July 10th, 2026

Rockville Renters United celebrates the passage of a rental algorithm ban in Rockville and improvements to the Landlord Tenant Code as a step toward achieving true housing justice in our city. We are grateful to the Rockville renters who tirelessly advocated and organized for their neighbors and, without which, this update would likely never have been prioritized. We would also like to thank city staff for their work in reaching out to tenants and tenant organizers in the city for input and critique. We also continue to be grateful to Councilmembers Izola Shaw and David Myles for their support in the ongoing fight for rent stabilization, among other tenant protections.

This update to our city’s code includes measures that Rockville Renters United has long advocated for. Chiefly, the banning of rental pricing algorithms in our city; achieving one of our five core policy goals. Also included in the updated code are other measures that we applaud, such as restrictions on some discriminatory pre-lease screening practices and limits on junk fees.

This measure overall is a positive step for our city, but there is still much we must fight for to ease the extreme imbalance of power between corporate landlords and  tenants. Critically, the majority of the Mayor and Council continues to ignore and even censor the single largest request brought forward by renters for the last three years: rent stabilization. It has become clear that the majority’s logic for censoring this topic – that rent stabilization will prevent new development in this city – has failed. Far from developers flooding into Rockville, new multifamily housing projects have dried up while our eviction rate increased 4% in 2025. Meanwhile, the parts of Montgomery County protected by rent stabilization are seeing new housing and an eviction rate that declined by 7% in the same period.

Other protections were either removed from staff’s original recommendations or eliminated from existing code entirely. Two-year lease renewals at a single rate as a standard first offer, a protection enjoyed by the rest of Montgomery County, were stripped from the original proposal by a majority of the council. Similarly, the removal of a requirement for landlords to report rent increases to the city on lease renewal represents the elimination of the only tool, however small, that Rockville renters had to hold rent-gouging landlords accountable in the absence of rent stabilization.

Still, this code update represents a hard-earned first step in achieving housing justice in Rockville. While banning rental pricing algorithms benefits thousands of Rockville households, it still leaves the half of our city who rents vulnerable to rent gouging and other abusive practices in a housing market that is increasingly beholden to Wall Street investors and private equity funds. Housing justice advocates in Rockville are organizing to deliver these protections, and we fight until the values of our hard-working residents are reflected in the laws of our city.

July 24th, 2025

Rockville Renters United is incredibly proud of the many dozens of our neighbors who showed up at the July 21st Mayor and Council meeting to demonstrate their strong support of rent stabilization. We are deeply grateful for the community that has formed around this topic over the past year and for coming together to advocate for the needs of the nearly 50% of Rockville residents who are renters.

We also commend Councilmembers Zola Shaw and Dr. David Myles for their continued fight for rent stabilization and for continuing to stand on the side of strong, community-centric housing policy in Rockville. The supporters of rent stabilization who turned out and shared their perspectives were a true, diverse reflection of our city.

This community came out yet again to the Mayor and Council meeting on July 21st with a simple hope: that our elected leaders would allow a good-faith and fully informed discussion of how rent stabilization and protections against predatory rent increases fit as a complementary part of the city’s overall housing strategy. We were again rebuffed. Mayor Monique Ashton and Councilmembers Adam Van Grack, Barry Jackson, Kate Fulton, and Marissa Valeri voted once more against protecting Rockville renters with rent stabilization; a protection that is enjoyed in most of the county and neighboring jurisdictions. Further, they voted to indefinitely ban an informed discussion of rent stabilization.

We are dismayed with their vote, but we found the way in which certain council members choose to address their constituents outright disturbing. In a combative voice, Councilmember Van Grack presented misleading information as an excuse to ignore the community members assembled in front of him. The most distressing part for us, as a Rockville community organization, was watching Councilmembers Jackson and Valeri dismiss our advocacy as merely the political machinations of some shadowy external group they could not convincingly pinpoint or define.

It is beyond troubling that our elected leaders are so disconnected from their community that this is how they choose to interpret the unprecedented levels of true community organizing among Rockville residents. The drivers of this movement are not in the shadows. We are here, in the light of the council chamber. We have repeatedly stood before our elected leaders over the past year, asking them to protect the renters of Rockville from the predatory actions of the handful of bad actors who we’ve watched seek excessive profits at the expense of our neighbors and ourselves.

The council was most certainly correct in one thing: there is room here for a good-faith, nuanced discussion about how rent stabilization fits as part of Rockville’s housing strategy. We have requested that for over a year. While we still hope for that discussion, the Council’s actions make it clear that we will continue to wait.  But we will not wait quietly, nor idly. We will make known across our community what has happened. We will continue to creatively and energetically advocate for ourselves and our neighbors. And we will continue to make ourselves into the leaders our community deserves.