Gov. Maura Healey walks on a red carpet heading into the House chamber for her State of the Commonwealth address on Jan. 22, 2026. Photo by Ella Adams | State House News Service

Gov. Maura Healey pledged to beat her administration’s own housing production goals and expand first-time homebuyer assistance but stopped short of endorsing big new policy ideas in her “State of the Commonwealth” speech.

The state Senate is working on a package of reforms to attack the state’s housing crisis that Senate President Karen Spilka promised will be “bold” and where “nothing is off the table.”

Housing advocates are pushing for the inclusion of measures that would legalize small multifamily buildings on lots with sewer and water service, and larger affordable housing projects on religiously-owned land, among other big ideas.

Speaking in the House of Representatives chamber in the State House Thursday night, Healey announced a number of policy initiatives aimed at affordability, most prominently a pledge to buy down Massachusetts residents’ utility bills this winter.

She also ticked off her administration’s housing accomplishments, like statewide ADU legalization, state financing for office-to-residential conversions and a growing program to sell off state land for housing development, as well as her proposal to change state environmental regulations to reduce permitting time for big housing developments.

But the biggest housing policy announcement of the night was relatively small: expanding a pair of programs that help first-time homebuyers.

The state will be dedicating $25 million to expand a MassHousing down payment assistance program for low- and moderate-income homebuyers via “available capital resources,” a spokesperson said. An unspecified amount of “additional resources” will be channeled to the quasi-public housing finance agency’s mortgage products, to lower mortgage interest rates for those same first-time buyers by 0.55 percent. MassHousing has funded home loans for over 5,500 buyers over the last three years.

“For the thousands of families out there looking for housing, looking for their first home, help is on the way,” the governor said Thursday.

Such demand-side supports commonly attract criticism from real estate industry figures and housing scholars when they aren’t paired with new supply. More buyers in a market, according to conventional economic thinking, means more people bidding up the price of an asset faster.

Data from the Massachusetts Association of Realtors shows December closed with a 13.5 percent year-on-year drop in the number of single-family homes for sale, and a 4.2 percent drop in the number of condominiums for sale, despite an up to 35 percent springtime surge in the latter. Industry leaders say they’re hopeful the spring will bring a pulse of new homes for sale, driven by a modest expected drop in mortgage interest rates.

“Massachusetts’ affordability challenge is first and foremost a supply problem. We went decades without building enough homes and that’s what drives prices,” a spokesperson for the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities said in an email. “The Healey-Driscoll Administration is tackling this from both directions: accelerating home production statewide while also helping first-time buyers who are being shut out because they can’t clear the down payment hurdle. This assistance is targeted to income-eligible first-time homebuyers, so it helps households already trying to buy a home.”

In Thursday’s speech, Healey framed fixes to the cost of housing squarely in terms of supply, at a time when left-wing groups are trying to pass a harsh statewide rent control measure that critics say would make the problem even worse. The governor has previously stated her opposition to the measure.

“We really haven’t been building homes in a big way since the ‘90s,” she said. “Lots of people come here because it’s such a great place. But not enough homes have been built.”

“Experts tell us we need to build 220,000 new homes by 2035. We’re not just going to meet that, we’re going to beat that,” she added.

And she urged her audience to “lean in” on finding more housing fixes, without endorsing any of the additional reforms in play for the Senate’s planned reform bill, nor a proposed ballot question that would dramatically shrink the minimum lot size needed to build a single-family home, which supporters say will enable the construction of new starter homes.