Portland renters just got word that their landlords can raise rent by as much as 2.6% in 2027, up from the 2.2% cap allowed this year. That’s the fifth consecutive annual increase under the city’s rent control ordinance since it took effect in 2021.

Six years in, there’s enough data — from Portland and from cities that tried this before — to ask a fair question: is the ordinance doing what voters approved it to do, or has it become something bigger than a cap on rent? Here’s what the numbers say.

How the ordinance actually works

Portland’s rule is simple on paper: each year, the city publishes an allowable increase tied to the Consumer Price Index for the Greater Boston metro area, and landlords may raise rent by up to that amount. Less well known is the “banking” provision — if a landlord doesn’t take the full allowed increase in a given year, they can carry the unused portion forward and apply it later (up to 10% in any single year). Landlords may also add a one-time 5% bump when a unit turns over to a new tenant.

That banking rule creates a strange incentive: a landlord who might otherwise hold rent flat in a slow year has a real reason not to, because skipping an increase doesn’t mean skipping it forever — it just delays it, and makes it larger later. The rational move under the ordinance is to take the maximum every year, regardless of the unit’s condition or the state of the market.

Why rents stay high even in a soft market

Before rent control, a down market worked the way you’d expect: if demand dropped, landlords lowered rent to compete for tenants, and it could take years for a unit’s rent to climb back to what comparable units were fetching before the downturn. That’s ordinary price adjustment — it moves in both directions.

That doesn’t really happen anymore. In our own experience managing rental housing across Maine, a landlord filling a vacancy in a soft market can still drop the asking rent to get someone in the door — but the increases not taken in better years are still sitting banked, available to apply the moment that lease is signed. The following year, that same tenant can see a 10% increase that has nothing to do with current market conditions and everything to do with catching the rent back up to where the ordinance would have allowed all along.

Once that increase lands, most tenants pay it rather than move. Relocating is expensive and disruptive — a deposit, a truck, time off work — with no guarantee the next unit doesn’t carry the same banked increase, ready to apply the moment the new lease starts. Paying the increase is usually cheaper than leaving, which is exactly the kind of price stickiness a soft market isn’t supposed to produce.

Less housing, higher rents elsewhere

Portland isn’t the first city to run this experiment. A widely cited Stanford/NBER study of San Francisco’s 1994 rent control expansion (Diamond, McQuade, and Qian) found that landlords responded by pulling roughly 15% of the affected housing off the rental market — through condo conversions, redevelopment, or owner move-ins — and that this supply reduction pushed city-wide rents up by an estimated 5.1%. Tenants who kept their rent-controlled units benefited, but renters looking for a home paid more, because there was less housing to go around.

It does nothing for the people who don’t have housing at all

Rent control’s entire mechanism only reaches people who already hold a lease. It has nothing to say to someone who doesn’t have an apartment to begin with — and Portland’s homelessness numbers suggest that population isn’t shrinking the way the headline count implies.

Maine’s official 2026 point-in-time count found the state’s overall homeless population down to 2,126 people, roughly 300 fewer than the year before. But the unsheltered count — people with nowhere indoors to sleep at all — rose to 361 statewide, a historic high, up from 281 the year before. Portland’s real picture looks worse than the official tally suggests: the January 2026 count found just 57 unsheltered individuals in Cumberland County, but a more thorough Preble Street survey conducted over three weeks in November 2025 identified 104 people sleeping outside in Portland alone — more than five times the roughly 20 the official count had found there the year before. Over 90% of those surveyed had been without housing for a year or more.

Nothing about rent control touches this. It doesn’t add a single unit of shelter, transitional housing, or permanent supportive housing, and by reducing the overall supply of rental units available to enter into — the same dynamic documented in San Francisco — it may make it marginally harder, not easier, for someone trying to exit homelessness to find a landlord willing to rent to them. A policy built entirely around protecting existing leases was never going to reach the people who don’t have one.

