The Bay State’s housing crunch seemed to reach into all corners in 2025, tying up courts, lawmakers navigating climate and transportation concerns, groups dependent on federal fair housing funding, and services promising to make it easier for more people to afford to live in pricey Massachusetts.
Here are some of the housing angles that drew our focus at CommonWealth Beacon this year.
The persistent MBTA Communities fight
This showpiece 2021 housing law requiring multifamily zoning near the MBTA system survived a Supreme Judicial Court challenge, spawned 40 bills on Beacon Hill, and sparked a degree of political soul-searching even among its biggest backers. At a national pro-housing conference in September, advocates who spent years championing the law acknowledged it was “too effing complicated” – its town-by-town approach designed to give municipalities leeway but also creating endless room for resistance.
Towns like Milton and Duxbury finally fell in line after the state’s high court agreed that Attorney General Andrea Campbell could enforce the law, and a lower court judge waved away challenges claiming lawmakers had created an “unfunded mandate” for cities and towns. But the delayed compliance and ongoing legal vexations kept the statute’s core state versus local control tension in the spotlight.
Even optimistic projections suggest MBTA Communities might yield just 40,000 units over 10 years – a step to be sure, but nowhere near the 222,000 units Gov. Maura Healey’s administration projects the state will need in the next decade. And even as the final deadline for compliance looms – December 31 for the last group of towns – the fight is headed back to the state’s high court.
Climate and housing collide
From worsening flooding to wildfires, climate change isn’t coming for Massachusetts housing – it’s already here.
Experts warn that in 10 to 15 years, large swaths of the country may lack mortgages because insurance markets are failing across entire regions. Meanwhile, FEMA expanded flood maps putting thousands of Bay State homes in new risk zones.
A federal retreat is complicating the crisis. The Trump administration ended FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program in April, pulling back $882 billion in climate preparedness funding (which a district judge has since ordered restored), then cut a fifth of the agency’s workforce and scrubbed coastal erosion prediction tools from its website – maps that Nantucket and other communities relied on for risk planning.
And it is getting hotter, with drought conditions worsening by the end of summer 2025 after a brutal wildfire season the year before. As the state seeks to build more housing, it will need to grapple with climate threats from all sides, carving away at land once considered to be a safe bet for homeowners.
Mixed federal messages on housing
When the Trump administration abruptly cut $30 million in grants to 78 fair housing organizations nationwide in February – part of the administration’s battle with the specter of “DEI” – Massachusetts ended up in the thick of it. Four national and local nonprofits sued, and a federal judge ordered HUD to reinstate the funding after determining the cuts violated congressional appropriations and administrative law.
The temporary victory came with a warning: With HUD proposing a 76 percent staffing cut to its fair housing enforcement division, the infrastructure to combat housing discrimination remains under threat.
While slashing fair housing resources, the administration also offered a seemingly contradictory approach to housing tax credits. The showpiece tax bill enacted over the summer expanded the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, while the president proposed reducing funding for rental assistance programs like Section 8, which help cover housing costs for low-income tenants.
Add in the hard-to-assess Opportunity Zone program, which is pitched as a way to encourage development in areas that struggle to attract investor dollars, and the Trump approach to encouraging new and affordable housing starts to look like a strategy resting mostly on reducing taxes for developers while leaving social supports and subsidies to help low-income tenants off to the side.
Lawsuits grapple with murky mortgage products
Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s consumer protection division spent time in 2025 probing financial products that blur the line between helping homeowners and exploiting them.
Her first-in-the-nation enforcement action against Boston-based Hometap argues the company’s home equity investments – giving the company a share of the house’s value in exchange for an infusion of cash – are actually illegal reverse mortgages disguised as investments. A Suffolk Superior Court judge let the case proceed in August, setting up a showdown over whether these largely unregulated products need to follow consumer protection rules.
A politically explosive housing case involved BlueHub Capital, a Roxbury nonprofit whose CEO is a longtime Healey donor. A Superior Court judge ruled in September that BlueHub’s shared appreciation mortgages – which helped distressed homeowners avoid foreclosure but claimed a cut of future home equity – violated multiple consumer protection laws. The ruling came a year after the Legislature passed and Healey signed an economic development bill containing language exempting nonprofit shared appreciation mortgages from those very laws.
In mid-November, after initially digging in its heels on the program’s integrity, BlueHub announced it was “pausing” these mortgage offerings.
Rent control’s comeback
Three decades after Massachusetts voters banned rent control by ballot measure, the question may head before a new generation of voters. A coalition of advocates collected enough signatures to put a statewide rent stabilization measure on the 2026 ballot. If it passes, the initiative would cap annual rent increases at 5 percent or at the rate of inflation, whichever is lower, for most buildings across the state.
The real estate industry is already gearing up for what could be one of the most expensive ballot fights in recent memory, calling it “the most restrictive rent control program in the entire United States.”
The campaign splits even progressive allies, some of whom worry that proposing a blanket statewide cap on rents, rather than allowing individual communities to opt in, could hurt its chances. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, who proposed her own rent stabilization policy in 2023, called the ballot measure “quite restrictive” and said she’d have preferred a local-option approach. But tenant advocates, who say Beacon Hill has ignored their calls for action year after year, see rising rents straining household budgets across the state, and they’re betting that voters will support the measure.