A triple-decker stands on Washington Street in Roslindale in this 2023 file photo. Mayor Michelle Wu’s home neighborhood is the only one so far to have seen a rezoning under her “Squares + Streets” initiative. Photo by James Sanna | Banker & Tradesman Staff / File
Four years ago, as COVID tore across the globe and people retreated to their homes with the computer as a window to the outside, then-City Councilor Michelle Wu looked into a Zoom screen and diagnosed Boston’s housing woes.
“I think it’s the fact that we are really operating the most complex, opaque political development approvals process anywhere in the country,” she said during a mayoral candidate conversation in August 2021. It’s designed so that “the only way to build anything is to come before city government and offer something,” she said.
On one level, the city is able to “extract something from every single project,” because of the case-by-case review, she said. “But we get locked into this awful status quo where we are spending so much time, energy, and financial resources on navigating the process instead of just creating the actual units that we need desperately.”
Rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Boston was in a pandemic price valley as she spoke – about $2,000 a month – bottoming out after rising rents hit $2,200 just before the shutdowns began in March 2020.
Now mayor, Wu is skating to a second term, in a city feeling one of the most pronounced housing crunches in the country, where the average one-bedroom rental will run a person $2,700 a month. The city’s real-time vacancy rate of about 1.5 percent is lower than the broader metro area, which is itself at just under 1.8 percent, when a healthy rate is closer to 5 to 8 percent. Permitting and housing starts are down, with interest rates chilling the market.
Residents Squeezed, New Zoning Slow to Arrive
Residents have been feeling the squeeze. Three-quarters of Boston residents say the city government is doing only a fair or poor job making Boston more affordable, according to a survey for the pro-housing group Abundant Housing Massachusetts that polled 550 Boston residents in August. Some 43 percent rated efforts as poor, compared to just 17 percent who said the city was doing a good job.
But housing and planning organizations largely offered a gentle assessment of the mayor’s housing record. Wu is set to enter her second term and criticism seems muted following her 49-point thrashing of Josh Kraft in the September preliminary, which chased him from the race.
“Nothing is perfect,” said Josh Zakim, Wu’s former City Council colleague and current executive director of the research and housing-creation advocacy organization Housing Forward MA, in an interview. “I think they’re doing a really good job, though, and to the extent that we’re not getting done what needs to get done, most of that is attributable to the macroeconomic environment.”
Substantial majorities of those polled said they somewhat or strongly support an array of policy goals, including allowing buildings up to 6 stories to be built around the city and up to 12 stories near MBTA stops, allowing more flexibility in parking requirements to build more housing, and joining the rest of the state in allowing accessory dwelling units to be built as-of-right.
Neighboring Cambridge ushered in one of the most ambitious rezonings in the country in February when it retooled its zoning to allow residential buildings up to six stories if the lot size allows and at least 20 percent of the residential units are income restricted.
Seventy-eight percent of respondents said they would support a comprehensive update of the city’s zoning code, a goal that Wu herself touted in her initial campaign and mayoral term so far.
Her signature Squares and Streets initiative – which offers a “toolbox” of new five new zoning codes with different height and density variants to boost production and make building in business areas in main corridors more predictable – has moved slowly.
Since its launch, new zoning – like more multifamily housing near and above businesses, required outdoor amenities like decks and parks, and yard standards to promote climate resilience – has been adopted only in part of Roslindale.
An Echo of Past Failures
Even hyperlocal rezoning efforts, like Squares and Streets, can run into the buzzsaw of community resistance. A Squares and Streets rezoning in the Codman Square area of Dorchester was postponed to 2026, as it and a Fields Corner rezoning plan quickly saw pushback from skeptical neighbors concerned about density and displacement.
For those who remember the Mayor Marty Walsh era of targeted rezoning, there are echoes of the ill-fated JP/Rox plan which remains little more than informal guidance after local opposition stalled the final rezoning push.
“At best, the last four years have been tentative,” said Jesse Kanson-Benanav, executive director of Abundant Housing Massachusetts.
The market alone won’t create affordable housing, he noted, praising the city’s work to preserve and expand its subsidized housing portfolio. But zoning reform efforts have been “piecemeal” and there have not been the sorts of sweeping policy changes that other blue cities have experimented with to positive results, he said.
