Jonathan Berk

Across the United States, 2025 marked a turning point for housing policy. After decades of underbuilding, worsening affordability and regulatory drift, states and cities moved beyond pilot programs and symbolic, slow, reforms and began dismantling the rules that made housing scarce in the first place.

What once seemed politically impossible is now happening across red, blue and purple states alike, in ways that should inspire us here in Massachusetts.

The emerging consensus is striking: The housing shortage is not a failure of the market, but the predictable outcome of decades of regulation that constrained supply. Fixing it requires structural reform, not just subsidies layered on top of scarcity.

Three states in particular, California, Texas, Oregon and Montana, illustrate how wildly different political cultures have arrived at the same conclusion: It’s time to build.

California: Reform and Transit-Oriented Density

California’s housing crisis has long been amplified by the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which has been routinely used to delay or block infill housing through litigation. In 2025, the state finally curtailed CEQA’s role in certain types of housing production.

SB 131 added a common-sense fix: If a project narrowly misses one exemption criterion, review is limited to that issue rather than triggering a full environmental impact report. Together, these changes replaced multi-year delays with a 30-day approval window for qualifying projects, cutting millions in soft costs and uncertainty.

The state also advanced long-stalled efforts to align housing policy with transit investment. SB 79 requires major metro counties to allow buildings up to nine stories near high-frequency transit stops, overriding local zoning that previously reserved even transit-rich areas for single-family homes.

 Texas: Broad, State Level Preemption

Texas pursued a different strategy, focused more on preempting local rules that inflate costs and suppress supply. It recognized that despite the state’s recent rapid growth, building continues to be constrained and results in a furtherance of unsustainable sprawl as opposed to infill housing production.

SB 840 limits the ability of cities to block residential development on underused commercial land. It caps parking requirements and dimensional standards statewide, acknowledging that strip malls and office parks are one of the largest untapped sources of new infill housing.

SB 15 tackled the entry-level market by capping minimum lot sizes in large cities at 3,000 square feet and restricting excessive setback and frontage rules. The goal is straightforward: Allow smaller homes on smaller lots and restore a pathway to homeownership that has all but disappeared in fast-growing metros.

Texas also legalized single-stair apartment buildings up to six stories through SB 2835, with local opt-in. Austin adopted the reform immediately. Combined with Dallas eliminating most parking minimums and new limits on abutter appeals, Texas is quickly on pace to establish one of the most permissive housing environments in the country.

Montana: The Montana Miracle Continues

Montana has quietly become one of the most effective housing reform states in the nation. In 2025, lawmakers built on earlier zoning reforms and adopted recommendations from the Governor’s Housing Task Force that would be familiar to anyone following housing debates in coastal states.

HB 492 sharply reduced parking mandates, banning more than one space per unit statewide and eliminating minimums entirely for small homes, affordable housing, adaptive reuse and assisted living. SB 213 legalized single-stair residential buildings up to six stories under modern fire safety standards.

Reform in 2025 was not limited to a few states. Maine legalized up to three units on most residential lots statewide and four in designated growth areas, while limiting local parking and lot size rules. New Hampshire legalized single-stair buildings up to four stories and capped parking requirements at one space per unit statewide. Oregon expanded its middle housing framework with enforceable production targets and pre-approved plans. Cities from Denver to Chicago to Salem, Massachusetts eliminated or sharply reduced parking minimums.

Massachusetts Must Move Faster

What made 2025 different was pace. States stopped treating housing reform as a one-off achievement and started legislating as if scarcity were an emergency. They passed multiple production-focused bills in a single session, attacking costs and constraints from several directions at once.

That lesson is unavoidable for Massachusetts. One housing bill every two years is not a strategy, it is an admission of an entrenched unwillingness to confront the scale of a problem we created.

After decades of layered regulation, supply cannot be unlocked through isolated reforms. Each legislative session must be a housing session, advancing multiple bills that legalize housing, reduce costs, and make production predictable.

Other states have shown this approach is possible. The question is whether Massachusetts will follow, or continue pretending a crisis decades in the making can be solved through incrementalism.

Jonathan Berk is the founder of the real estate and placemaking consultancy re:MAIN and the board chair of Abundant Housing Massachusetts.