The tax assessment problem

Here’s a cost that gets less attention: rent control’s effect on the city’s own tax base.

Municipal assessors generally value income-producing rental property using the income approach — a building is worth what it can earn. Cap the rent a landlord can charge, and you cap the income the property can generate, which lowers its assessed value under Maine’s market-based assessment standards. Lower assessed values on rental buildings mean a smaller total tax base for the city — and property tax revenue funds the same schools, roads, and public safety services that renters rely on just as much as homeowners.

The Cambridge, Massachusetts experience shows how large this effect can be, in reverse. When Cambridge ended rent control in 1995, previously controlled properties saw assessed values jump 18–25%, and — more tellingly — nearby buildings that had never been rent-controlled rose 12% in value, as investment flowed back into the neighborhood. Researchers Autor, Palmer, and Pathak estimated decontrol accounted for nearly a quarter of Cambridge’s total residential price appreciation over the following decade. That’s the value rent control had been suppressing the whole time it was in effect.

An analysis commissioned by the Greater Portland Board of Realtors put a local number on the same dynamic, estimating that rent control reduces Portland’s total taxable property valuation by 3.2% to 5.4% versus an unrestricted market. Because the city still has to fund its budget, that gap gets made up through a higher mill rate spread across the remaining tax base — the analysis projects a $6.3 million to $10.6 million tax burden shift in FY2026 alone, and $34.9 million to $58.9 million cumulatively through FY2030. Roughly 63% of that shift lands on single-family and condo owners, adding an estimated $224 to $379 to the median homeowner’s tax bill next year alone. One case study in the report — a 92-unit downtown building — showed an assessed-value reduction large enough to erase $85,000 to $105,000 in annual tax revenue from that property alone.

That’s revenue the city doesn’t have for schools, road repair, or the fire and police departments that respond to calls in rent-controlled buildings same as anywhere else. A policy meant to ease the cost of housing ends up, in part, being paid for by a tax base that has less to give.

What it looks like on the ground

Local landlords describe a familiar version of this dynamic. Brit Vitalius, president of the Rental Housing Alliance of Southern Maine, has said members feel they must raise rent every year just to stay financially viable under the ordinance — and that some small owners have responded by selling to larger, out-of-state buyers instead. That’s the pattern critics warn about: rent control doesn’t eliminate the pressure to raise rent, it just shifts ownership away from smaller, locally accountable landlords toward owners with less connection to tenants and the community.

What the resolution actually asks for

On September 9, 2026, Portland’s City Council took up Resolve 2-26/27, “To Fully Enforce Rent Control, Strengthen Tenant Protections, and Guarantee Safe and Stable Housing for Renters,” co-sponsored by Councilors Regina Phillips and Wes Pelletier at the request of the Portland Tenants Union. It’s worth reading past the headline, because parts of it are hard to argue with — and the parts worth debating are worth debating on the merits, not as a referendum on whether landlords are good or bad actors.

The resolution’s own text points to a real problem: a March 2026 tenant-union audit of Zillow listings found that nearly half of 271 units reviewed appeared to violate the ordinance’s rent limits, and the resolution notes the city’s current systems aren’t built to catch that kind of error before it compounds for years. Its answer is a fully automated online registration system that calculates allowable increases and banked rent itself, and won’t approve a filing that’s incomplete or inconsistent. That’s a genuine improvement for compliant owners, not just an enforcement tool for tenants — an ordinance this complicated is hard to administer correctly by hand, and a system that flags mistakes before they become violations protects good-faith landlords as much as it catches bad ones. The same is true of streamlining how the city responds to uninhabitable conditions: no responsible property manager wants unsafe units sitting unresolved.

