The commission argued in its report that there are no simple, painless adjustments that can meet the scale of the state’s massive shortage of homes. A full-scale rethinking of how homes in the state, both market-rate and affordable, are planned, permitted, financed, built, and maintained is necessary to make meaningful progress.
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“The time for incremental change has long passed,” the commission wrote. “Bold, decisive, continued action is essential to ensuring that Massachusetts remains a place where people can afford to live, businesses can thrive, and communities can grow.”
The recommendations followed an analysis earlier this month by the Healey administration that said the state will need to build 222,000 homes by 2035 in order to fill a yawning supply gap that is driving up the cost of housing for everyday people. At the rate Massachusetts is currently building, the state will fall well short of that goal.
The recommendations in the report — which are suggestions for Healey administration to consider, not a formal legislative agenda — are wide-ranging.
The commission recommended Massachusetts effectively end single-family only zoning, by allowing two-unit buildings on any residential lot in the state, and up to four units in areas served by municipal water and sewer.
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A number of other states, including Vermont and Maine, have passed similar reforms, though they have been controversial. The idea, advocates say, is to add modest density in the form of duplexes, triple-deckers, and fourplexes — the sort of housing many towns used to build before the buildings were banned in most places — in single-family neighborhoods without dramatically disrupting the character of a community.
Cambridge enacted a similar policy last week, allowing buildings up to six stories citywide.
The proposal would not preclude the construction of single-family homes, but rather it would allow denser homes to be built in addition to single-families in neighborhoods statewide.
It also proposed tying more municipal funding — like school and highway funds — to state housing goals, so that “communities will have stronger incentives to adopt pro-housing initiatives.”
And the commission suggested eliminating minimum lot size requirements for residential land. More than half of the cities and towns in Eastern Massachusetts mandate that some lots for single-family homes be at least one acre. Some require a baseline of two acres, one and a half times the size of the playing field at Gillette Stadium, per house.
That is a waste of land in a state where it is an expensive commodity, and the rules are a relic of an era when zoning was used as a tool of exclusion, some land-use experts say. Getting rid of those lot-size requirements would make it easier to build smaller, more affordable homes, and make better use of the state’s land, the commission said.
“By requiring excessive amounts of land per home, these regulations inflate housing costs, limit the availability of buildable land, and reduce housing diversity,” the committee wrote.
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Another of the reforms outlined by the commission is the end of minimum parking requirements for new development statewide.
Parking minimums are commonplace in cities and towns across the state. They mandate new housing developments are built with a certain ratio of off-street parking spaces designated for residents of the development. But those parking spaces are expensive: In some communities, it can cost developers more than $100,000 to build a single space, and those costs are transferred directly on to tenants in the form of higher rents.
What’s more, many parking minimums require developers to build more spaces than residents use. A 2023 study by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council found that some 40 percent of parking spaces in six communities surrounding Boston were empty during peak hours. Instead of building excess parking, the report said, that land could be used for housing.
Eliminating parking minimums would not mean banning off-street parking. It also would not mean that developers would stop building it, the commission said. Rather, they would build parking to market demand. Cambridge and Somerville have both eliminated parking minimums in recent years.
Of course, making the commission’s recommendations a reality is another question. Changes to housing policy in Massachusetts are always controversial, particularly when they involve the state influencing local land-use decisions.
Virtually every reform the commission proposed will likely have powerful adversaries, because those proposals in many cases suggest undoing rules that have shaped what housing is built here, and how, for decades.
“Any of these suggestions is going to require some soul-searching if we want to implement them,” said Jesse Kanson-Benanav, executive director of the housing group Abundant Housing Massachusetts, who served on the commission. “It’s going to be a hard conversation, but its a conversation we must have. Because what we’re doing right now is not enough.”
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The commission’s final proposal was more than 100 pages long. Here’s what else it suggested:
- Bolster financing programs for water and sewer infrastructure expansion, with the eventual goal of connecting more municipalities to the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority and other regional water and wastewater systems.
- Dedicate additional resources to studying modular, or factory-built, housing, with the goal of opening large modular factories in Massachusetts to build units for local development projects.
- Streamline approvals for Chapter 40B housing projects, which lets developers bypass local zoning rules in communities that do not have a certain amount of affordable housing.
- Create an Office of State Planning to coordinate long-term land-use policy goals, and closely track municipal development data to measure progress.
- Require municipalities to set standards that adhere to, but don’t exceed, the state Department of Environmental Protection’s wetlands and wastewater requirements, a measure intended to remove onerous rules that can block new construction.
- Allow residential buildings of up to 24 units and six stories to only have a single staircase, as opposed to two, to help reduce the cost of small and mid-size development.
Andrew Brinker can be reached at andrew.brinker@globe.com. Follow him @andrewnbrinker.