A market-clearing housing strategy for Boston and Allston-Brighton

Allston-Brighton’s rents are high because the region has not built enough homes, and today almost nothing new can be built at a price renters can pay. This paper diagnoses why, sets housing targets for the region, Boston and Allston-Brighton, shows what meeting them would mean for the neighborhood’s residents, and lays out the reforms that would let private builders do the work.

Executive Summary

Boston is one of the most productive labor markets in the country, and people want to live here. When the number of homes cannot keep up, the extra demand shows up as higher rents, crowded apartments, long commutes and displacement.¹² Allston-Brighton feels this more than most places: 82 percent of Allston households and 77 percent of Brighton households rent.¹

Two things now block new housing. The first is zoning. In Allston-Brighton, a building of ten or more homes must provide two parking spaces per home, set aside 17 to 20 percent of units at below-market rents, fit an envelope that wastes floor area, and win discretionary approval that takes about two years.⁴⁵ The second is cost. Construction costs rose about 68 percent and construction interest rates nearly doubled between 2015 and 2026, while rents rose about 52 percent.³ Economists increasingly see these as one problem: land-use rules keep projects small and one-off, which holds back construction productivity.⁷

We measure the combined effect with a break-even rent: the rent per square foot a new building must charge to pay for itself with a normal return. For a typical six-story Allston-Brighton building, it is $7.96 under today’s as-of-right rules. New apartments in the neighborhood rent for about $4.61.²³ Nothing gets built as of right, and the little that is built depends on case-by-case relief.

Our reform package lowers the break-even rent step by step: no parking minimums, no inclusionary set-aside, efficient envelopes, by-right approval, Boston’s existing Chapter 121A tax treatment for new homes and a state single-stair code. Together they bring it to about $4.82, within 5 percent of what new apartments rent for today. The savings that come from building repeatable projects by right would finish the job. The traditional design standard in our cost study adds about 6 cents, roughly $50 a month on an average new apartment. It does not change height, density or unit count.

How many homes? Holding real rents steady requires about 160,000 new homes in Greater Boston this decade, roughly 16,000 a year against about 9,000 permitted in 2024.¹³²⁰ Bringing rents down requires more. The best recent evidence finds that each 1 percent increase in a region’s housing stock lowers its rents by about 0.5 percent.⁸⁹ Our abundance target of 470,000 homes would therefore leave regional rents about 9 percent lower in real terms than if today’s pace continued. The range across studies is 5 to 11 percent.

For Allston-Brighton, the plan assigns 6,000 homes to Allston and 8,500 to Brighton over ten years. At full build-out, a renter at the neighborhood’s median rent would pay about $220 less a month, or $2,600 a year. Renters in the neighborhood as a whole would save about $78 million a year. Section 9 sets out what that means for students, families, immigrants, seniors, low-income households and homeowners.

The legal package has three parts. A Boston Zoning Commission petition creates an Allston-Brighton Housing Abundance Overlay District. A City Council order starts hearings and asks the City to make its existing Chapter 121A tax treatment available to overlay housing. A state act gives Boston clear authority for as-of-right districts and directs a single-stair building code. The full texts are on our model legislation page.

What Is Wrong: Boston’s and Allston’s Housing Problem

Too few homes for the people who want to live here

Greater Boston’s rents rose about 52 percent between 2015 and 2026.³ Over the same period, building fell. Greater Boston permitted 13,682 homes in 2015 and 8,993 in 2024. The City of Boston went from 4,955 to roughly 2,000, its lowest since 2012.²⁰ In Allston-Brighton, new apartments in large buildings ask $2,632 for a studio, $3,124 for a one-bedroom and $4,593 for a three-bedroom.²