Where the resolution asks for more is the retroactive piece — re-verifying every base rent, exemption claim, and reported “voluntary” tenant turnover back to 2020 — and a mandate for the Housing and Economic Development Committee to draft, within six months, ordinance language that would add a fee for no-cause lease terminations, make rent-control fines mandatory and escalating, and give tenants a right of first refusal to buy their building if it goes up for sale. That last piece in particular deserves its own real conversation: a right of first refusal adds a legal step and a new party to every sale of a rent-controlled building, which is the kind of friction that shows up as a discount in what a buyer will pay — compounding the valuation hit described above. That’s a legitimate trade-off to weigh, not a reason to treat everyone pushing for stronger enforcement as adversaries.

There’s a third party being directed here that’s easy to miss: the city government itself. The resolution doesn’t just ask the City Manager to build a new verification and registration system — it sets a July 1, 2027 deadline for doing it, tells the City Manager to come back to the Council with a budget request if more funding is needed, and gives the Housing and Economic Development Committee six months to produce specific ordinance language on a defined list of topics. That’s not unusual for a council resolution, but it’s worth naming plainly: this isn’t only a dispute between renters and landlords. It’s the council directing its own administration’s priorities and budget, on a timeline it set for itself, over a policy area that already reaches every taxpayer through the mill rate. Renters, landlords, and City Hall are all being told what to do here — just in different ways.

The honest counterpoint

It would be unfair to leave out the strongest argument on the other side: for the tenant who already has a rent-controlled lease, the protection is real on paper — a rent that can’t jump overnight. The Stanford researchers who documented rent control’s costs in San Francisco found it delivered that benefit by letting covered tenants stay in their homes nearly 20% longer than they otherwise would have.

Locally, that particular effect is harder to see. Across Portland’s rent-controlled portfolio, property managers — Foreside included — haven’t observed a meaningful shift in how long tenants stay; turnover has stayed relatively flat over the ordinance’s six years. That may say more about Maine’s broader housing shortage driving turnover regardless of rent control than about the ordinance itself, but it’s worth noting that the one benefit most consistently credited to rent control elsewhere isn’t obviously showing up here. Either way, the debate isn’t over whether rent control helps the tenants it directly covers — where that benefit shows up, it’s real. It’s whether that benefit is worth the cost to everyone else competing for a place to live, funding city services, or paying the tax bill.

So who does rent control actually hurt?

Line up the evidence and a pattern emerges. It’s the renter who can’t find an apartment, because the supply that would have been built or offered never materialized. It’s the existing tenant who still gets an automatic increase every year, whether or not the unit was ever repainted, because the ordinance ties rent to inflation, not condition. It’s the small, local landlord who sells out to a larger, more distant owner rather than keep operating under rules that reward maximizing rent over investing in the property. It’s the homeowner picking up a larger share of the tax bill because the rental tax base shrank. It’s every resident — renter and owner alike — relying on the schools, roads, and emergency services that a smaller tax base funds less generously. And it’s the city government itself, now committed to building new systems and drafting new ordinance language on a deadline it set in response to a problem a rent cap helped create.

Rent control was built to protect renters. Look closely at where the costs actually land, and a lot of them land back on renters — just later, and less visibly.

Where common ground actually exists

None of this makes tenants, tenant advocates, or the councilors sponsoring this resolution the opposition. The Portland Tenants Union’s core complaint — that violations go undetected for years under a system nobody can fully audit by hand — is one that responsible landlords should want fixed too. Every violation that goes unpunished makes it harder for good-faith owners to be seen as anything other than part of the problem, and better tools for catching bad actors ultimately protect the landlords who are already following the rules.

Where landlords, tenants, and the city genuinely agree is on the goal: safe, stable, fairly priced housing. The honest disagreement is about which lever gets there. A rent cap redistributes a fixed amount of housing and a fixed tax base among competing claims — it doesn’t create more of either. The one lever that has reliably lowered rent and grown the tax base everywhere it’s been tried at scale is more housing supply. That’s a conversation Portland’s landlords, property managers, and tenant advocates could actually have together, and it’s worth having before the next resolution tries to solve a supply problem with a price control.