarks is “conversions” of “underutilized, underperforming, and distressed assets” and “repositioning” them through rebranding, “aggressive marketing, leasing, and efficient operational processes.” It frequently targets buildings located near transit stations and transforms them into luxury buildings.

Mattapan residents had been lobbying for train stops for decades. The Blue Hill Avenue stop opened in February 2019—and DSF swooped in just before. When DSF announced the 2018 purchase, its president, Josh Solomon, said, “This acquisition aligns perfectly with our strategy of purchasing underutilized properties at transit oriented locations.”

In economics terms, “underutilized” refers to an asset whose full potential value has not been achieved. But Fairlawn, of course, was “utilized” by people every day—tenants like Annie Gordon.

Gordon grew up in Georgia and followed her family to Boston in the 1970s, moving into Fairlawn in 1976. By 2018, Gordon had retired, and her Social Security check covered her rent—just barely. She ended up returning to work part-time to supplement her income, finding a job at WalMart, despite ongoing health issues. She and the other tenants at Fairlawn had no idea that their building was for sale; they first learned of the purchase when it had already been finalized.

However, organizers and public officials had sought to get out ahead of the issue. City Life/Vida Urbana, a local housing justice group established not long before Gordon moved in, had been raising warning bells about the risk of displacement along the Fairmount Line since at least 2006. When the building came on the market, Sheila Dillon, then Boston’s housing chief, tried to facilitate the sale to a nonprofit to preserve the building’s affordability. The nonprofit offered the same asking price as DSF, but the owner sold to DSF, perhaps because the transaction would take less time. Promptly thereafter, DSF issued its dramatic rent increases.

DSF thus followed the playbook of large corporate landlords: extracting profits out of lower-income and disproportionately minority populations, displacing tenants via steep rent increases, and filing evictions, including one against Gordon—all in the name of maximizing the value of this “underutilized investment.” 

It worked. DSF purchased the property for about $65 million in 2018. Five years later, in 2023, without making any substantial capital improvements, it put the building on the market and reportedly received a bid for upwards of $90 million. (The sale is not finalized.) The invented name for the neighborhood, a sleek, sans-serif font, and heavy pressure on longtime tenants to pay 15-plus percent rent increases could net DSF a $25 million profit.

DSF’s possible windfall in flipping Fairlawn signals the dramatic incentives that the housing market provides to corporate landlords to “reposition” housing stock, no matter the cost to tenants. A response to the affordability crisis that leaves in place these incentives and facilitates the financialization of housing will only fuel further displacement.

For instance, Gomory reflected that “policies that incentivize large-scale capital investment in order to provide affordable housing,” such as the 2017 Opportunity Zones policy, “stimulate the consolidation of rental markets, . . . which could increase eviction rates there.” As Desmond and Wilmers concluded, “initiatives designed to expand affordable housing that do not directly confront profit seeking among landlords may prove ineffective.”

The invented name for the neighborhood, a sleek, sans-serif font, and heavy pressure on longtime tenants to pay 15-plus percent rent increases could net DSF a $25 million profit.

“Now, housing is financialized—it’s like a security you trade, like a commodity,” said Gabrielle René, an organizer at City Life. “We don’t think of it as a place to build a family, a place to build community. Until we rethink that, it will continue to be the way it is right now.”

In the Greater Boston area, City Life is one of the most active groups advancing that “rethinking.” Betty Lewis, who moved into her Fairlawn apartment in the early 1980s, first learned of City Life when someone from the group knocked on her door after DSF had purchased the building. The canvasser let her know that a tenants’ association was forming in the building to talk about what to do about the rent hikes. Lewis’s first reaction was that she “didn’t want to be bothered.” 

Even so, Lewis attended the meeting, held in a neighbor’s apartment. She continued to go to future meetings, where René and other organizers explained to her and about 10–15 fellow Fairlawn residents what rights the tenants had and strategized about how they could collectively negotiate with DSF.

The tenant association’s goal has stayed consistent throughout the ongoing, nearly six-year ordeal: a collective bargaining contract that would last for five years and limit rent increases to what Lewis called “reasonable”—about 2.5 percent. Lewis and Gordon have insisted that any negotiation be on behalf of all tenants, seeking a building-wide solution in order to maintain tenant solidarity.

All the while, these two tenants, who have lived well over 80 collective years at Fairlawn, have not paid one cent of the rent hikes that DSF slipped under their doors in 2019.

Because DSF’s contract included a provision charging a $500 “holdover” fee tacked on each month to tenants who did not sign the new lease, management claims that Lewis owes $20,000.

But after several years of leading the tenant association, partnering with City Life organizers, and attending political education trainings, Lewis and Gordon aren’t just refusing to pay out of necessity; they are challenging the landlord’s right to profit off the community’s collective labor.

This is the ultimate transformation City Life aims to inspire. “One of the most important goals of our radical approach is to challenge what is sometimes called cultural hegemony,” said Steve Meacham, a longtime City Life leader at a conference last year. These “dominant ideas in the air” include the description of the “capitalist market as the ‘free’ market,” the belief that the fair rent is the market rent, and the attribution of rising property value to the owner’s investment.

“Without challenging these ideas,” Meacham continued, “tenants cannot organize, cannot challenge displacement and no-fault evictions.”

