2025 Greater Boston Housing Report Card
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, […]
Short-Term Rentals in Boston: Regulation, Compliance, and Impact
The Boston University Initiative on Cities and the School of Hospitality Administration released a new brief examining how Boston’s short-term rental (STR) regulations are working in practice. The brief summarizes key insights on how the rules have reshaped the size and characteristics of the city’s STR market, as well as what the data reveal about […]
Mayors and the Health of Cities
Mayoral Views on Economic Incentives: Valuable Tools or a Bad Use of Resources?
Mayoral Views on Housing Production: Do Planning Goals Match Reality?
Mayors and Social Inequalities
IOC Affiliates Published and Presented Research on Housing and Eviction Protections
Recently, Boston University Initiative on Cities affiliates Dr. Molly Richard, a Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University’s Center for Innovation in Social Science (CISS), and Dr. Kenton Card, an IOC Visiting Urban Scholar and current Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) at the University of Minnesota, prominently shared their insights […]
New Publication: “From heat racism and heat gentrification to urban heat justice in the USA and Europe”
A new article published in Nature Cities examines urban heat issues through new lenses of inequality, calling for researchers to bridge the gap between heat management and institutional discrimination. Focusing on the Global North, the authors, including IOC Director Loretta Lees and External Advisory Board Member Isabelle Anguelovski, argue that researchers and planners must consider […]
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 […]
IOC Co-Authors New Commentary on Highway Reclamation Impacts on Population Health
Boston University Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and IOC BU Urbanist Mary Willis (SPH), alongside co-authors Fintan Mooney (SPH), Professor of Epidemiology Jennifer Weuve (SPH), IOC Director Loretta Lees (CAS), and IOC Executive Director Stacy Fox, contributed to a new commentary in the Journal of Urban Health that proposes a framework for evaluating the multidimensional impacts of […]