u/GarrisonCty

I love Massachusetts for many things, but when it comes to housing - and particularly permitting new housing - we are a massive burning dumpster fire. We make California look reasonable and functional and progressive. We entrust housing decisions exclusively to municipal bodies largely controlled by anti-housing municipal voters.

Just this week, the Town of Wellesley held a Special Town Meeting where it voted to appropriate $900,000 to fight the State's plan to convert a large under-utilized Community College parking lot to housing. Just 5% of Town Meeting members voted to support the State's plan. A substantial minority (36%) voted to take the State to court immediately for merely suggesting the proposal. 

Wellesley is not the exception, Wellesley is the norm. Yes, there are some wonderful towns and cities which are pro-housing or have permitted substantial amounts of new housing. We should celebrate these communities which include Everett, Cambridge, Revere, Lexington, Westford, and others. But they are a distinct minority. Most towns are like Marblehead, which last week approved an MBTA Communities compliance plan which virtually guarantees not a single new housing unit will ever be built.

Below are some highlights from the attached 1Q Housing Data:

• California, the nation's poster child for anti-housing regulations, is permitting housing at nearly 3 times the rate of Massachusetts.

• West Virginia, the only state to consistently hemorrhage population to the point it is facing legitimate questions about its economic future and viability, is developing housing at more than 2 times the rate of Massachusetts.

• New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the nation, is developing housing at approximately 3.5 times the rate of Massachusetts.

The irony of all this is that Massachusetts is not facing economic headwinds like many Midwestern or Southern states. On the whole, our economy is healthy. We are not the Rust Belt. We are inflicting this on ourselves voluntarily. But this is already harming the State's economy and those effects will only increase over time (particularly if we keep up our LAST PLACE showing).

Yes, only one quarter of data, but this is a consistent pattern. In 2025, with a whole year of data, Massachusetts placed #46 on this same metric behind only Rhode Island, Illinois, and Alaska.

Data source: https://www.census.gov/construction/bps/statemonthly.html

Brookline, Mass, an upscale urban suburb of Boston, has a really cool campus-style public high school consisting of several buildings clustered around a historic public park and abutting a light rail line. Located in an urban context with limited buildable land, the most recent addition to campus was built directly over the renovated Brookline Hills MBTA station. This building, the new 9th Grade Academy, was completed during the Pandemic.

Photos by William Rawn Associates —

The Good News: For the first time, I saw people engaging with the new Copley Square Park plaza.  

The Bad News: It was teenagers doing wheelies and laps on bikes and, unless you want to take your life in your hands, pedestrians have to avoid the general area.

If you haven’t been following, Copley Square Park was recently redone. $19 million dollars later, there’s new lighting and pedestrian paths, but the biggest change is that most of the lawn space was removed and replaced with concrete pavers.

Maybe the concrete will be better for farmers markets and pop-ups, but given the infrequency of these events, wasn’t the lawn just a better default option? Particularly when it means that folks walking now have to negotiate teenagers-who-aren’t-the-best-cyclists performing for social media?