Fair Rents, Stable Communities: How Strong Rent Stabilization Can Help Passaic Thrive

Fair Rents, Stable Communities: How Strong Rent Stabilization Can Help Passaic Thrive provides compelling evidence that Passaic, NJ’s recently enacted rent stabilization law, while a historic step, does not go far enough to protect tenants—especially low-income families and immigrants of color—from unaffordable rent hikes, eviction, and displacement. The report calls on city leaders to take bold action to close loopholes, lower the cap, and enact vacancy control.

Findings:

• If the City of Passaic strengthens its rent stabilization law—lowering the current rent cap from 6% plus fees to 3%— this would put over $4 million a year back into renters’ pockets, boosting the local economy, and help protect over 4,000 renter households from homelessness.

• If stronger rent protections were in place, $3.5 million in savings would go directly to low-income renters, who are more likely to spend locally—supporting jobs, small businesses, and municipal revenues. 

• Evictions in Passaic County have jumped in recent years from 2,652 filings in 2021 to 6,745 in 2024, with corporate landlords increasingly driving displacement. Most evictions are for non-payment of rent.

• Corporate entities, which are known to evict at a higher rate, have been expanding their holdings in Passaic, including over 1-to-4 unit properties.

• Passaic’s rent stabilization ordinance currently allows landlords to increase rents without any limit, to market-rate, when tenants move out. This loophole incentivizes landlords to evict or push out tenants, so they can raise the rent without limit. Instead, the city should adopt vacancy control, which restricts rent increases both within and between tenancies. Vacancy control is critical for protecting Passaic’s communities from predatory landlords, and for creating longer-term affordability. Otherwise, with tenant turnover, stabilized rents will increasingly come to resemble unfettered, market-rate rents.

Passaic’s rent stabilization law currently covers about 9,800 renter households, and the vast majority of renters are low-income and people of color.  The city’s current 6% cap on rent increases, passed in February 2025, exceeds local market trends: from 2021–2023, Passaic’s median rents rose 4% annually on average. That difference means the current cap is too loose: it does not do enough to limit the existing rent appreciation that is already unaffordable to Passaic renters, putting added and unnecessary strain on working-class families already stretched thin by rising costs. Only four other municipalities in New Jersey with rent stabilization allow rent increases of 6% or more. Most jurisdictions with rent control set much lower thresholds, and several limit increases below the Consumer Price Index (CPI). 

Passaic now faces a critical decision: become a leader in housing justice, or allow speculation and gentrification to push more residents out.

Policymakers can more effectively protect Passaic’s renters – most of whom are already rent-burdened – by lowering permitted increases to 3 percent or the CPI, whichever is lower. Policymakers should take swift action to further improve Passaic’s rent stabilization ordinance by also: enacting vacancy control, ending loopholes like “below market rate” increases, expanding coverage, and strengthening infrastructure for oversight and enforcement. The city should establish processes for tenants to withhold rent until habitability violations are addressed, provide a publicly accessible rental registry, and fully staff its rent stabilization agency.