The state Senate is preparing a “bold” omnibus housing legislation that’s giving housing advocates an opening to push ambitious reform ideas. iStock photo
What’s the case for optimism about housing progress in 2026?
On one hand, it seems dark.
Developers say it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to get projects to pencil in the city of Boston – the traditional powerhouse of production – thanks to high construction costs and affordability rules.
A proposal to enact severe rent control rules statewide looks likely to make it onto the fall statewide ballot, threatening to suck attention from all other housing debates.
Federal rental assistance programs are in doubt, threatening to upend not only low-income renters’ lives, but the balance sheets of many, many landlords.
And local fights to implement the state’s biggest single housing reform to date, the MBTA Communities law, are still ringing in some people’s ears.
Add to that the state Legislature’s historical habit of waiting multiple years between touching contentious issues, and it’s easy to see why some observers privately express anxiety about whether ambitious ideas have any chance of making it through Beacon Hill before the legislative session ends.
But housing activists say the conversation has changed.
“If you look at the crisis a the MBTA years ago, the Globe covered it extensively. It was in your face, right? Trains breaking down for days, some shutdowns during snowstorms, somebody jumping off a bridge and swimming home, right? Those stories are in your face, and that crisis is in your face,” said Jonathan Berk, a prominent housing activist and the board chair of advocacy group Abundant Housing-MA. “And so as [the housing crisis] slowly trickles higher up the socioeconomic classes, and up to corporations that are having a hard time hiring for very senior positions, you start to hear more and more people saying, ‘Look, we’ve got to fix this.”
Senate Plans ‘Bold’ Bill
Perhaps the most visible measure of that is state Senate President Karen Spilka’s declared intent to bring forward a “bold” package of housing reforms in 2026. Her declaration to GBH News in mid-November came just days after Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll promised an audience at the release of the annual Greater Boston Housing Report Card that the Healey administration was “not done on housing” after passing the $5.16 billion Affordable Homes Act in 2024.
Spilka’s given that task to Sen. Julian Cyr, the Senate co-chair of the Joint Committee on Housing, with the instructions that “nothing’s off the table,.”
“If you look at polling, if you ask people what’s the biggest issue in Massachusetts, what do they talk about? What are they identifying? It’s housing and it’s affordability, and it’s affordability largely tied to housing,” Cyr said in an interview with Banker & Tradesman late last month.
Cyr described the omnibus bill his committee is assembling as a “broad” and likely to include elements of zoning and permitting reform bills already passed out of the Joint Committee on Housing. Other issues in the mix: a push for a regional-level real estate transfer fee on the Cape and Islands to pay for new workforce housing, programs like support for first-time homebuyers, and how to pay for those subsidies “in a fiscal environment where state revenues are, if not shrinking, going to be pretty tight for the next few years.”
“And then certainly, right, there’s a whole host of conversation about protections for renters, certainly with the [rent control] ballot initiatives,” Cyr said.
James Sanna
YIMBY, YIGBY Bills
Two of the state’s biggest housing advocacy organizations, CHAPA and Abundant Housing-MA, have thrown their weight behind a wide-ranging piece of legislation that would legalize building up to five homes on residential-zoned lots with water and sewer services, remove minimum lot-size and parking requirements and rein in some of the most aggressive municipal septic regulations that have hamstrung new housing on Cape Cod, among numerous other provisions.
Dubbed the “YIMBY Bill,” the legislation recently got the Joint Committee on Housing’s stamp of approval after being combined with the so-called “Yes In God’s Backyard Bill,” or YIGBY Bill, that would let faith-based institutions build mixed-income multifamily housing on land they own by right. The idea, backer say, is to give congregations a new means of financial support while clearing the way for those congregations that see providing housing as part of their mission. The measure could conservatively generate 60,000 to 80,000 new homes, a recent analysis found.
“I’m eternally optimistic, but I have reason to be when an issue is impacting every single person” but when federal policy is so uncertain, said Rachel Heller, CHAPA’s CEO. “We don’t know which [federal] programs will be will be funded, which programs will be stable, which programs will be around to support people in accessing food and housing. That’s when it’s really important to look at what we can do at the state level and in each of our communities and to pull every lever we’ve got.”
Other bills CHAPA is pushing this year, Heller said, include one that would provide technical education for local land-use boards and another that would define “site plan review.” The latter is needed to write rules of the road for these types of reviews towns and cities are still allowed to require for as-of-right developments like those being legalized by the MBTA Communities law, Heller said.
“It’s setting clear, predictable expectations for our municipalities, for people who live there and for the developers. In the past, we’ve seen site plan review processes really stretch out for a long time. It could be a year or more. And when that happens, you have a developer that is holding on to the land, paying for all those carrying costs,” she said. “We’ve seen over the last few years, while they’re holding on to that land, all of the costs are going up – whether it’s building materials or labor or all of these, all of the costs associated with development are going up. And so, at the end of a site plan review process, the development could cost a lot more.”
