High rent costs are not something a town/municipality can solve. In a most ways, it's also something a state government cannot solve.
"High" rent is relative to the area, and rent is high across the entire country currently.
Lack of rental housing drives up rental prices. The lack of rental housing is largely due to unnaturally low interest rates. People qualified for oversized loans, and bought up the rental supply, converting them into homes instead.
Since cash was easy to acquire via loans, this resulted in an unprecedented period of time where housing prices were driven upwards with near-zero limiting factor. That was the market where people were overbidding asking-price by $50K+ without even seeing the house... that was/is a very unnatural market. This bidding process resulted in significantly overvalued homes, which made them inaccessible to lower-income people. So the rental market shrunk significantly, and housing prices went through the roof... then runaway inflation came knocking, making everything that much worse.
Which is to say, all of this is the creation of poor federal policy, and there isn't much your state or city can do about it.
No, rent is not high across the entire country. It's high in a select few metros, and fairly low everywhere else. Municipalities can't unilaterally reduce rents, but the can exacerbate the problem by disincentivizing housing through regulation and price controls.
"High" rent is relative to the area, and rent is high across the entire country currently.
Lack of rental housing drives up rental prices. The lack of rental housing is largely due to unnaturally low interest rates. People qualified for oversized loans, and bought up the rental supply, converting them into homes instead.
Since cash was easy to acquire via loans, this resulted in an unprecedented period of time where housing prices were driven upwards with near-zero limiting factor. That was the market where people were overbidding asking-price by $50K+ without even seeing the house... that was/is a very unnatural market. This bidding process resulted in significantly overvalued homes, which made them inaccessible to lower-income people. So the rental market shrunk significantly, and housing prices went through the roof... then runaway inflation came knocking, making everything that much worse.
Which is to say, all of this is the creation of poor federal policy, and there isn't much your state or city can do about it.