Zoning that makes housing illegal or unbuildable

• Parking minimums. Article 51 requires two off-street spaces for every home in buildings of ten or more units.⁴ Structured parking costs about $34,000–$59,000 a space above ground and $106,000–$152,000 below.¹⁵ Built as written, the requirement alone pushes a building’s break-even rent about 50 percent above market. Projects survive only by winning relief one at a time. A citywide repeal was filed in April 2026.²²
• Inclusionary set-asides. Since October 2024, Article 79 requires 17–20 percent of units in projects of seven or more homes to rent at an average of 50–60 percent of area median income. In 2026 that means about $1,600–$1,930 for a one-bedroom.⁵²¹ The below-market rent is paid for by the other tenants or by not building at all. In our model, the set-aside adds about 11 percent to the break-even rent. Studies of inclusionary zoning find higher prices and, in some markets, less construction.¹⁸
• Envelopes that waste space. Height limits, setbacks and odd lots push buildings into inefficient shapes. The Brighton building behind our cost model can rent only 77 percent of its floor area. A regular building can rent 85 percent, which by itself lowers the break-even rent about 9 percent.³
• Discretion instead of rules. Almost every meaningful project needs variances, Article 80 review and negotiated mitigation. That takes about two years before construction and favors large, well-capitalized players.²⁴
• Much of the neighborhood is off limits. Most residential land allows only one-, two- and three-family homes. The bigger regulatory cost falls on homes that are never proposed at all.³

Costs that outran rents

Boston’s multifamily hard costs are among the highest in the country: $290–$390 per square foot by one index and $400–$590 by another.¹⁴¹⁵ Between 2015 and 2026, hard costs rose about 68 percent and construction debt went from about 4 to 7.5 percent. That roughly doubled the rent a new building needs to break even.³ New apartments in Allston-Brighton now rent at or slightly below that level, and residual land values are near zero.³ The regulatory burden has not gone away. It has moved inside construction cost, because rules that keep projects small and one-off also keep builders from getting faster and cheaper.⁷

Baseline Data

The Boston Planning Department reports Allston with 31,810 residents and 11,758 homes, and Brighton with 55,869 residents and 25,805 homes, as of January 1, 2025. Allston is 82.4 percent renter-occupied and Brighton 77.2 percent.¹ Allston’s occupied homes are 42.5 percent studios or one-bedrooms, 32.1 percent two-bedrooms and 25.4 percent three-bedrooms or larger. Brighton’s are 39.7, 32.6 and 27.7 percent.¹

Rents in this paper are asking rents for new-construction-quality apartments, per rentable square foot per month: $4.61 in Allston-Brighton, with a range of $4.39–$4.82.² Median rent across the neighborhood’s occupied homes is about $2,400 a month. The median building dates from around 1954, and 41 percent of homes predate 1940.³ All figures are planning estimates. We give ranges because no rent, cost or unit count can be known exactly.

The Economic Model

Rents fall until building stops paying

In a market where builders can enter freely, new homes get built as long as rents cover the full cost of building them plus a normal return. Economists call that threshold the minimum profitable production cost.⁶ We express it as a break-even rent per rentable square foot. It covers hard and soft costs, construction interest, operating costs, Boston’s property tax and a required yield of 6.85 percent (the 5.1 percent market cap rate plus a normal 1.75-point development spread).³

Two implications drive this paper. First, new supply can push rents down only until they reach the break-even rent. Below that, building stops. Second, anything that lowers the break-even rent lowers the floor that rents can fall to, and so raises the number of homes the market will build. Zoning reform is therefore cost reform.

How much each reform moves the break-even rent

The table follows a six-story, wood-frame building on a small concrete base, the most common new building type in Allston-Brighton, at a contractor-grade hard cost of $395 per gross square foot. That figure sits inside the published Boston ranges of $290–$390, $370, $390 escalated to about $436, and $400–$590.^14151617 Each row adds one change to the one above.

AHF model, calibrated to Working Paper 2026-01: six-story wood-frame building on a small concrete base, $395/GSF hard cost, 24% soft costs, 65% loan-to-cost construction debt at 7.5%, required yield 6.85% (5.1% cap rate + 175 bp), Boston FY2026 tax rate, land excluded. Parking at $47,500 per above-ground structured space. Inclusionary rents at about $2.55/RSF (50–60% AMI average). Uncertainty is about ±5% on every figure.³

Five conclusions follow.

