Boston Indicators

The special topic section also features a deep focus on three case studies.

Everyone who attends the event in person will be invited to ask questions and share reactions to all aspects of the report.

The Greater Boston Housing Report Card provides the most up-to-date regional and municipal housing data.

For this year’s “Special Topic” section, a research team from Boston University’s Initiative on Cities has analyzed approval documents from those affected by the MBTA Communities law (MBTA-C).

Please join us on Wednesday, November 12, 2025, at 9:00 a.m., in person or online, for the release of the 2025 Greater Boston Housing Report Card. buff.ly/Q8hGZHv

We’re excited to have Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll join us. She will share a research presentation and her remarks.

The special topic section also features a deep focus on three case studies.

Everyone who attends the event in person will be invited to ask questions and share reactions to all aspects of the report.

The Greater Boston Housing Report Card provides the most up-to-date regional and municipal housing data.

For this year’s “Special Topic” section, a research team from Boston University’s Initiative on Cities has analyzed approval documents from those affected by the MBTA Communities law (MBTA-C).

To learn more about housing data—and the twists and turns of Dain’s search for an accurate count of housing permits in Malden—check out Upzone Update.

“The forces are aligned to make this change,” Dain adds. “There’s a commitment at the highest state levels to address the housing shortage and housing crisis. We have the right staffing and technology and momentum.”

Next, Dain explains, Massachusetts should take action by improving and standardizing housing data collection.

A new tool is the U.S. Census Address Count, a dataset that draws on U.S. Postal Service address lists to produce better housing production data. In addition, the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, a regional agency, is filling the data gap with MassBuilds, a statewide building data map.

There are some useful but limited data tools. One is the U.S. Census Building Permits Survey (BPS), but it offers what Dain calls “blunt metrics… not the detailed information we need to manage housing policy.”

As Dain, a Boston Indicators Senior Fellow, says, “There's a lot of information that policymakers should know about housing construction and production and related dimensions of these issues that we just don't have good, solid data on.”

The Surprising Lack of Good Permitting Data and What to Do about It Homes in the construction pipeline should be readily countable, unlike, for example, grains of sand in Salisbury Beach.

And as she explains in the newest edition of Upzone Update—"The Surprising Lack of Good Permitting Data and What to Do about It” buff.ly/2fh6B3K —while counting permits should be easy, the process can feel like counting grains of sand. Concrete numbers keep slipping through your fingers.

Amy Dain once spent several years tracking down the number of housing permits issued in Greater Boston.

To learn more, check out the brief. And look for more information next month when we release our 2025 Greater Boston Housing Report Card. bit.ly/47x9uui

One caveat about these estimates, as the brief notes, is that the Census Address Counts are a new data product, so “we are still learning about its strengths and limitations.”

Construction activity varies widely. Enter Milton in the table’s search box, for example, and the result is a 1 percent increase in units. In Medfield, there has been a 3.4 percent increase. For Salem, it’s 5.1 percent. For Boston, it’s 5.7 percent. And for Millis, it’s 13.9 percent.

To measure actual construction, we’ve used Census Address Count estimates to create an interactive table (embedded in the brief, buff.ly/wGl4wZP) that shows the 2020-to-2025, net change in housing units in Greater Boston’s cities and towns.

However, to fully understand housing production trends, it’s important to count the actual numbers of houses being built, as we explain in our brief, “How many homes are we actually Building?” buff.ly/kXJNCwz.

Counting the number of housing construction permits gives us a glimpse of how much housing could be built in the future.

To learn more, check out the brief, and look for the release of our 2025 Greater Boston Housing Report Card on Wednesday, November 12th. buff.ly/9lQmnUe

Between 2020 and 2025, Metro Core Communities added about 26,382 net new units, compared to 44,724 units across all other community types combined.”

Among the top Metro Core producers are Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville.

What we found, as the brief explains, is that “Metro Core Communities have been producing substantially more housing than other types, even after adjusting for their pre-existing stock.

But permits are not an exact proxy for housing production, so we also look at the rate of housing completions among various types of urban and suburban communities, based on definitions developed by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC). buff.ly/uFyE8CI

To understand how many housing units might be built in the future, our new brief—“How many homes are we actually building?” buff.ly/8YLEGFn%E2%8... looks at recent trends in building permits.

The special topic section also features a deep focus on three case studies.

Everyone who attends the event in person will be invited to ask questions and share reactions to all aspects of the report.

The Greater Boston Housing Report Card provides the most up-to-date regional and municipal housing data.

For this year’s “Special Topic” section, a research team from Boston University’s Initiative on Cities has analyzed approval documents from those affected by the MBTA Communities law (MBTA-C).

Please join us on Wednesday, November 12, 2025, at 9:00 a.m., in person or online, for the release of the 2025 Greater Boston Housing Report Card. buff.ly/Q8hGZHv

We’re excited to have Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll join us. She will share a research presentation and her remarks.

In addition, federal restrictions on immigration may be raising labor costs because a large share of construction workers were born in other countries.

To learn more, check out the brief. And look for more information next month when we release our 2025 Greater Boston Housing Report Card.

Other factors include recent tariffs on lumber and steel as well as local barriers such as restrictive zoning, costly building code regulations, and lengthy permit approval processes.

“Nationwide,” the brief notes, “construction materials remain expensive compared to pre-COVID levels, with costs in May 2025 roughly 40 percent higher than in March 2020.”