We all agree Massachusetts needs more housing. To get there, do we need a shinier, more tempting carrot, a bigger stick or something in between? iStock illustration
Do we need a shinier, more tempting carrot, a bigger stick or something in between?
That is the question now, with the Bay State’s drive to boost housing production sputtering after years of cheerleading by our state’s top elected officials and the passage of some modest zoning reforms.
Developers have dramatically scaled back on plans for new single-family homes and apartment and condo buildings, as seen in a big drop in the number of building permits issued.
There were around 14,300 new housing units permitted in Greater Boston last year, and the numbers are expected to come in even lower this year, according to a report released last week by The Boston Foundation’s research team, Boston Indicators.
That’s after jumping to around 19,800 in 2021, Boston Indicators found in its annual Greater Boston Housing Report Card.
Comparing the first half of 2025 to the first half of 2021 suggests things got even worse this year: just 5,456 were permitted in the region between Jan. 1 and June 30. That’s a 44 percent drop from the same period in 2021.
We All Agree on the Problem
Just about everyone agrees that the state, and especially Greater Boston, needs a lot more housing than it has now after decades of chronic underbuilding and surging rents.
Housing unaffordability, already a serious issue before the pandemic, has gone from bad to catastrophic over the past five years – something the Boston Indicators report puts a particularly fine point on.
Statewide, the median price of a home in Massachusetts, as of the end of September, had jumped from just under $300,000 in 2010 to $440,000 in 2020 to $640,000 in 2025, according to The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman.
We need hundreds of thousands of new homes over the next two decades to have any hope of putting a dent in prices.
Yet, how to get there has become the subject of an increasingly heated debate that is splitting roughly down party lines.
At the center of the debate is the MBTA Communities Act.
Healey, Campbell: More Sticks
The 2021 law, which requires towns, cities and suburbs to open their doors to significant amounts of new apartment and condo development near T stations, has sparked fierce pushback and challenges in a small but notable number of communities.
A much larger number of towns have complied on paper while attempting to craft the new zoning rules in ways that would minimize any new multifamily housing development, according to Boston University professors Katherine Levine Einstein and Maxwell Palmer. The two surveyed MBTA Communities implementation in a supplement to this year’s Greater Boston Housing Report Card.
The state’s Democratic establishment, led by Gov. Maura Healey and Attorney General Andrea Campbell, has come down on the side of enforcement.
Campbell sued and won cases against Milton and other communities that have refused to follow the law.
Pro-housing groups are now pushing for a bigger stick. In particular, advocates would like to see more stringent zoning reform that closes loopholes towns have used, per a recent CommonWealth Beacon story reporting from September’s YIMBYtown conference.
Any such legislation would also likely include more serious consequences for noncompliance than the loss of a handful of grants, as has been the case under the MBTA Communities law.
GOP Candidate: More Carrots
On the other side of the political aisle is Mike Kennealy, the state’s housing chief under Baker and now a Republican candidate for governor.
Kennealy has been outspoken in his criticism of what he sees as heavy-handed attempts by Healey and Campbell to enforce compliance with the law.
Kennealy, who oversaw the crafting of 2022 guidelines implementing the law, clearly wants more carrots and fewer sticks.
“The governor and the attorney general have effectively weaponized us against cities and towns and made it [MBTA Communities law] much more of a mandate with threats and lawsuits,” Kennealy told me in interview for my newsletter, Contrarian Boston, earlier this month.
Kennealy has a point. For the law to work, there has to be some level of cooperation and buy-in from communities.
With 177 towns and cities subject to the MBTA Communities law, there is no way, given the resources and staffing available to the state government, to rigidly police away so-called “paper compliance” that isn’t likely to produce new homes.
And even if ornery, proudly independent New England communities could be forced into sullen acquiescence, that would be far short of the kind of wholehearted effort needed to make plans for new housing a reality.
Scott Van Voorhis
Make New Homes Attractive
But simply relying on cheerleading or happy talk to encourage local officials to do the right thing won’t be enough either.
After all, governors have tried that approach now for a quarter century, and it clearly hasn’t worked.
In the end, it will likely take some mix of carrots and sticks to get more housing approved and built in Greater Boston and across the state.
It may also require effectively bribing communities to do the right thing.
Obviously, we are not talking about anything illegal here.
But in their report, the Boston Indicators and Boston University researchers raise the idea of using additional state aid to reward towns that go above and beyond in approving new housing units and doing what they can to get them built.
Yes, it’s true there is no evidence that new apartment buildings bust local school budgets. And yes, some multifamily buildings are able to generate more in property taxes than an underperforming retail or office building.
But if we want more housing, we are going to have to pay for it and make it not just revenue-neutral for cities, towns and suburbs to add units, but a real profit center.
Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist and publisher of the Contrarian Boston newsletter; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