“From a pro-housing perspective, it’s clear that we need to build affordable housing,” he said. “And we need to make sure that housing that’s on the market, for the 80 percent of Boston residents that don’t live in affordable housing, is reasonably priced.”
Wu Shies from Production Goals
Wu’s administration has stayed away from the long-term housing goals that were a point of pride for her predecessors, including her one-time boss Tom Menino. Even by Wu’s more modest timeframe, announced halfway through her term and extending only to 2025, the housing picture has been shaky.
After hedging on whether the administration would share publicly any housing goals – “I don’t want to get caught up in a number,” Wu said in December 2023 – her office rolled out projections a week or so later. Her administration projected that 8,300 new market-rate units and 4,700 new income-restricted homes would be permitted between 2021 and 2025.
As of August, 7,173 market rate units had been permitted along with 3,661 income restricted units, according to data from the housing office. According to city data, just 2,389 units started construction in 2024, a slight boost over the prior year but well below the 4,406 starts in 2022. The public tracker for the city’s housing goals, which tracks permitting but not housing starts, has not been updated since December 2024.
Permitting approvals are one of the most optimistic measures of new housing, since securing a permit is no guarantee that project financing will come through or labor and materials will be available when needed. For instance, the enormous Suffolk Downs project was approved in 2020 – set to bring 10,000 new homes and sweeps of offices and parks to the 109-acre former horse track site. But progress dragged for years, as the pandemic crippled the construction industry, with the first 475-unit apartment complex opening in October 2024.
At the close of 2024, the city’s housing progress tracker predicted “that the market will begin to rebound in 2025 from the dip in 2023. We expect production in 2025 will be closer to the strong market conditions of 2022.”
But permits in the first eight months of 2025 were a hair lower than that of 2024, according to city data. By August, 1,686 units were permitted, compared with 1,693 by that time the prior year, a far cry from the January to August period of 2022 when 3,343 units were permitted.
Asked if the mayor’s policies align with the goals laid out in the poll, the mayor’s office did not address the density proposals or the suggested goal of 30,000 new units in Boston presented to poll respondents, but instead issued a statement.
“Over the last three years, our administration has built more affordable housing than in a generation, made city land free for developers to keep residents and families in their homes and connected to opportunity, and begun streamlining permitting processes and updating our zoning code for more clarity and predictability,” a spokesperson said. “As the pressure on families continues to rise amid unpredictable federal policies, the City will continue to build on our progress through innovative solutions to address the regional housing crisis and ensure Boston is a home for everyone.”
Fear that Goals Attract Local Resistance
Yet the absence of a clear overall production target makes it difficult to assess whether these efforts add up to enough. Mayor Tom Menino’s 2013 “Housing Boston” plan called for 30,000 units by 2020, while Mayor Marty Walsh’s “Housing A Changing City” report set a target of 53,000 new units by 2030 – later raised to 69,000 in 2018 as population growth surged ahead of expectations.
The mayoral terms ended without the end goals completed, though Walsh’s former economic development chief, John Barros, noted during his unsuccessful run for mayor in 2021 that the city was on track to meet the elevated projections.
Wu’s reluctance to set a long-term goal reflects broader anxieties among municipal leaders. Planners at one point pitched the 17 communities in the Metro Mayors Coalition Housing Task Force, convened by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council and initially headed up by Walsh and Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone, on local production targets for every municipality, with specific breakdowns for housing types and affordability levels.
But many of the mayors pushed back, arguing that these goals would invite critique from advocates and resistance from the communities.
Housing goals ultimately come down to accountability versus flexibility. Long-term targets provide a yardstick for progress but can become politically toxic if economic conditions shift. Short-term metrics allow for adjustments but make it harder to assess whether the city is keeping pace with housing demand, said Lizzi Weyant, executive director of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council.
For now, Wu is betting on short-term metrics to meet the long-term needs. The approach may prove pragmatic given economic uncertainties, but it also means residents lack a clear answer to whether Boston is building enough housing or falling further behind.
“The challenge, and you see this in the polling results, is that there’s generally broad support for more housing production,” Weyant said. “And that’s the centerpiece of the Wu administration, but the individual projects are still very difficult.”
A longer vesrion of this article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
