Beacon Hill housing moves swish past Boston

August 12, 2026

By Jennifer Smith

Beacon Hill has taken repeated swings at getting cities and towns to build more housing over the last five years — sometimes waving carrots and sticks, sometimes making changes to state zoning law to allow more housing by fiat.

But a quirk of state zoning that treats Boston differently is starting to create parallel realities. Just 500 feet apart, across the Neponset River, a single-family homeowner in Milton or Quincy could soon add a second unit or even a third smaller unit without needing special permission from local officials or buy-in from neighbors worried about parking. Or they could be in Boston.

None of the big housing reforms passed recently on Beacon Hill apply to Boston, which is covered by its own state-authorized zoning code, not the code directly changed by legislation, which covers every other municipality in Massachusetts.

Cities and towns from the Cape to the Berkshires now allow small accessory dwelling units to be built in most districts, have a harder time rejecting building variances, and many are covered by higher zoning requirements near transit. And more change is in the works that could boost housing on religiously owned parcels and allow two units to be built on most lots.

These recent moves all work the same way: by amending Chapter 40A of the General Laws, the statute that hands 350 cities and towns their zoning authority. But Boston’s zoning is covered by a separate state statute — the 70-year-old Boston Zoning Enabling Act — and often operates as a world apart from its fellow municipalities.

That is especially significant because Boston is the state’s single major metro area and the driver of the Massachusetts economy, said Luc Schuster, the executive director of Boston Indicators, a research center at the Boston Foundation. Statewide changes can be great, he said, but “there’s a big donut hole in that approach when Boston is exempt.”

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