The 2024 Greater Boston Housing Report Card

The Initiative on Cities Co-Authors the 2024 Greater Boston Housing Report Card Special Analysis on Using Public Land to Develop Affordable Housing

Greater Boston’s well-publicized housing challenges continue, even as communities work to change zoning rules to comply with the state’s new MBTA Communities requirements. A lack of new construction, high interest rates, and changing demographics continue to slow sales and increase costs.

These are some of the findings from The Boston Foundation’s Greater Boston Housing Report Card, released on November 12, 2024. The report card comprises two parts: a core metrics analysis authored by Boston Indicators and a special analysis of affordable housing development on publicly-owned land co-authored by the Boston University Initiative on Cities (IOC) Urban-H Associate Director of Housing Katherine Levine Einstein, Urban Faculty Fellow Maxwell Palmer, and IOC Associate Director Danielle Mulligan.

This year’s special analysis highlights the opportunity presented by freeing up publicly owned, vacant, or underused land for affordable development – and the obstacles that are keeping it from happening. Almost a quarter of land in Greater Boston is publicly owned. Of this, 40% is vacant and not reserved for conservation. A calculation using conservative figures estimates that tens of thousands of units could be built on Commonwealth and municipal land. If only 5% of the identified vacant land is developed at the minimum density required under the MBTA Communities Act (15 units per acre), 85,000 units would be constructed. With land suitable for dense development and creative opportunities tied to existing public infrastructure, even more units could be unlocked in key locations.

However, the IOC research team identified two major obstacles to accessing that land. First, the combination of public procurement laws and the housing permitting process makes the redevelopment of public land prohibitive in many cases. Beyond that, public opposition to development often uses the system to prevent development – in extreme cases, using millions of dollars in public funds to stop housing development. Using a database of public property, the Registry of Deeds, and newspaper archives, the team identified 13 instances in which local governments purchased land expressly to stop a housing development since 2010. These purchases totaled over $50 million in public funds.

To overcome such challenges, the research team proposed four policy strategies for the state:

1. Streamline Procurement Processes: Allow greater density on state and municipally-owned land and reduce the threshold for approval for housing projects.
2. Reform State Funding Programs: Limit local governments’ use of laws to block new housing designed to promote affordable housing, like the Community Preservation Act (CPA)
3. Provide Technical Assistance to Municipalities: Support towns and cities in determining the best potential public land usage.
4. Streamline Housing Permitting Process: Enforce the implementation of laws requiring local governments to reform zoning restrictions and streamline their processes to allow for more housing development.

“Using a small percentage of municipal land holdings to build new housing represents a major opportunity to address our regional housing crisis,” said IOC Associate Director of Housing Katherine Levine Einstein. “But as we have seen in other issues, such as zoning reform, the regulatory process makes it harder and more expensive to build. Streamlining processes and ensuring public dollars intended for the development and preservation of housing cannot be weaponized against housing would be major steps in the right direction.”