Salim Furth

I have the privilege of working on housing policy all over the U.S. But in Massachusetts, it’s personal. I’m writing this piece sitting at my parents’ kitchen counter near the Orange Line. (Don’t worry, Mom, I tidied up.) They’ve temporarily downsized to let my brother’s growing family live in their own, larger condo. The months of house-hunting for my brother, his wife and kids have stretched into years.

It’s sad that middle-class New Englanders weren’t paying attention to unaffordability as it swamped the working poor, then the working class. But now it’s coming for their own children. Boston’s kids can grow up and move to Atlanta or Houston or Maine or Dallas or Virginia. Or the state can allow them to build homes here.

Massachusetts legislators have taken important steps to address the housing supply crunch plaguing the Bay State. But they should not imagine that the work they’ve done is equal to the size of this deficit of attainable homes, built up over decades of exclusionary, anti-development policy at all levels of government.

 Counting the Wins

In a new policy brief, my colleagues and I suggest 17 steps state legislatures can take to tackle housing unaffordability. Massachusetts has already enacted three of those ideas. Now, Massachusetts leaders can think ahead toward longer-range reforms to allow more and better housing.

The 193rd General Court passed a law allowing accessory dwelling units  on most single-family lots, incorporating best practices that took years to work out on the West Coast.

Another accomplishment, the MBTA Communities law, requires Boston-area towns to incorporate transit-oriented multifamily zoning. Less known is the wonky reform to the voting rules for zoning changes, which former Gov. Charlie Baker branded “housing choice.” That change has helped towns pass the zoning changes needed to comply with MBTA Communities.

Next Steps

Housing abundance in Massachusetts is going to require years of local politics and prosaic planning in cities and towns. But state legislators can move the starting line forward for this work by adopting principles and rules that make sense in any context.

To create clear, fair rules that apply to all applicants, Massachusetts should imitate Rhode Island’s recent laws that require towns to publish “specific and objective” criteria for conditional or special-use permits and for aesthetic design review. Without published criteria, builders are left guessing and towns open themselves to the appearance of corruption. The legislature should also grant specific, limited powers for towns to perform site plan review, which has long been a source of confusion for towns and land use lawyers.

Second, too many Massachusetts towns have zoning in place which makes existing homes illegal. Famously, just 22 buildings in the entire city of Somerville conformed to its zoning code before a wholesale rewrite. Under such senseless zoning, new development is pushed through a lengthy review process and even renovations can be delayed.

Third, Massachusetts legislators can reduce housing costs, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, expand property rights, advance socioeconomic equity and slash busywork in planning departments with one neat trick: Eliminate all parking minimums. Cities from Cambridge to Spokane have taken this step; the result is that new development comes with the parking it needs, not the parking that a decades-old ordinance imagines.

Finally, several state legislatures have addressed the post-COVID imbalance between office space (too much) and housing (too little) by allowing residential uses as a matter of right in most commercial zones. Districts of mixed residential and commercial use have helped buoy major city downtowns, like Austin, Texas’s, and cozy town centers, like Walpole’s.

Looking Ahead

Some reforms will take longer than a single legislative session. These require consensus-building across many stakeholders and a reconsideration of the ways construction has been done (or not done) for most professionals’ working lives. Change will be slow, but potentially transformative.

In Connecticut and four other states, lawmakers took the first steps in 2024 to re-legalize 6-story buildings with a single staircase without compromising safety standards. To enable higher-quality apartments, especially those with larger, family-friendly layouts, Massachusetts should follow suit, instructing its building and fire code experts to create standards for single-stair buildings. To complement this effort, the state can also become the first to allow small, European-code elevators, which can bring down costs and expand accessibility.

The city of Boston, which is not covered by the state’s standard land use rules, needs a wholesale revolution in land use procedure. It is too soon to evaluate Mayor Michelle Wu’s creation of a city planning department in July, but reorganization on that scale is clearly part of the solution. Boston is the only major city in the U.S. to rely so heavily on variances, each one a flag showing where zoning and planning have failed. State legislators should work with the city to ensure that the enabling statutes are not preventing reform – and should use them to force change if the city remains addicted to variances after a few years pass.

Housing abundance and the resulting drop in prices won’t happen overnight. But theory, research and the experience of other states show that housing supply reforms are the path to broadly attainable housing.

Salim Furth is a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.