• Today’s as-of-right rules make new apartments impossible. At $7.96, a building would need rents 73 percent above the market.
• Each zoning reform is a large cost reform. Removing parking minimums saves $1.44. Removing the set-aside saves $0.67. An efficient envelope saves $0.48.
• The design standard is small by comparison. It adds $0.06, about 1 percent of the break-even rent and about $50 a month on an average new apartment. It costs about one-twenty-fifth of what the parking reform saves.
• Municipal and state reforms together bring a six-story building within about 5 percent of today’s new-building rents. A four-story wood building, which costs less per square foot, already breaks even once Chapter 121A tax treatment applies.
• The rest has to come from cheaper construction or cheaper money. Repeatable, by-right projects are the main lever. Lower interest rates are outside city control.

Taller buildings cost more to build. Concrete or mass-timber buildings of 7 to 18 stories cost roughly $500–$560 per square foot, and they do not pay for themselves in Allston-Brighton at today’s rents, even with every reform. The overlay still allows them, because allowing height costs nothing. Institutional builders and later market cycles can use it. Most production this decade will be four- to six-story buildings.

How rents respond to new homes

A housing-demand elasticity cannot simply be inverted into a rent forecast. A metro area is an open market: when rents fall, people move in and households split up, so the price response is smaller than that conversion implies. The better evidence comes from studies that measure how rents actually respond to new supply.⁸⁹¹⁰

We use the metro-level estimate of −0.50 as our central case and report the range across studies. Two features matter for Allston-Brighton. A neighborhood’s rents are set mostly by its region, so adding homes across the region has about four times the effect of adding the same share in one neighborhood. The largest benefits go to older, cheaper apartments.⁸ Studies of new buildings in lower-income areas find lower nearby rents and less displacement, not more.¹⁹²⁵ Supply constraints raise home prices about twice as much as rents, so more building would also slow growth in home prices.¹¹

How Many Homes

Boston and Allston-Brighton figures for “hold the line” are their shares of the regional total in the abundance allocation (23% and 3%). Rent effect: −0.50% per 1% of regional housing stock (2,081,743 homes), range −0.26% to −0.58%.⁸⁹¹³²⁰

Holding the line. The Commonwealth’s housing plan calls for 222,000 homes statewide by 2035, of which Greater Boston’s share is about 140,000–180,000. That is the pace needed to keep up with expected household growth.¹³ Greater Boston permitted about 9,000 homes in 2024, so even holding the line means nearly doubling production.

Bringing rents down. Each additional 41,600 homes, about 2 percent of the regional stock, lowers rents about 1 percent. Our target of 470,000 homes is about 380,000 above today’s pace, enough to bring regional rents about 9 percent below that path in real terms (range 5 to 11 percent).

The cost condition. Builders keep building as long as a new building can charge at least its break-even rent. That does not require new apartments to rent for what older ones do. In Allston-Brighton a new one-bedroom asks about $3,124 a month, against a median of about $2,400 across all the neighborhood’s homes.²¹ New buildings will keep that premium, and every break-even test in this paper is against new-building rents, not the older stock.

Filtering also means new-building rents do not have to fall as far as the average. Added supply lowers rents most in older, cheaper buildings, as households move up the chain and leave cheaper homes behind.⁸¹⁹ Measured against today’s level rather than today’s path, the abundance target lowers average real rents about 7.5 percent. The decline for new buildings should be smaller. The table shows how far new-building rents could fall from today’s $4.61 before each building type stops paying.

“Room” is how far new-building rents could fall below today’s $4.61 per square foot a month and the building still earn its required 6.85% yield (6.35% with 6% debt). AHF model; four-story building at $365/GSF, six-story at $395/GSF, both with the essential design standard.³

Under the municipal and state reforms, four-story buildings pay at today’s rents and can absorb a fall of about 4 percent in new-building rents. Once repeatable by-right construction cuts hard costs 10 percent, they can absorb a 12 percent fall, more than the whole average decline, and six-story buildings about 5 percent. That sustains the program even on the cautious assumption that new-building rents fall as much as the average, with six-story buildings joining as interest rates normalize or as filtering concentrates the decline in older stock. Without the cost reforms, the zoning changes would mainly restart building and hold rents steady.

