2024 Greater Boston Housing Report Card Release Recap

On Tuesday, November 12, The Boston Foundation released its 2024 Greater Boston Housing Report Card, detailing the region's latest housing market trends. The release event, at the Edgerley Center for Civic Leadership, featured a presentation on the core metrics of the current housing market, a special topic presentation highlighting the opportunity to use available public lands to build much-needed new housing, and a discussion among housing experts about the challenges facing Greater Boston's housing market and the policy initiatives required to address them. 

Lee Pelton, President and CEO of the Boston Foundation, opened the forum with a reflection on the recent U.S. presidential election. He noted that the election served as a testament to a broader feeling of discontent in the country and in Massachusetts.  

“At the Boston Foundation, we are using this moment to share time together, to be human together, and to work together to affirm the ambition which sits at the heart of our work,” Pelton said, clarifying that this shared ambition is to achieve equity and sustain a prosperous city of opportunity for all. He continued, "Change is possible when we learn together and partner together toward solutions.” 

Executive Director Luc Schuster and Research Fellow Aja Kennedy of Boston Indicators presented the core metrics of the report. Their analysis showed that Greater Boston’s housing market remains stagnant due to multiple factors including "interest rate lock," where homeowners with favorable mortgages are reluctant to sell, and slow housing production despite recent zoning reforms. The report also highlighted growing housing inequality: longtime homeowners have benefited from rising property values, while renters face increasingly high rents. 

The report also touched on the state’s much-publicized challenge with homeless families. Although Massachusetts provides relatively strong shelter support for those unable to afford rent compared to other states, the system has seen a spike in migrant families seeking shelter, with the state reaching its cap of 7,500 family shelter placements. Managing the resulting overflow has been a challenge, but thus far, Massachusetts continues to fare much better than peer states at providing emergency shelter to homeless individuals and families.  

The Indicators team then handed off the podium for the 2024 special topic, which focuses on the potential of using publicly-owned land for affordable housing development. Katherine Levine Einstein, Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Director at the Initiative on Cities at Boston University, presented research revealing that much of Greater Boston's public land is underutilized. 

Einstein proposed a scenario to the audience: if just 5% of Massachusetts' vacant public land were used for housing at an average density of 15 units per acre, it could create 72,000 new housing units. However, she explained that the process of declaring public land "surplus" and enabling housing development is cumbersome, requiring a two-thirds majority vote from local governments. This process is often drawn out due to community members taking advantage of the regulatory process to halt projects, often influenced by local leaders opposing the developments. She cited one example of this in Weston, Massachusetts, where it has taken over six years to build six units of affordable housing due to public opposition. 

To address these obstacles, Einstein shared several policy reforms, including: 

• Streamlining the process for public land disposition to make it easier for developers to build affordable housing. 
• Reforming state funding programs like the Community Preservation Act to prevent them from being used to block housing developments. 
• Providing technical assistance to municipalities interested in redeveloping public land for housing. 
• Simplifying the housing permitting process overall to reduce delays.