With crises everywhere in Massachusetts in how we provide basic necessities like housing and transportation, should members of the real estate and banking industries get more involved in helping find solutions? 

The answer should be: unequivocally, yes. 

As this paper often highlights in this space and elsewhere, the state is nearing a breaking point on both these issues. 

Workers frequently say they are seriously tempted to change jobs just for a better commute, or even relocate out of state. With companies ever more hobbled by unpredictable roads and a public transit system that make employees late, force key meetings to be rescheduled and damage morale, commercial tenants may be thinking twice about whether they might relocate to somewhere less congested. 

Expensive housing is forcing more and more renters and homebuyers further and further from their jobs, limiting the geographic areas from which a company can expect to hire, increasing the strain on the state’s transportation networks and on workers’ psyches as they worry about their ever-more-stressed family budgets.  

If these twin threats to our state’s economic vitality aren’t frightening enough, they also have significant implications for the region’s carbon emissions as workers and businesses become even more spread out than they already are. 

This is an all-hands-on-deck situation, and everyone should be pitching in, especially those who, by virtue of their day jobs, are steeped in the details of these problems. Even those who handle their firm’s brand with kid gloves will find benefits in being seen as part of the solution. 

But you don’t have to get up on a soapbox to be of help, or become a figure on your town’s sometimes-toxic Facebook discussion group.  

One of the best things anyone can do is simply to make sure their friends and neighbors are informed and engaged in the issues.  

Use your expertise and show them the hard facts. Do they know that the state is already almost 100,000 homes short of demand? Do they know that building multifamily homes in town centers and by transit stops helps reduce traffic, especially if parking requirements are reduced? Do they know how new development help towns dodge Proposition 2 ½ restrictions? Do they know how many more people can a bus lane move per hour than a lane of cars? 

The sad fact about many of our communities is that small networks of residents tend to dominate political discussions, and many of these have backed policies that restrict new construction and more sensible transit systems. Given the diffuse nature of planning power in Massachusetts, more voices need to join the conversation to support the pro-development and pro-transit solutions evidence shows the state needs to keep thriving.