Where the Homes Go: Boston

We allocate Boston’s 110,000 homes using three criteria. First, transit and job access. Second, large sites, adopted plans and visible redevelopment potential. Third, fairness: high-opportunity neighborhoods that have grown little should take a meaningful share.

Greater Boston

The regional target of 470,000 homes is allocated by county and by subregion. The figures describe where the homes should be built. The rent effect depends on the regional total.

Building types

The strategy does not assume towers everywhere. Most homes come from mid-rise buildings near transit, then small multifamily buildings, ADUs and conversions, townhouses and a smaller number of towers in the core. The overlay sets no bedroom-mix quota. Builders choose the mix renters want, and family-size homes also open up as people move out of older apartments into new ones.

Zoning capacity is not production

Owners do not all sell at once, and many parcels have valuable buildings, long leases, contamination or awkward shapes. A credible plan therefore allows much more housing on paper than it expects to be built.

Allston and Brighton

The plan assigns 6,000 net new homes to Allston and 8,500 to Brighton over ten years, about a 51 percent and a 33 percent expansion of their housing stock. That is about 3 percent of the regional program, from a neighborhood with under 2 percent of the region’s homes. That is reasonable for a transit-served district with Allston’s large sites, but most of the rent benefit comes from the regional program as a whole. Allston’s target is more physically plausible because it has several large or combinable sites. Brighton’s ownership is more fragmented, so it needs a broader program of corridors, squares, Green Line edges, institutional housing, small multifamily buildings and ADUs.

Parcel archetypes and zoning envelopes

The near-term work falls to four- to six-story buildings on corridors, squares and transition blocks, the types that break even under the reform package. The tallest envelopes on Western Avenue, Beacon Park Yard and Allston Yards depend on institutional capital or on the cost reforms described above, and most of that capacity will be used later in the decade.

The Reform Package

The local vehicle is an amendment to Article 51, which already governs Allston-Brighton. Because Boston changes zoning through its Zoning Commission under Chapter 665 of the Acts of 1956, the package is written as a Zoning Commission petition, supported by a City Council order and a state enabling act.²⁴

One overlay, six subdistricts. The Allston-Brighton Housing Abundance Overlay District has six subdistricts, with multifamily housing allowed as of right in all but the neighborhood-housing layer:

• High-capacity sites: up to 18 stories and 7.0 FAR.
• Main corridors: up to 10 stories and 5.0 FAR.
• Squares: up to 7 stories and 4.0 FAR in cores, and 5 stories and 3.0 FAR on transition blocks.
• Neighborhood transition: 4 stories, with 8–12 homes on qualifying lots.
• Neighborhood housing: ADUs, conversions and up to four homes.
• Institutional and campus: up to 12 stories.

Where the overlay conflicts with Article 51, the overlay controls.

Rules that lower cost.

• Parking: no minimums. Builders decide how much parking to provide, and lenders and renters will want some.
• Inclusionary zoning: overlay projects are exempt from Article 79, and there are no negotiated community-benefit or linkage payments as a condition of approval.
• Unit mix: no bedroom-mix mandate. Floor area in three-bedroom homes is exempt from FAR as an incentive.
• Envelopes: no required stepbacks, side yards or minimum lot area per home.
• Approvals: code-compliant projects get a written decision within fixed deadlines.

Design that respects the neighborhood without costing homes. Appearance is governed by the objective design schedule in our design standard. It covers street wall placement, window proportion and depth, masonry-like facing, a defined base and roofline, and entrance spacing. These are measurable rules about what the building looks like, and they cannot reduce height, floor area or units. The required package adds about $2–$7 per square foot, up to about $13 with unfavorable bids. We model $5. Everything else is optional.

