Return of rent control? How some US cities are trying to keep roofs over people’s heads

Rent control was banned in Massachusetts in 1994 and in many other places in the US, too. Illustration: Ulises Mendicutty/The Guardian

For Paula Coar, rent control was a “blessing”.

Coar lived in a rent-controlled apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her sister and their children for over a decade in the 1980s and 1990s and credits the policy for the opportunities she was able to provide to her children.