If by "improve" you mean "allow for skyrocketing rents and push the poor and most of the middle class further away from the city," yes, it did. I'm currently moving from Somerville, which adjoins Cambridge and is often called "where everybody moved when the rich people pushed them out of Cambridge" to Malden (some distance away by bus or car) because the rental situation has continued to deteriorate for everyone except the landlords.
It also kicked off (pedantically read as "shortly preceded") a building boom in East Cambridge, which was a depressing and sometimes dangerous place when I graduated (1 year before rent control ended) and is now largely transformed, with lots more commercial and significant residential construction/renovation.
There hasn't been much high-density apartment building construction (North Point and one in Central Sq are the only two I can think of), so naturally a place where demand increases faster than supply sees rising prices in a free market.
Well admittedly, the Boston area also has some of the country's most baroque zoning, permitting, and general NIMBYism laws -- just like the Bay Area. So it's horrendously hard to just build more housing, even though basically none of Cambridge outside Kendall Square's industrial area has elevations higher than three or four stories.
This argument always comes up, and it is a bad one. No, no one has a right to live in any particular place. It's the same thing as the people who fall back on "but but First Amendment" when somebody's saying "you're an asshole." Nobody's saying it isn't legal, but you can still be an asshole while acting legally.
If the best defense I could muster for something is that it is not literally illegal, I would be looking hard in the mirror. But that's just me.
I don't understand your response. You're talking about the 2nd Amendment and things not being literally illegal, neither of which address what I said. I'm not talking about the legality/illegality of squatting (which is the only thing that seems relevant to housing).
I see a lot of attitudes in regards to housing that I can only describe as entitled, which is unfortunate because it's a very negative word. But nothing else immediately comes to mind. Do people have a right to live in any given area, absent their ability to pay for it? I don't think so. There's no amendment for it. There's no laws for it. The closest applicable laws are those providing for rent control, but all that does is decrease the cost of living somewhere (at the expense of supply and housing quality) -- it still doesn't guarantee you a right to live there absent the ability to pay the lower rate.
There are lots of places I would love to live in but cannot because I either cannot afford it or am not willing to spend a very large percentage of my salary on it. It's a purely economic decision. How is there a right to live somewhere that is independent of your ability to afford it? Are you making an argument that if you are born somewhere, you have a lifelong right to live there at the prevailing rent at the time of your birth (adjusted only for inflation), and that this right should transfer to your children? That's really what it comes down to when people complain about no longer being able to afford living somewhere that they previously were able to live in. I don't think there is such a right, and it's certainly not reflected in any laws.
