Recap: The Greater Boston Housing Report Card 2025
November 12, 2025
“The Boston Foundation is a bit of our conscience...helping guide ‘what do we really need to know and how do we get there?’” said Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll during remarks at the November 12 forum to release the 2025 Greater Boston Housing Report Card. “The Governor and I have seen housing and the need for more as our biggest challenge. That’s true in Greater Boston but also Western Mass., South Coast—all over, availability and affordability are missing. We’ve heard from the business community about their challenges attracting and retaining talent. We now see housing as a business imperative. In fact, everything important to this commonwealth circles around housing.”
As TBF President and CEO Lee Pelton noted in his welcome, “Understanding a problem is the very first step in helping to solve it.” Each year, TBF’s exploration of housing trends and topics keeps us in tune with how our housing challenges evolve in response to local efforts and larger forces. While our region’s housing woes seem intractable, Pelton urged listeners to believe that “if we have the civic will to meet our housing crisis, change is indeed possible.”
The Research
Authors of the report—Boston Indicators Executive Director Luc Schuster from the Boston Foundation, and Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of Housing Katherine Einstein and Associate Professor of Political Science and Faculty Fellow Maxwell Palmer from Boston University’s Initiative on Cities—presented their respective findings: Schuster on core housing metrics, and the BU team on the timely topic of MBTA Communities legislation and municipalities’ different paths to compliance.
Latest core metrics yield gloomy or equivocal takeaways. In short:
- Prices have cooled but remain unaffordable.
- New housing completions are up, but permits for future construction are down.
- Homeownership is slipping further out of reach.
- Homelessness remains high even as state shelter caseloads have dropped sharply
A notable change to the field is a new set of data from the U.S. Census, which provides a count of all addresses. That offers a better assessment of existing housing units since permits don’t reflect houses demolished or single old mill buildings turned into multiple units, to say nothing of projects abandoned. Over time address counts could improve accuracy, but building permits remain important for predicting future growth, and currently the numbers are dismal. Materials cost and worker shortages are part of the problem.
Zoning, too, is an important element of where and what kind of housing gets built, and is at the heart of the MBTA-C law investigated in this year’s Special Topic. As Einstein noted, “Lots of ink has been spilled on the few communities that are outright defying the law. More interesting to look at is the great variety among the ways communities are reaching compliance.”
Palmer shared an overview of responses to the law, namely that: • Some municipalities intentionally zoned for growth while others deliberately did not. • Almost everyone avoided upzoning single-family parcels. • State policies were sometimes weaponized to block zoning for more development. • Threats of ballot referenda were a real challenge for housing advocates.
He also noted that huge amounts of data were submitted as part of the compliance process, a boon for researchers.
Researchers had pored over endless town meeting and other committee notes and wrote case studies of three similar communities that took three different routes to compliance: Lexington, which passed an ambitious zoning plan but later scaled back in the face of a resulting surge in development; Needham, which put forth an ambitious plan that was rejected in favor of a “base compliance” plan; and Wellesley, which took a no-drama approach and overlaid the new zoning on areas of existing development, yielding compliance with minimal change.
Einstein shared key takeaways for housing advocates:
- Shoot high because, as Lexington proved, you can always scale back.
- Housing may be about people, but don’t neglect to argue the positive economic impacts on town and region.
- And timing is important, and avoiding repeat referenda could help.
“I know it may be hard for us in this room to believe, but people lose interest after so many conversations about zoning…. Housing struggles when it gets put to vote on off-cycle referendums,” she noted.
View from the Statehouse
The Lieutenant Governor's comments followed the data presentation and led into a panel conversation among the researchers and the Lieutenant Governor, moderated by TBF’s Vice President of Programs and housing specialist Soni Gupta.
Driscoll revealed she is no slouch on housing herself, speaking cogently without notes on legislation and policies the Governor’s team has already pursued, such as the Affordable Homes Act and State Comprehensive Pan and the Housing Bond Bill, as well as other means to problem-solve the housing crisis, from use of state-owned land to reducing administrative hurdles to shorten development timespans. “There are a lot of intractable challenges in government. Building housing isn’t one. To solve it though, we have to work together—local, state officials, builders, developers—using some carrot and some stick.”
She emphasized that our combined talent is our superpower in this “team sport” of creating the high quality of life and opportunity for those who live here and those we need to live here—people with energy and aspirations and willingness to work. “People are voting with their feet and leaving Massachusetts. I am not OK with that.”
Q&A
Soni Gupta posed questions to panelists and left plenty of time for audience questions. In a nutshell:
Q: Why does tanking vacancy rates not really help?
Luc Schuster: We have wanted higher vacancy rates for ages, but getting them from a plunge in the international student population will only help around the margins. The economic loss that ripples out from a shrinking population tends to offset any rent-lowering by landlords.
Q: What are some strategies for reducing costs?
Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll: We need to look into innovations like modular, and definitely reduce the timeline for projects.
Q: Do we argue people or dollars in housing development?
Katherine Levine Einstein: What works in Roxbury will be different from what works in Needham. Housing is fundamentally about people but what works in convincing some people is to assuage fears about what new housing means to their community.
Maxwell Palmer: Voters who haven’t moved in 20+ years need some education. Everyone agrees we need more affordable housing and less luxury. But median costs now seem like luxury costs.
Kim Driscoll: We also need some myth busting about how development hits schools. If you’re losing students you’re losing per pupil state funds. Further questions came from the audience on what can bring out advocates, researching other housing policy outcomes, legislating for single-stair midrise buildings, what other state programs should we push for, and are there other regions of the country doing better at making entry-level homes that we could learn from?
To hear answers to all of that and more, view the recording of the session!