One of the things I appreciate about ULI national meetings is that they remind me that people face the same struggles everywhere.  Across a few days, San Francisco hosted sessions about housing issues across the country including about how hard it is to bring to market, the impacts of high costs (labor, materials, land), interest rates and, of course, regulation.

We are lucky in New England to have so many people who think long and hard about housing, dedicating precious resources to thought-provoking reports and trustworthy data.  From ULI itself, to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing, to the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, we are blessed with so many reliable resources.

One or those sources I look forward to every year is the Boston Foundation’s Greater Boston Housing Report Card.  Published in November, it unfortunately once again found that “housing costs continue to rise faster than incomes, housing needs far exceed production, and the gap between who can afford to stay in Greater Boston and who cannot continues to widen.”

Think about that statement for a moment.  Housing stock in the greater Boston area increased by around 3.8% or 97,656 units from April 2020 to July 2025.  During the same period, population only increased by 0.5% annually.  A reasonable interpretation of that data could be we’re not doing too bad, since we produced more units on a percentage basis than new people.  And yet…

Housing costs keep going up.   Units, especially affordable ones, remain hard to come by.  Construction costs are as high or higher than anywhere else in the country.  What is going on?

Well, changing demographics and 50 years of underproduction are partly to blame for the cognitive dissonance between new buildings going up seemingly everywhere and an undiminished housing crisis.  High costs and interest rates that make most project types infeasible are also contributing, including an expected steep drop in housing starts over the next few years.

But the central question posed by the Report Card remains:  can we or anyone else in the country “summon the civic will to act”?

If we are talking about politics, the answer is sometimes and, in some places, yes.  California has led with ADU and zoning reform; North Carolina with building code changes, and of course here in Massachusetts we have the MBTA Communities Law tying zoning reform to public transportation.

But hard experience teaches us that regulatory change does not guarantee production.  All too often, the reforms themselves are touted as victories, independent of whether or not they lead to more units.  And let’s not forget that housing opponents are smart and have shifted tactics by, for example, weaponizing local site plan reviews to kill as-of-right projects, as was commented on in a recent Boston Globe editorial.

We need to be honest with ourselves.  The oft-repeated strategies listed in the Report Card are necessary but clearly not sufficient.   Inclusive community engagement, broad-based coalitions, and ambitious zoning are important but not guarantees of success.  Indeed, many of these same tactics have been co-opted by people opposed to change.  Just look at what happened in Needham and Milton.

People do not like change.  In a state with very little excess land, new housing inevitably means something old must be sacrificed.  Even if that something is underutilized industrial buildings, someone has fond memories of what was once there and remains convinced that commercial taxes are better than residential.  At a time when we’ve added tens of thousands of new units and the news is reporting outmigration from Massachusetts, it’s easy to understand cynicism about housing policy and wondering when enough new construction is enough.

People opposed to new housing are not just supporting the status quo.  At the ballot box and in town meetings, their often-simultaneous disinterest in zoning reform and tax overrides leads to one, and only one place.  Whether they know it or not, they are supporting a shrinking Commonwealth that will create reductions in municipal revenue and provide reduced local services.  Overtly stated concerns about traffic and schools, mixed with an apparent disinterest in creating economic growth that would pay to mitigate those very same problems, show where their real interests lie.

Housing policy is not just about places to live. It is economic policy.

If communities cannot provide the things businesses need, they will not invest or hire.  And homes are, along with roads and a trained workforce and utilities, part of a community’s infrastructure.  Residents who think that housing is someone else’s problem are living in a past where robber barons built company towns for their employees.

Businesses have a long history, from mills to auto plants to biotech, of moving out of our region when they perceived business advantages to settling somewhere else.  If there is no place for their employees to live, they will move where housing is affordable and abundant.

If we are unwilling to fix housing, then we should prepare ourselves for a future of reduced economic vitality, one where towns and cities provide less services.  Rather than just bringing coalitions together, we need to communicate hard truths of insufficient housing invariably leading to reduced economic vibrancy and less opportunity for residents and their children.

It is incumbent on those of us who support housing to prove to our neighbors that the conventional wisdom of “population stagnation or loss undermines economic growth, reduces the tax base, and hurts overall cultural vibrancy” is real.  That while we might lose something by building new housing, there is a real, and possibly irreversible, cost to the doing nothing.

These are not new trends.  Businesses moving away, smaller household size and more and more people living alone is our history since World War II.  A NIMBY future that only cares about community character and what things look like has an illogical conclusion; a vicious cycle of shrinking population leading to either higher taxes or less municipal services.

We need to decide together if a less vibrant economy due to a smaller population is an acceptable future. Maybe it is.  Maybe AI and robots will replace the firemen and construction workers and restaurant employees who are being priced out.  I personally don’t have much faith or interest in that future, but I am only one person.

Please send any reactions, comments, or ideas to Scott at [email protected].