By The Boston Foundation, November 12, 2025
Boston, MA – A new report on the current state of housing in Greater Boston presents a picture of strong construction, a concerning trend in building permits, and critical affordability challenges in the region. The mixed signals are the focus of the 2025 Greater Boston Housing Report Card, which was released at a Boston Foundation event this morning.
“This year’s report data highlights some significant differences among housing construction, permits, and prices,” said Luc Schuster, Executive Director of Boston Indicators, the research arm of the Boston Foundation. “While new data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows a significant uptick in new home completions in recent years, the increase has not significantly helped home affordability, and a decline in the number of new housing permits statewide suggests any construction uptick could be short-lived.”
“It’s easy to get lost in the numbers of units, permits, and cost burdens, but we must remind ourselves that at the end of the day, we are talking about real homes, families, and communities,” said Lee Pelton, President and CEO of the Boston Foundation. “The lack of supply and rising prices are not new, nor is the impact that our failure to build more affordable housing has on families, workers, and our overall economic competitiveness. If we want vibrant communities and a robust workforce, we need to step up and use the tools and innovations at our disposal to bring greater equity and affordability to families.”
Once again this year, the research team from Boston Indicators wove together data on Greater Boston’s demographics, housing prices, affordability, and housing instability in the Core Metrics section of the report. This year’s report also includes research from the Boston University Initiative on Cities, a Special Topic exploration of the varying paths Greater Boston communities have taken to meet the requirements of the MBTA Communities Act.
Through broad-based analysis of state documents and a deep dive into the implementation tactics of three suburban Boston communities – Lexington, Needham, and Wellesley – the BU researchers highlight the differing paths the 177 cities and towns are taking to meet the law, which requires them to change their zoning and land use policies to allow for the construction of more housing.
“By requiring zoning changes but not the creation of new housing, the state both respected local control over housing policy and provided loopholes that some communities have seized on to meet the letter of the law but not its intent, which was to create thousands of new homes for Massachusetts families,” said Katherine Levine Einstein, Associate Professor and an Urban-H Associate Director of the Boston University Initiative on Cities.
Data provide good, bad, and ugly signs for Greater Boston housing
In the Core Metrics section, the Boston Indicators researchers found uplifting news in a new housing dataset from the U.S. Census Bureau. The new Address Count data, which tallies new postal addresses as a proxy for housing units, finds that Massachusetts has created 97,656 new units between April 2020 and July 2025, over 71,000 of them in Greater Boston.
While these units were mostly built before the clock started ticking on the Healey Administration’s goal of building 222,000 new housing units over the next 10 years, it is a pace that would put Massachusetts within striking distance of meeting the goal by 2035.
However, that encouraging data is tempered by the latest permit numbers, which signal a coming slowdown. The number of building permits issued in Massachusetts has declined sharply over the past four years, from a peak of nearly 20,000 permits in 2021 to just over 14,000 in 2024. And in Greater Boston, which saw 15,019 permits pulled in 2021, just under 9,000 units were permitted in 2024, and the figures for 2025 to date are even lower.
Just one in seven renter households can afford ‘starter homes’
Despite the new units, too, Greater Boston’s housing affordability crisis has only worsened since the pandemic, according to the report. The report compared the monthly mortgage payment on an “entry-level” home in 2021 to 2025, and found that while a household income of just under $98,000 would be considered enough to afford the $2520 monthly payment in 2021, a household would need an income of over $162,000 in 2025 to afford a mortgage payment of over $4200.
“The sobering reality of this combination of price increases and higher mortgage rates is that just one in seven renters in Greater Boston has the income to access a ‘starter home’ in our region,” said Schuster. “The data show just how much work we have to do if we are to expand opportunities and unfreeze the market.”
Renters are not immune: nearly half are ‘cost-burdened’ by housing
Similar challenges face the rental market, where rent increases have slowed in some communities in 2025, but overall, the percentage of renters defined as “cost-burdened” (spending over 30% of income on housing) or “severely cost-burdened” (spending over 50% of income on housing) remains essentially unchanged in 2025. While the percentages of cost-burdened households remain stubbornly high across races, a majority of Black and Latino renter households are considered cost-burdened, and nearly one-third of Black renter households pay more than half their monthly income on housing.
Special Topic: Lessons from MBTA Communities Zoning
For the special topic in this year’s report, Katherine Levine Einstein and Maxwell Palmer, both Associate Professors at Boston University’s Initiative on Cities, explored some of the dimensions of how the requirements of the MBTA Communities Act are being met in 177 cities and towns across the Commonwealth.
Einstein and Palmer analyzed documents from the Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities (EOHLC) and investigated the adoption of new zoning policies in three Massachusetts suburbs with similar demographics that took substantially different paths to MBTA-C compliance: Lexington, Needham, and Wellesley. The cases bring to light both the local nature of the MBTA Communities adoption process and the resulting mix of plans that emerged.
In their key findings, the researchers share several insights for local and state policymakers and advocates, both for implementing existing housing laws and designing new ones. Among them:
- The structure of community engagement processes may influence which voices are heard.
- Housing opponents and municipal leaders might weaponize state policies to block new housing. In some communities, fears about the fiscal costs of new housing—especially in the schools—thwarted ambitious rezoning efforts.
- Local governments should be encouraged to zone ambitiously for housing production. While some communities zoned for growth, others complied with the law while allowing as little new housing as possible. Very few communities opted to increase the allowable housing density in single-family neighborhoods.
- State housing reform must take into account the potentially obstructionary role that local ballot referendums can play.
- Housing advocates should strive to build broad-based coalitions (ideally from both political parties), including business leaders, schools, and young people, and bring them together at key meetings.
The full report, which includes interactive charts, data tables, and updates on the status of MBTA Communities plans across the 177 affected cities and towns, can be viewed here.