Susan Gittelman
A proposed 2026 ballot initiative just certified by Attorney General Andrea Campbell could seed housing production by making it easier to build more affordable single-family starter homes in Massachusetts.
Andrew Mikula, a housing researcher at Boston-based public policy think tank Pioneer Institute, developed a proposal that would prevent municipalities from requiring new single-family home lots of larger than 5,000 square feet and frontage of over 50 feet in residential districts with access to public water and sewer.
One reason Mikula chose that size was because it already exists in state law. Chapter 40A, the zoning enabling act, uses that threshold to grandfather housing built before the enactment of stricter local regulations.
Many suburbs now require homes to be built on lots of at least an acre, or more than eight times larger than the proposed 5,000 square feet.
Polling Shows Support
Mikula, who is working on the ballot initiative in his private capacity, told me he was inspired by two events earlier this year. The first was a poll commissioned by Abundant Housing Massachusetts and conducted by the MassINC Polling group. It found that 78 percent of Massachusetts residents supported building homes on smaller lots and 72 percent supported subdividing large lots into smaller ones.
Rather than policy being determined by the passionate minority of residents who often attend municipal zoning meetings, Mikula thought a ballot initiative might give voice to the majority who want more housing built. The access to public water and sewer requirement also narrows the number of communities where there might be significant opposition.
The second event was in June, when Maine passed legislation that prevented enforcing minimum lot sizes larger than 5,000 square feet in designated growth areas.
“Maine has a far less severe housing shortage and far more vacant and developable land than Massachusetts. If they can do this, then why can’t we?” Mikula said.
Large Lots Force More Expensive Homes
Efforts to stimulate housing development have mostly focused on multifamily developments that house more people, but as long as a critical mass still want to live in single-family homes, their development needs to be spurred as well.
A new research data set finds that 18.5 percent of single-family home construction nationwide bunches at the minimum lot size threshold. It also follows two decades of previous research in concluding that minimum lot size regulations increase home sizes, sales prices and rents.
To cover the cost of larger lots, developers must build larger, more expensive homes. The small, affordable starter homes that dotted the landscape of post-World War II America can rarely be built today, creating a mismatch between supply and demand and putting single-family home ownership out of reach for too many people who want it.
Approaches to zoning were very different in the latter part of the last century. Until the 1960s and ’70s, suburban municipalities in particular viewed restrictive zoning as a way to raise their socioeconomic profiles and mandated large lots. In the 1980s and ’90s, environmental groups often supported large-lot zoning because they thought it saved land from industrial uses. At the time, with many former farms being subdivided, the availability of land was also less of a problem.
But over time, zoning laws came to shut people out of places with better public schools and other amenities. As has been well documented, it has contributed to segregation and undermined social mobility.
Added Layers to Enforcement
“Zoning regulations are overlapping and intertwined,” said Northern Middlesex Council of Governments Executive Director Jennifer Raitt, who served on Gov. Maura Healey’s Unlocking Housing Production Commission (UHPC), which published its report earlier this year. “Sometimes changing one regulation does not immediately expand housing choices because other regulations need to be addressed.”
Raitt used the example of how a zoning change could allow certain types of housing to be built by right, but a project might still be held up by the need to get a special permit to build to a particular height.
Interestingly, the UHPC went beyond Mikula’s proposal in its report, recommending the outright elimination of most minimum residential lot sizes.
Mikula addresses the issue of “overlapping and intertwined” zoning regulations in his ballot initiative by giving the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities authority to administer the provision, provide guidance and promulgate regulations.
One wild card that makes it difficult to determine how much housing the proposal would generate is a lack of reliable data to inventory whether existing lots have access to public water and sewer. The higher that number is, the more impact it could have. Unfortunately, we rely on a patchwork of municipal reporting for this information.
The next hurdle to get on the ballot is for proponents to secure 75,000 signatures, which will require harnessing the frustration among those who have been priced out and channeling it into collective action. It’s a substantial task but not impossible – and perhaps long overdue.
Susan Gittelman is executive director of B’nai B’rith Housing, a nonprofit affordable housing developer currently working in Boston, MetroWest and the North Shore.