Boston’s existing tax tool. Boston taxes new apartment buildings on income-based assessments, which takes about a fifth of every new dollar of net operating income.³ The City already uses Chapter 121A of the General Laws to set payments in lieu of taxes for development projects. We propose no new tax program, only that qualifying overlay housing be eligible for that existing treatment on published terms, with payments of about 60 percent of full taxes during the early years. That lowers the break-even rent about 7 percent. New homes would still pay about $5,200 a year each, about $75 million a year once Allston-Brighton’s 14,500 are built.

State action. The state act gives Boston clear authority for objective, time-limited, as-of-right districts. It also directs the building code board to allow single-stair buildings up to six stories, now under study by executive order, which frees floor area and lowers cost on the small lots typical of Allston-Brighton.²³

What we do not do. We do not ask new homes to pay for affordability. Households that need deep help are better served by vouchers and publicly funded homes paid for from broad revenue, which work best when there is enough housing to go around. Tenant protections and relocation help for residents of buildings being redeveloped remain in the petition.

What Build-Out Would Mean for Allston-Brighton’s Residents

The figures below use the central estimate: rents about 9 percent lower in real terms by the end of the decade than if today’s pace of building continued. The range is 5–11 percent. Pew’s research finds the largest slowdowns in older, cheaper apartments, so these estimates are conservative for the neighborhood’s pre-war stock.⁸

Renters

Allston-Brighton has about 29,600 renter households.¹ At the median rent of about $2,400, a 9 percent reduction saves about $220 a month, or $2,600 a year. Across all renters, that is about $78 million a year staying in residents’ pockets. New apartments would rent about $240 a month less for a studio, $285 for a one-bedroom, $370 for a two-bedroom and $420 for a three-bedroom.²

Lower-income households

About 8,700 Allston-Brighton households, roughly a quarter, earn under $35,000 a year.¹ For a household earning $30,000 and paying the median rent, $2,600 a year is about a month of pre-tax income. Allston’s poverty rate is 27.9 percent and Brighton’s 19.1 percent. Most new homes are market-rate, but the evidence shows their benefits reach lower-income renters through cheaper older apartments and less competition for them.¹⁹

Students and young workers

About 25,500 Allston-Brighton residents are enrolled in college or graduate school: 43 percent of Allston’s population and 22 percent of Brighton’s.¹ When studio and one-bedroom apartments are scarce, groups of students outbid families for two- and three-family houses. New small apartments, which make up most of what builders produce, and the institutional-housing requirements in the petition give students and young workers somewhere else to live.

Families with children

Children are scarce in Allston-Brighton. Residents under 15 make up 4.2 percent of Allston and 6.2 percent of Brighton, against 10.8 percent citywide.¹ Families need larger homes, and three-bedroom apartments already make up about a quarter of the neighborhood’s stock. As students and roommate groups move into new small apartments, older family-size homes return to families, and a new three-bedroom would rent about $420 a month less. Exempting three-bedroom floor area from FAR encourages builders to add more.

Immigrant households

About 32 percent of Allston residents and 27 percent of Brighton residents were born abroad. About 9 percent of residents speak a Chinese language at home and 8 percent speak Spanish.¹ Immigrant households are more likely than native-born households to rent, so lower rents reach them directly. Neighborhood businesses on Harvard and Brighton Avenues gain new customers and new storefronts in mixed-use buildings.

Seniors

About 10,100 Allston-Brighton residents are 60 or older, and about a fifth to nearly a third of residents over 65 live in poverty.¹ Lower rents help senior renters stay. New elevator buildings add accessible homes near the Green Line and bus routes, which pre-war walk-ups rarely offer. The petition allows senior and supportive housing as of right.

Homeowners

About 6,200 Allston-Brighton households own their homes.¹ Owners in the overlay gain the right to add homes, ADUs or conversions, which raises the development value of their land. Across the region, home prices would rise more slowly than otherwise, because prices respond to supply even more than rents do.¹¹ That helps first-time buyers and makes longtime owners’ gains slower but steadier. New buildings broaden the tax base: about $75 million a year from Allston-Brighton’s new homes, even with Chapter 121A tax treatment.

