What the MBTA Communities Law Means for Massachusetts’ Housing Shortage

Editor’s Note: Para la versión en español de este artículo, visita El Planeta.

LYNN, Massachusetts — During the 2021 pandemic year, Ramón Cruz, a Dominican immigrant who has called this city north of Boston home for more than four decades, said his housing stability vanished within four months of signing a $600-a-month lease.

“The pandemic brought a new owner in the building who came in and raised my rent by $800 without any prior notice, only a verbal warning,” Cruz told The Latino Newsletter. “I hadn’t even reached one year on my lease. They told me that because the building had been sold to a new owner, my lease terms wouldn’t apply the same way.”

After a serious injury sidelined him from work in the transportation industry for nearly a year, Cruz said staying economically afloat became even harder. He was eventually connected to public housing, starting at about $275 a month in 2021 and rising only slightly since.

The stability, he said, gave him a chance to start again. Cruz’s experience unfolded against a broader housing shortage that has strained renters across Massachusetts for years.

In a new report, Amy Dain, a senior fellow at Boston Indicators, examined how the 2021 (MBTA) Communities law — aimed at easing that shortage — is beginning to shape housing development.

Now, five years after the law passed, Dain’s report found that more than 100 projects or nearly 7,000 homes across 34 communities are in the pipeline, though most are still in the permitting process.

The 2021 MBTA Communities law, codified as Section 3A of the Zoning Act, requires cities and towns served by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) to create at least one zoning district where multifamily housing can be built “as of right,” without special permits. The law does not require those units to be income-restricted.

In an interview with The Latino Newsletter, Dain explained that the region’s housing shortage has persisted for decades.

“It’s sort of the issue of supply and demand. Then you have a shortage of something, people will bid up the prices of it, and that’s been driving price escalations,” Dain said.

Dain attributed the housing shortage to zoning restrictions, especially rules that limit multifamily housing construction and require city council or town meeting votes for individual projects. 

Her recent research highlighted that MBTA Communities was designed to reduce those barriers by allowing multifamily housing in designated districts without special permits.

Still, policy change is only a starting point, Mark A. Martinez Jr., a housing attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, said.

“We would love to see requirements so that some of these units are going to remain affordable for the people that already live in that neighborhood,” he said.

Otherwise, Martinez warned, if communities build only market-rate units, many low-income and immigrant residents “are not going to be able to rent into this new flashy housing that’s going up in their neighborhood.” 

For Martinez, the goal isn’t just building more housing, but housing people can actually afford: “What good is a world-class city [like Boston] if you can’t afford to live in it?”

Dain noted that some communities address affordability through local inclusionary zoning, which requires developers to set aside a share of new units as affordable. But she emphasized that affordability is not mandated under MBTA Communities — whether to require it is still up to each city or town.

Boston, for example, operates under an updated Inclusionary Development Policy (IDP) that can require up to 20 percent of units in qualifying developments to be income-restricted, an increase from the previous 13 percent standard before Mayor Michelle Wu raised the requirement in 2023.

In Lynn, advocates like Lynn United for Change said MBTA Communities may bring fewer zoning changes because the city has long allowed multifamily housing “by right” across a large area. Isaac Simon Hodes, the housing advocacy group’s executive director, noted that the city also has inclusionary zoning — requiring new buildings to include “a small percentage of affordable apartments” — but said it’s “better than nothing” and still “not enough to meet the need.”

Along with community organizer Celly De La Cruz, Lynn United for Change has spent years helping residents navigate housing emergencies while advocating for stronger tenant protections and affordability. For them, MBTA Communities will have its biggest impact in towns with restrictive zoning that have long blocked apartment construction. De La Cruz pointed to neighboring and affluent Marblehead as an example.

“If it doesn’t include any affordable housing, it won’t make an impact. No working-class person [is] gonna be able to move into those apartments in Marblehead,” De La Cruz said.

Advocates say affordability is closely tied to displacement.

De La Cruz described that families can no longer afford to stay in Lynn and are moving, leaving schools, after-school programs, and support systems behind. She said the result is not hypothetical, noting that “It is not a possibility, it’s a reality.” 

“The cultures disappear,” she noted, adding that only “the wealthy can afford to pay the rent.” According to the Census, about 46% of Lynn’s population of around 104,000 identifies as Latino.

Dain noted that not every new building automatically raises nearby rents. She distinguished between direct displacement — when older, naturally affordable housing is redeveloped, and residents are forced to leave — and broader concerns about indirect displacement, in which new development attracts higher-income residents. 

In that framework, the risk depends on whether new development replaces lower-cost housing and whether protections are in place for current residents.

In affluent towns like Lexington, projects are already in the pipeline, with several under construction. Many legislators, experts, and housing advocates point to those developments as evidence that zoning reform can translate policy into real housing. Still, construction takes time. After decades of doing too little, many Massachusetts communities are now confronting a housing shortage shaped by years of limited multifamily development.

Rosanna Marinelli is a multimedia correspondent for The Latino Newsletter and the News Editor at El Planeta.

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Serena Maria Daniels edited this edition of The Latino Newsletter. Julio Ricardo Varela published it.

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