Housing costs are out of control. In Boston, experts offer the 4 fastest ways to fix it

It doesn’t take much more than a quick peek at Zillow to figure out that housing prices and rents are rising at a dizzying pace. And that’s nowhere more true than in Massachusetts, where those costs are among the highest in the nation.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median gross rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Massachusetts was $1,882 in 2023, up from $1,727 the year before and $1,381 in 2018.

But it’s also true no matter where you live. And voters are talking about it.

Concerns about housing costs topped the list of voters’ concerns in the most recent poll of Boston’s closely watched mayoral race.

Ditto for a nationwide Associated Press/NORC poll that listed housing costs as a major source of financial stress for most Americans.

So what to do about it?

That debate took center stage Tuesday in Boston as lawmakers from across the country gathered for the second day of the National Conference of State Legislatures’ annual summit.

And while there’s no “silver bullet” to the nation’s housing affordability crisis, a panel of housing experts from across the country said there are four easy fixes available to policymakers if they’re willing to embrace them.

“We need a lot of different solutions,“ Kimberly Burnett, the executive director of Ivory Innovations, a housing think-tank at the University of Utah, said. ”And so, our role, really, is to find and support and promote lots of different innovations across the spectrum.”

Pressed by the mixed crowd of lawmakers, policy experts and legislative staffers, Burnett and her fellow panelists offered what they said were the four fastest fixes to an issue that has vexed officials nationwide, again, including Massachusetts.

For Ruby Bolaria Shfirin, the chief investment & partnership officer at Terner Labs, an affordable housing group in Oakland, Calif., it starts with rent caps.

“I think, literally, if, you want to keep people housed, you can in the quickest way possible, is a rent cap,” she said. “And it doesn’t need to be, like, a 2% thing. California passed a 10% rent cap. But some kind of floor like that is really, really helpful, as well as other anti-eviction measures.”

Rent stabilization advocates flooded the Massachusetts State House last month, where they called on lawmakers to pass bills that would give cities and towns the option to implement local rent control laws that would annually cap such increases. It would not impose it statewide, MassLive previously reported.

Another option: Legalizing more and different types of housing, such as accessory dwelling units, sometimes referred to as “Granny Flats,” or “In-Law Apartments.”

Language authorizing the construction of these tiny homes, by right, was included in a major housing bond bill that state lawmakers passed, and Gov. Maura Healey signed, last year.

One more possibility: Increased workforce development efforts for the construction industry. Because you need skilled workers to build the high-density housing of the future.

Officials in Maryland, for instance, awarded $4 million in funding, split among eight organizations, to encourage such efforts, The Baltimore Banner reported in June.

Speeding up the local regulatory process and making it more predictable, with a basketball-style shot clock, also would help, Burnett said.

That means municipal governments would have a certain amount of time to make a decision on a project, instead of dragging their deliberations out for weeks or months, she said.

“If the developer knows what that [limit] is,it’s much easier to plan,“ Burnett said. Developers are successful if they can build [the] housing that they need in a predictable way.”

Policymakers also need to find a way to balance the rights of developers against those of tenants, Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, the senior research analyst at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, said.

That could mean incentives for building affordable housing, she said, along with a “baseline of tenant protections.”