We all breathe in market-friendly air, accepting whatever price the market spits out as reality. City Life challenges that orthodoxy. Fairlawn is a “poster child,” Meacham said, for tracing how “social energy creates real estate value.” In other words, it took people’s time, energy, and tax dollars to make the Fairmount Line stops a reality and increase the value of the Fairlawn property. Landlords, he said, “privatize” that socially-created wealth.

City Life’s public campaigns highlight the contrast between social wealth and corporate power. The organization led protests at DSF’s downtown office on Newbury Street and at a theater in Rhode Island on whose board DSF’s top executive sits, framing the battle over Fairlawn as a battle against a wealthy corporate investor.

But to create enough public pressure to gain negotiating leverage against big landlords, City Life needs people—lots of them. Maintaining solidarity is hard. At Fairlawn, René said, some tenant leaders ended up getting accepted for senior housing and left the building, opening up units for higher-income, market-rate renters. The threat of eviction looms, and many tenants decline to organize in fear of retaliation, although it’s illegal in Massachusetts to evict someone for participating in a tenants’ union. Moreover, an eviction on one’s record—no matter the case outcome—can derail one’s ability to get housing in the future, prompting some people to leave prematurely rather than asserting their rights in court.

The challenges of maintaining solidarity in the midst of the housing crisis is why City Life organizers stress the importance of preserving the affordability of already-occupied homes, such as those at Fairlawn. 

“If you want to create social housing, you [need] the people who are going to be pushing for it, and organized tenants are who is going to push for it,” Meacham said. “The occupied buildings create the army you need to fight for [affordable housing solutions]. Without that, it’s hard to marshal the forces that fight for affordable housing.”

The result is a vicious cycle. When tenants squeezed by corporate profiteering leave—or are forced out by eviction—the collective power of resisting tenants diminishes, giving landlords greater leeway to squeeze more tenants.  

“If the people who are being gentrified disappear without a squawk,” Meacham added, “nobody’s going to come to their aid. So our job is to make sure it’s a very, very loud squawk.”

City Life and other tenants’ groups champion a package of policy changes that would restrict investors’ abilities to extract profits from people’s homes and preserve currently affordable units. As an initial matter, rent stabilization—a cap on how much a landlord can increase the rent by each year—would “stop the bleeding,” Meacham said. 

According to a City Life study, evictions increased by 29 percent in the two years after rent control was lifted in Boston. At Fairlawn, Gordon’s rent increased by $100 ever year as soon as the anti-rent control referendum passed in 1994.

But rent control alone won’t affect the status of housing as a commodity. By contrast, the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act would establish a tenants’ right of first refusal when their building is put on the market. This proposed legislation (versions of which have passed in San Francisco, Washington D.C., and other municipalities) would allow tenants the right to either match a third-party offer to purchase the building or to designate that right to a nonprofit or other affordable housing developer. Under TOPA, Fairlawn would have been sold to the nonprofit that matched DSF’s offer in 2018.

The challenge for tenants under TOPA, Herbert said, is where to amass the funds to match a private buyer’s offer. That’s where the transfer fee, another policy priority, comes in. The basic idea is to levy a tax at the point of sale on real estate transactions that exceed a certain value and then use that money for affordable housing purposes. 

“If the people who are being gentrified disappear without a squawk,” Meacham added, “nobody’s going to come to their aid. So our job is to make sure it’s a very, very loud squawk.”

According to the MAPC report, transfer fees can deter speculative investors, disincentivize short-term flipping, and reinvest some of the profits reaped by investors back into the community. Transfer fees can fund community development corporations that buy up affordable private buildings to remove them from the speculative market and be used to increase subsidies for low-income renters. 

Meanwhile, reformers call for changing the law on LLCs to eliminate the ability of large landlords to hide their holdings in multiple LLCs, remain anonymous, and lower their tax burdens. A Massachusetts legislator proposed one such bill this session.

Finally, advocates envision creating more socially-owned housing—completely divorced from the private market—through transformation of existing private buildings (such as would happen through TOPA) and new production.

As Meacham said, “real estate is what governs the State House.”

These policies would “take a serious bite out of gentrification and displacement,” Meacham said. But the very reason that these policies would be effective—that they target the power of corporate landlord and speculators—is why they are so difficult to enact.

“The toolkit is clear,” Herbert said. “The challenge in our system is that landlords fight it vociferously.”

Or as Meacham said, “real estate is what governs the State House.”

A Boston Globe investigation found that at least 36 Massachusetts legislators, or 18 percent of the body, are themselves landlords. While just 35 percent of Boston residents own their homes, only two of the 20 legislators who represent the city confirmed that they are renters. The chairman of the House Budget Committee, through which many of these proposals must pass, owns two rental properties in Boston.

Landlords, lawmakers, and housing advocates are gearing up for major fights on Beacon Hill this legislative session, with multiple housing bills, including Healey’s bond bill, circulating. 

Whatever the outcome, Gordon and Lewis remain undeterred. With the sale of their building still pending, they continue not to pay the rent increase.

And while the larger project of decommodification of the housing market may seem radical, the tenants’ demands are not. Lewis said her ideal outcome is “a reasonable housing situation, where you don’t have to come in your house and run into rats, or run into mice, or run into bugs in your house, or roaches.” She envisions a building staffed by people who would help tenants if they ran into issues and make necessary repairs.

“I don’t mind a [rent] increase,” she added. “I just want them to give me a reasonable increase. I want a five-year lease, … so that I don’t have to be worried about every year having to come up with some extra money.”