Speaking of rent control, lawmakers, and (ahem) their rental property

So there are landlords in Legislature. There are taxpayers there too.

I filed Freedom of Information Act requests in 1994 with several rent control boards and found that, during the rent control phaseout, few rentcontrolled tenants could meet the means test for having low or moderate income.

In the front-page article “On Beacon Hill, an imbalance on housing” (April 23), the Globe reports that a number of state legislators are landlords, suggesting that these lawmakers would be biased in reviewing Boston’s home rule petition on rent control. (By the Globe’s logic, as taxpayers, legislators would be biased on tax questions, too.)

The article reveals more about what might be the Globe’s own bias, especially given its sorry history of misinforming the public about rent control. In 1994, the Globe opposed the ballot question that ended rent control, stating that the vast majority of Boston’s 22,000 formerly rentcontrolled households were poor, elderly women. I filed Freedom of Information Act requests with several rent control boards and found that, during the rent control phaseout, few rent-controlled tenants could meet the means test for having low or moderate income.

The figure in Boston was, ultimately, 869 out of 22,000 units, or about 4 percent; in Cambridge it was 9 percent (1,427 out of 16,000); and in Brookline it was 10.5 percent (440 out 4,200).

So, granny did not get thrown out on her fanny (as the tenant advocates claimed would happen) and rent control was welfare for yuppies (as everyone knew anyway).

Someone who was not biased about rent control was the late Nobel laureate economist Paul Samuelson. In his economics textbook, Samuelson wrote: “In the wry words of one European critic, ‘Nothing is as efficient at destroying a city as rent controls — except for bombing.’ ”

JON MADDOX

Belmont

The writer was the author of Chapter 40P: The Massachusetts Rent Control Prohibition Act.