Workers and commuters

About a quarter of Allston workers and 29 percent of Brighton workers ride transit, and 16 percent of Allston workers walk to work.¹ Every home built here instead of beyond Route 128 or 495 is a household closer to Boston’s and Cambridge’s jobs, with shorter commutes and less traffic on the roads into the city.

Article 80 and Agency Reform

Code-compliant overlay projects should follow a Housing Abundance Review Track: one completeness notice within 15 business days, and a written zoning and design determination within 60 days for projects under 100 homes, 90 days for 100 to 299 homes and 120 days for larger ones. Nothing settled by the zoning, including use, height, density, parking or unit count, should be reopened in review.²⁴

• Planning Department. Publish an Allston-Brighton Housing Abundance Administrative Manual with subdistrict maps, eligibility rules, the objective design schedule, application checklists, fixed review timelines and a public dashboard. The dashboard should track permits, completions, rents and break-even rents.
• Boston Civic Design Commission. Review only against the objective design schedule. It should not reduce homes, height, floor area or residential use.
• Transportation. Replace negotiated transportation mitigation in the overlay with published frontage standards for sidewalks, loading and curb cuts.
• Inspectional Services. Issue a Housing Abundance Zoning Compliance Certificate, so compliant projects never enter variance practice.
• Assessing Department and Mayor’s Office of Housing. Publish the terms on which overlay housing qualifies for the City’s existing Chapter 121A tax treatment.
• Institutions. Institutional master plans should require Harvard, Boston University, Boston College, hospitals and other institutions to measure their students’, staff’s and affiliates’ housing demand and commit to plans that house them.

Implementation Roadmap

Implementation Considerations

Implementation begins with parcel-level mapping. The Planning Department’s capacity analysis should join individual parcels to zoning, assessor, ownership, environmental and transit layers and score each parcel’s likelihood of redevelopment, so the overlay map and its subdistrict boundaries are drawn parcel by parcel.

Infrastructure and feasibility will shape delivery. Financing, construction labor, sewer and water capacity, electric infrastructure, schools, the public realm, transit capacity and street redesign all matter. None of them invalidates the target, but they will shape sequencing, public investment and a realistic implementation schedule.

The cost side deserves as much attention as the zoning text. The City should publish break-even rents for standard building types each year, alongside permits and rents. If the break-even rent stays above market rents, the remedy is more cost reform, not more mandates.

Separate Legislative Appendices

The full model legal texts are on our model legislation page. Appendix A is the Zoning Commission petition for the Allston-Brighton Housing Abundance Overlay District. Appendix B is the City Council order. Appendix C is the state enabling act.

