Boston Mayor Thomas Menino announced a plan to add 30,000 new housing units in the city by the year 2020 in a speech to the Boston Municipal Research Bureau this morning.

"I have always said that the status quo is moving backward. Just moving forward isn’t enough. We have to move ahead aggressively and relentlessly," the mayor said, according to a copy of his remarks obtained by Banker & Tradesman.

Menino also hailed signs of progress in the city’s commercial and residential real estate sectors, saying he anticipates the city will triple last year’s total of $1.6 billion in new development and highlighting the expected commencement of work on the old Filene’s site in Downtown Crossing later this spring, redevelopment plans afoot for the Bronstein Center in South Boston waterfront and the anticipated opening of a Wegman’s supermarket in the Fenway.

The new units called for in the "Housing Boston 2020 Plan," first reported by the Globe, would come on top of 20,000 new housing units created in Boston between 2000 and 2010.

Barry Bluestone, the director of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern and lead author of The Boston Foundation’s annual Boston housing report card, said the mayor’s plan was an important step in the right direction for housing policy in Massachusetts.

"We projected, in the last Greater Boston Housing Report Card, the need for an additional 12,000 units of housing per year in all of Greater Boston – that’s 161 communities – through 2020," he said. "This is a large down payment on that."