This article is a collaboration by The Shoestring and the Montague Reporter, and was featured in the latter’s September 19, 2024 edition.
SPRINGFIELD –In Massachusetts, it is illegal for a city or town to regulate how much a private property owner can charge for rent – except at mobile home parks.
In 1994, state legislators narrowly passed the Rent Control Prohibition Act, which dissolved municipal rent control boards and made local regulation of rental rates, or the price of services provided to tenants, illegal. Mobile home parks and publicly-subsidized housing were excluded from the ban because they tend to house some of society’s most vulnerable: the elderly, disabled, or poor. Residents at mobile home parks typically rent the land, which comes with water, electricity, and sewer hookups, and own the homes they park on it…