Andrew Mikula

The past year was a significant one for zoning reform in Massachusetts. Local laws that determine what can be built and where were upended in Cambridge in February, when the city started allowing 6-story residential buildings citywide. A week earlier, the commonwealth finalized regulations allowing accessory dwelling units statewide. Implementation of the MBTA Communities Act, which mandates communities with transit access to zone for some multifamily housing, is ongoing, and in 2025, 60 communities passed zoning intended to comply with it for the first time.

But after some of these reforms have generated controversy and even lawsuits, lawmakers may be hesitant to pursue further zoning reforms, at least at the state level, in 2026. Instead, process-based reforms offer an opportunity to accelerate housing production while avoiding much of the controversy around undermining local control over zoning.

This is because so many of the guardrails around local permitting processes are already controlled at the state level, from special permit vote thresholds to public hearing notification requirements to criteria for issuing a variance.

Less Tangible, Still-Impactful Fixes

Streamlining the approval process feels less tangible than zoning reform, which may in turn make it more politically palatable.

Media materials opposing zoning changes often invoke vivid imagery of gloomy, out-of-scale buildings and bumper-to-bumper traffic. With something as abstract as permitting reform, it’s harder to stoke fears of specific results and easier to argue that reforms will merely hasten the development of more desirable housing.

Public opinion polls show that streamlining the approval process for new housing is broadly popular. In a 2023 Pew Charitable Trusts national survey on land use reforms, 86 percent of respondents supported a requirement that local governments make permitting decisions faster.

But implementing permitting reforms requires much more attention to detail, and enforcing a strict timeline for local decision-making is unlikely to be effective by itself. If local government bodies reach their deadline and don’t feel like their concerns are resolved, they could just deny the project. And as long as the municipality has the power to deny the project, the developer will have little reason not to allow permit granting authorities to extend the application period.

Real Changes Must Get Wonky

The ineffectiveness of permitting “shot clocks” is not just empty speculation. Since 2020, California has required municipalities to either approve or deny a permit application for accessory dwelling units within 60 days. But the average length of the permitting process for ADUs in California, as of 2024, exceeds six months.

Cutting down on permitting delays in Massachusetts requires getting wonkier. Most municipalities conduct site plan reviews, under which they scrutinize technical aspects of architectural and engineering drawings, like vehicle circulation and drainage. But site plans almost always require approval from uncredentialed elected officials and are often subsumed into redundant special permit procedures.

The Massachusetts Legislature should codify site plan review in state law as an administrative process based on objective criteria. Exactly what the criteria are depends on the municipality, but the point is that, for most project proposals, a town staff member should be able to look at the site plan and say “yes, this is allowed” or “no, it isn’t.” The result could be faster and more predictable permitting.

Appeals Process Ripe for Reform

The legal appeals process is also ripe for reform.

A speedy permitting process means nothing if the neighbors can sue and hold up the project in court for years. Requiring a narrow, technical rationale for the appeal could quickly dispense with nuisance cases. A third-party professional would need to verify that development poses a substantial risk of flooding, erosion, or another serious concern.

It’s also important to give more resources to courts that already have land use expertise, where legal decisions tend to be rendered faster. Both appellants and defendants should be able to move a residential permitting-related case to a specialized land court upon request.

Lastly, a zoning change or special permit issuance that allows more housing should never require a supermajority vote of a local elected body. The Baker administration enacted some vote threshold changes, but the Legislature could go much further, reducing all pro-housing rezoning and special permit votes to a simple majority.

Each of these three categories of reform – codifying site plan review, streamlining legal appeals, and reducing vote thresholds – are the subject of multiple pending bills on Beacon Hill in 2026.

Of course, the ultimate goal is downstream of permitting – it’s to build more housing, including market-rate housing, that is intrinsically more affordable than large-lot single-family homes. Doing so will require zoning reform (and many other policy changes) as well.

But for now, there is legislative momentum around permitting reform in Massachusetts, and that’s an opportunity worth capitalizing on in 2026.

Andrew Mikula is a senior housing fellow at the Pioneer Institute in Boston.