Notes

1. City of Boston Planning Department Research Division, Boston in Context: Neighborhoods (2025). Population, tenure, bedroom, income, enrollment, nativity, age and commuting tables for Allston and Brighton. bostonplans.org
2. Yardi Matrix via RentCafe, asking rents in Allston-Brighton buildings of 50 or more units, July 2026: studio $2,632 (430 SF), one-bedroom $3,124 (647 SF), two-bedroom $4,039 (882 SF), three-bedroom $4,593 (1,094 SF). Constant-quality comparator $4.61 per rentable SF per month, range $4.39–$4.82, as compiled in note 3.
3. Allston Heritage Foundation, How Much Housing Would It Take to Drive Rents Down to the Cost of Building It? Working Paper 2026-01 and Addendum (August 2026). Minimum-profitable-production-cost model calibrated to a 2024 Brighton developer pro forma; available on request.
4. Boston Zoning Code, Article 51 (Allston-Brighton Neighborhood District), Table J: 2.0 off-street spaces per dwelling unit for residential uses of ten or more units. Municode
5. City of Boston, Inclusionary Zoning (Article 79), effective October 2024: market-rate projects of seven or more units; 17–20% of units income-restricted at an average of 50–60% of area median income; 3% voucher set-aside in large rental projects. boston.gov
6. Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko, “The Economic Implications of Housing Supply,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 32(1) (2018): 3–30.
7. Leonardo D’Amico, Edward Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, William Kerr and Giacomo Ponzetto, “Why Has Construction Productivity Stagnated? The Role of Land-Use Regulation,” NBER Working Paper 33188 (2024).
8. Sasha Rodnyansky, Daisy Su and Alex Horowitz, New Housing Slows Rent Growth Most for Older, More Affordable Units, The Pew Charitable Trusts (2025). Metro-level rent response of about −0.5% per 1% increase in housing stock; ZIP-level about −0.14%.
9. Santosh Anagol, Fernando Ferreira and Jonah Rexer, “Estimating the Economic Value of Zoning Reform,” NBER Working Paper 29440. City-wide rent responses of −0.26 (open city) to −0.58 (closed city) per 1% of stock.
10. Xiaodi Li, “Do New Housing Units in Your Backyard Raise Your Rents?” Journal of Economic Geography 22(6) (2022): 1309–1352.
11. Raven Molloy, Charles Nathanson and Andrew Paciorek, “Housing Supply and Affordability: Evidence from Rents, Housing Consumption and Household Location,” Journal of Urban Economics 129 (2022): 103427.
12. Albert Saiz, “The Geographic Determinants of Housing Supply,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 125(3) (2010): 1253–1296; Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti, “Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation,” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 11(2) (2019): 1–39.
13. Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities, A Home for Everyone: A Comprehensive Housing Plan for Massachusetts (2025): 222,000 homes statewide, 2025–2035. Greater Boston’s share of 140,000–180,000 is the estimate in note 3.
14. Rider Levett Bucknall, Quarterly Construction Cost Report, Q1 2026: Boston multi-family hard cost $290–$390 per SF. rlb.com
15. Cumming Group, Q4 2025 Market Analysis: Boston market-grade apartments $400–$590 per SF (shell and interiors, excluding sitework and soft costs); structured parking $34,000–$59,000 per stall above grade and $106,000–$152,000 below grade. cumming-group.com
16. Massachusetts EOHLC, Home for Everyone Construction Finance Explainer: average hard cost $370 per SF for four-to-six-story wood-frame housing. mass.gov
17. RKG Associates for the City of Boston, Inclusionary Development Policy Financial Feasibility Analysis (February 2023): apartment hard costs $340 (stick), $390 (stick over podium) and $490 (steel) per SF, 2022 basis.
18. Emily Hamilton, “Inclusionary Zoning and Housing Market Outcomes,” Cityscape 23(1) (2021); Jenny Schuetz, Rachel Meltzer and Vicki Been, “Silver Bullet or Trojan Horse? The Effects of Inclusionary Zoning on Local Housing Markets in the United States,” Urban Studies 48(2) (2011): 297–329.
19. Brian Asquith, Evan Mast and Davin Reed, “Local Effects of Large New Apartment Buildings in Low-Income Areas,” Review of Economics and Statistics (2023); Evan Mast, “The Effect of New Market-Rate Housing Construction on the Low-Income Housing Market,” Journal of Urban Economics (2023).
20. Building permits: Greater Boston (five counties) 13,682 units in 2015 and 8,993 in 2024; City of Boston 4,955 in 2015 and roughly 1,800–2,200 in 2024. U.S. Census Bureau Building Permits Survey via Boston Indicators. bostonindicators.org
21. MassHousing, 2026 HUD Income and Rent Limits, Boston-Cambridge-Quincy HMFA (effective May 1, 2026): one-bedroom maximum gross rent $1,607 at 50% AMI and $1,929 at 60% AMI.
22. Councilors Sharon Durkan and Henry Santana, draft text amendment removing residential parking minimums citywide, filed April 2026. boston.gov
23. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Executive Order No. 651, Facilitating Safe and Affordable Single-Stair Multifamily Residential Buildings (February 2026). mass.gov. On space efficiency, see Boston Indicators, Upzone Update: Single Stair (2025).
24. Chapter 665 of the Acts of 1956, as amended (Boston’s zoning enabling act); Boston Planning Department, Article 80 modernization amendments (adopted August 2025).
25. Kate Pennington, “Does Building New Housing Cause Displacement? The Supply and Demand Effects of Construction in San Francisco” (working paper, 2021).