(Illustration by Dsndrn-Videolar via Pixabay)

THE MBTA COMMUNITIES ACT has been touted as a landmark transit-oriented development law, aiming to spur the construction of desperately needed new housing in Greater Boston and to have those new homes built using “smart growth” principles, at higher density near transit nodes.

The name itself certainly suggested a transit-oriented intent. Five years after the law’s adoption in 2021, however, our analysis released last week shows that it is not playing out this way.

Only 30 percent of the homes in the early MBTA Communities permitting pipeline are easily walkable to a transit station (within a half mile). And while the law is generating real housing production, only about 7,000 units had entered the permitting pipeline in its first two years of implementation, the overwhelming share of them in just a handful of communities.

Even if all these homes get built, and we continue this pace for several more years, the total would make a modest dent in the state’s goal of producing 220,000 new homes by 2035.

This doesn’t mean the law is a failure. We needed to act, and MBTA Communities pushed the bounds of what was politically feasible five years ago. But if Massachusetts is serious about ending its housing shortage and doing so by building in the most strategic locations, much more will be required.

The law requires the 177 cities and towns with or near MBTA service to create at least one zoning district that allows multifamily housing as of right. Tracking how the law moved from statute to implementation helps explain why so little of its early production is within an easy walk of transit.

The original statute states plainly that new multifamily districts should be located within a half mile of a commuter rail station, subway station, ferry terminal, or bus station, if applicable, reflecting its transit-oriented intent.

But it applies to widely differing communities across the eastern half of the state, ranging from cities like Cambridge with multiple subway stops to towns like Ashby, a rural community of about 3,100 people in Worcester County, with no transit service, on the New Hampshire border. Perhaps to account for these stark differences, the law also sets a relatively low minimum zoned density of 15 units per acre, below what is typically associated with strong transit-oriented development.

Two years after the law was passed, the state’s detailed implementation rules reinforced this tension. The rules confirmed the law’s broad application to 177 municipalities, far beyond places served by rapid transit. And they acknowledged that even in communities with transit stations, many of those locations are constrained by wetlands, highways, parks, schools, or other public uses. As a result, the rules granted substantial flexibility in deciding where new multifamily districts could be located, with more than half of all MBTA Communities allowed to site districts anywhere they wanted.

At each step—from the law’s passage to the issuing of final regulations to local district design to developer site selection—the law has become less tightly tied to station areas. But does less transit-oriented mean less valuable? Not necessarily.

In many places, the law’s flexibility can be a virtue. Station areas are not the only places where new housing has value. Homes built near good schools, near job centers, or in walkable town centers can break down residential segregation and expand access to opportunity. Even housing in farther-flung, sprawling locations helps address our regional housing shortage and can be easier to build quickly at scale.

While the total number of units from this effort alone won’t solve our housing shortage, the roughly 7,000 homes in the early permitting pipeline should still be read as good news. Any new production helps, and essentially none of these projects would be moving forward without the law. This total also captures only the first couple of years of activity, coinciding with a period of weak market conditions.

At the same time, this early activity has been quite uneven, with roughly 80 percent of permitted units concentrated in just 10 of the 177 communities subject to the law. And more than 1,200 of the nearly 7,000 units are in one community, Lexington, a town served by MBTA bus lines but without a transit station.

The MBTA Communities law is better understood as a leveling up exercise, or a fair-share zoning law. The leveling up comes from requiring nearly every municipality in eastern Massachusetts to create at least one neighborhood zone where some amount of multifamily housing is legal to build, regardless of how restrictive its zoning had been before.

For decades, multifamily housing was illegal across most of the region, including in many places with strong schools, good access to jobs, and extensive public infrastructure. Some communities had pre-existing zoning rules that already met the law’s modest standards, like Cambridge, Beverly, and Everett. But most did not.

The law therefore raised the floor, bringing lagging municipalities up a level, ensuring that at least some duplexes, triple-deckers, and small apartment buildings could be built as of right. That shift is not creating mammoth apartment buildings near train stations, as some of the law’s detractors had feared, but it does spread zoning capacity a bit more evenly across the region.

Aiming for modest upzoning across a wide range of municipalities made the law politically viable and broadly applicable. This approach also means it was never designed to function as a powerful engine of transit-oriented development, even if it was sometimes framed that way.

So where does this leave us? A true transit-oriented development growth strategy is still very worth pursuing. But it would require more ambitious steps to cluster new homes, jobs, and amenities tightly around frequent, high-capacity transit so that public transportation, not private automobiles, becomes the natural choice for a greater share of daily trips.

Recent work on transit-supportive density, including a joint report Boston Indicators produced with TransitMatters, suggests that justifying the investment in frequent rapid transit generally requires residential densities of at least 15 units per acre averaged across station areas, and potentially even higher density on parcels closest to stations. Many station areas in Greater Boston fall well short of that mark, with some averaging six units per acre or less.

California’s recently passed SB 79 offers one example of what a more explicit transit-oriented development policy for these areas might look like. It allows significantly higher residential densities by right within the full walksheds of major transit stops, treating these transit stations as serious growth anchors. Running commuter rail frequently throughout the day, improving reliability on subways and buses, and extending the network all require substantial public resources. Over the long term, those investments need more than a modest increase in nearby housing and ridership to pencil out.

At its core, MBTA Communities wasn’t crafted to meet this standard. A law designed to legalize duplexes, triplexes, and small apartment buildings across hundreds of municipalities is fundamentally different from a focused transit-oriented-development law designed to reshape full station areas around frequent transit.

The MBTA Communities law is a big step forward, normalizing the idea that every community has a role to play in addressing our regional housing shortage. And it has created new opportunities for multifamily housing in places where it had long been prohibited.

But our analysis of early permitting activity also reveals the law’s limitations and points to how it could be strengthened. One path forward would focus explicitly on rapid transit station areas and frequent bus corridors. That could mean allowing denser residential development on MBTA- or state-owned land, legalizing multifamily housing across full station walksheds, eliminating parking minimums near frequent transit, and targeting affordable housing subsidies to transit-oriented locations.

As for the overall goal of building more housing to meet the state goal of 220,000 new homes by 2035, we need more scale everywhere, regardless of whether it’s near transit nodes. Fair-share zoning that requires all communities to allow some multifamily housing and true transit-oriented development are complementary, not interchangeable. It’s time for us all to turn toward what’s next.

Luc Schuster is executive director of Boston Indicators, a research center at the Boston Foundation.