A ballot measure in Massachusetts meant to make it easier to build starter homes will provide a test case for directly asking voters to increase the housing supply to address the affordability problem afflicting the nation.
The referendum, Question 7, asks voters to ban localities in the Bay State from implementing large minimum lot requirements for houses, so as to allow smaller lots and more modestly sized housing to be built.
Minimum lot sizes would be capped at 5,000 square feet. The national average for new single-family houses, by comparison, is just over 8,500 square feet.
The vote has national significance because it represents a new strategy in the quest to reduce the zoning and land-use rules that restrict the housing supply. Rather than trying to work through local governments, pro-housing supply advocates are trying to get voters to enact change at the state level — and thereby send a message to legislators that pro-supply policies are popular.
“Part of the hope is that doing this with a ballot campaign, as opposed to through the legislative process, demonstrates to lawmakers that there is an appetite among voters for zoning reform,” said Andrew Mikula, the chief housing economist at the Pioneer Institute, a Boston-based think tank.
Mikula started the petition to get Question 7 on the ballot and is one of the leaders of the campaign in favor.
He said that allowing for greater construction of starter homes could help ease the housing affordability problem in the Greater Boston area.
Some states, such as Maine and Kansas, have already limited minimum lot sizes. And reformers also cite Houston as a success, crediting it with adding tens of thousands of homes after capping minimum lot sizes in the late 1980s.
Massachusetts is an important case because it has long suffered from housing supply problems that have now spread across the country and driven up prices.
Homeownership in the area has slipped out of reach for most people.
The median price of a single-family home in the Boston area was $844,600 in the second quarter of this year, according to the National Association of Realtors. At those prices, even a couple of professionals who both have six-figure incomes will struggle to find a home to buy.
For younger people, in particular, the lack of homes at lower price points is a major obstacle to putting down roots and or starting a family.
“We need lower rungs on the housing ladder to help folks build equity and build community,” Mikula said.
Minimum lot sizes spread to Massachusetts as part of a major downzoning in the 1970s, said Amy Dain, an expert on Massachusetts land-use laws who works at Boston Indicators. At the time, local officials worried that starter homes on smaller lots could invite younger families with children to move into town, taking advantage of the school system but paying few taxes. The downzoning also came during the civil rights era, when many towns feared an influx of black residents.
Whatever the motivation, large lot sizes drive up prices by restricting the overall supply of developable land. They also make it difficult for developers to turn a profit on smaller, less expensive homes because they have to invest more upfront for the land.
Mikula suggested that the policy of capping minimum lot sizes at 5,000 square feet could add more than 5,000 new units per year, roughly doubling the number of new single-family units permitted in the state in recent years. That estimate is based on an analysis from Boston University professor Maxwell Palmer, finding that there are 350,000 parcels across Massachusetts that would be affected by the change.
The campaign for “yes” on Question 7 has support from a range of figures and interests in the state, including Gov. Maura Healey (D-MA). And a 2025 poll suggested strong support for decreasing minimum lot sizes.
But the Massachusetts Municipal Association, which represents the towns and cities, opposes it.
“We think local leaders, mayors, select board members, town managers, city councilors — they’re best positioned to make decisions about what’s best for their community,” executive director Adam Chapdelaine said in a recent interview.
Having voters override local interest, though, is a feature of the measure, not a bug, from the perspective of its backers.
Dain said decades of pro-housing-supply advocacy for reforms that work through local governments have yielded only marginal benefits, or created other problems.
For example, in 2021, the state legislature passed a law requiring cities and towns that are served by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority to establish at least one district in which multifamily housing is permitted by right.
But that requirement has faced outright rebellion from some towns since its enactment. At the same time, towns that have embraced it, such as Lexington, could face a sort of flood of multifamily construction. It is “almost unfair” to those towns to have to do more than their fair share, Dains said.
Question 7 is designed to avoid swamping smaller towns with new housing and instead target localities that are already developed. It is limited to areas that already have access to public sewer and water services.
That stipulation means the policy would mostly affect areas with access to jobs and transit, rather than spur sprawl by pushing construction farther out into the exurbs.
In other words, it would require that the high-income towns near Boston allow more people to move in and benefit from the local economy.
“The idea is we’re setting kind of a baseline for what we should expect to allow in terms of housing in places that expect to participate in a metropolitan economy in the 21st century,” Mikula said.
Local lawmakers are typically more deferential to existing homeowners and people who will take the time to show up to a planning meeting to object to new construction. But if the referendum has a strong showing, it could lead town and city officials to embrace pro-housing-supply measures more confidently, knowing that the majority of voters welcome them.
Massachusetts is unusually complex for developers because it has more than 300 different land-use jurisdictions that have individualized rules and processes for permitting housing. Often, getting approval means going through a planning board or town meeting.
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But Question 7 might help make it easier for developers to navigate the web of requirements. And it would boost single-family housing, rather than apartment buildings, which often engender greater pushback.
“This is definitely an interesting lever for change,” Dains said.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
