Greater Boston Added 15,241 Homes Last Year, Nearly Half the Prior Total

Greater Boston added 15,241 net new housing units in the 12 months ending in July 2026, down from 29,024 in the previous year, according to the 2026 Greater Boston housing report card released this week by Boston Indicators, the research arm of The Boston Foundation. WBUR, which published a numerical summary of the report on Thursday, Nov. 12, said that drop was nearly 50%. By The Boston Report’s calculation from those figures, net new production fell 47.5%.

The slowdown arrives after a year in which researchers had already warned that permitting data pointed to weaker construction ahead. Luc Schuster, executive director of Boston Indicators, told WBUR’s John Bender that recent state policy changes have helped at the margins, but not enough to close the gap. “The challenge is prices have leveled off at a very high level,” Schuster said.

What the data shows about new supply

Boston Indicators said the earlier jump to 29,024 units was due in part to larger apartment projects that stalled during the pandemic and then opened, WBUR reported. The new total, 15,241, is the figure the report uses for net new units between July 2025 and July 2026.

GBH News, which reported on the document on Tuesday, said homebuilding has increased since 2024 and that the state has largely kept pace with a goal of 22,000 new homes a year. The same report, GBH said, found that declining housing permits suggest construction may be slowing even as the region still needs far more homes to ease prices. Housing growth from 2020 to 2026 has been concentrated in a handful of places; Plymouth added more than 3,000 units, nearly 12% of its 2020 housing stock, with Quincy close behind, while wealthier, older suburbs have seen less growth, according to GBH’s account of the findings.

Home prices and the jump from renting to buying

Home values in Greater Boston are up about 50% since 2019, and rents are up 35% as of August 2026, GBH reported from the report. The region is the third most expensive major metro area in the country, behind only New York and San Francisco, according to a letter from Brian Douglas, interim president and CEO of The Boston Foundation, published with the report, and to GBH’s summary of the rental findings.

Only six Greater Boston communities had median single-family home prices below $500,000 this year, WBUR reported. Adjusted for inflation, that count is down 42% over the last decade, according to the report as cited by WBUR. GBH named four of the lower-priced places as Ashby, Avon, Brockton and Shirley. At the other end of the market, median single-family values now exceed $2 million in four communities: Wellesley, Weston, Brookline and, for the first time this year, Cambridge, WBUR and GBH both reported. Coverage of Brookline and other high-cost suburbs is part of the same regional picture.

Buying even in the less expensive towns is a stretch for most renters. The report estimated that a household would need $181,000 in income to purchase an entry-level home in one of those “low-priced” communities without spending more than 30% of its income on housing, among other assumptions, WBUR reported. GBH described the threshold as at least $180,000. Just one in six renters in those communities earns that much, according to the figures published by WBUR. GBH, citing the report, said fewer than 120,000 renter households can afford to buy in one of the low-priced towns, and that just 9% of Black and Latino renters earn enough to do so.

“For homeowners, high prices have meant increasing values of their homes,” Schuster told WBUR. “Their net worth, in many cases, has increased significantly over the last decade. But for renters, it’s become really hard to make that jump from renting into homeownership.” He also told GBH that “less than 10%” of Black and Hispanic renter households could afford to buy even in the low-priced towns, and that there are “basically no” such households who could afford a median-priced home in a higher-priced community.

The rental side of the ledger is no easier for many households. WBUR reported that 48% of Greater Boston renters are cost-burdened, meaning they pay more than 30% of their income on housing, and that 24% are severely cost-burdened, paying more than 50%. GBH said Black and Latino renters are hardest hit, with 60% of Black renters and 53% of Latino renters considered cost-burdened. In many Boston neighborhoods, the report said, prevailing rents are reaching $4,000 a month, or $48,000 a year, according to GBH.

The rise in severe cost burdens among moderate-income renters is especially sharp. The report found that the share of renters making $35,000 to $75,000 who are severely cost-burdened has more than doubled over the past decade, WBUR reported. In a related breakdown, the report said that roughly one in four renter households earning between $50,000 and $75,000 now spend more than half of their income on housing, compared with 1% of those households in 2006, according to GBH.

Condominiums have also become more expensive. About 57% of municipalities had median condo sale prices of $500,000 or higher, GBH reported from the data, with median prices above $1 million in Sudbury, Newton and Needham. Since 2019, median condo prices have climbed 122% in Millis and 119% in Sharon, the same account said.

Slower population growth and federal policy

The authors argue that federal policy over the past two years has compounded a long period of underbuilding. The region added just 9,000 residents in 2025, down from 49,000 the previous year, GBH reported. About 32,000 people moved to other parts of the country, and a sharp decline in international immigration has eroded a source of growth that had previously more than offset those domestic losses. Growth in Greater Boston came “exclusively from births,” the report found, according to GBH.

Schuster cautioned against treating weaker demand as a solution. “So supply up a little bit, demand may be down a little bit, but for a whole host of bad reasons,” he told GBH. “We don’t want to solve our housing affordability challenges by slipping into recession or losing significant numbers of residents.” GBH also reported that the authors tied federal funding cuts and immigration restrictions to job losses and pressure on universities and research institutions, and said federal cuts to SNAP and Medicaid have left lower-income households with less money for housing.

Those forces sit on top of housing costs that already shape daily life across Massachusetts. The new report card does not show a sudden break in that pattern. It shows production falling off after a temporary burst of delayed openings, while prices remain elevated.

Policy changes already on the books, and more in the State House

The report does point to recent state measures that researchers say are starting to make housing easier to build, including accessory dwelling units, the MBTA Communities Act, and a program to use surplus state land for housing, GBH reported. “Laws don’t build homes overnight,” Keith Mahoney of The Boston Foundation told GBH. “It takes years to get from a new rule to permits, financing, and an actual front door. We may not see the full payoff of today’s policies for a long time.”

Legislative proposals still in play could go further, the report said, including allowing religious institutions to build multifamily housing on land they own and a statewide change to allow two-family homes where single-family homes are allowed. If those measures pass, the report said, “2026 could end up proving to be a consequential year for state housing policy,” according to GBH.

In Boston, the Wu administration has separately proposed easing some inclusionary zoning and linkage rules to try to move stalled projects, including a two-year shift that would exempt 7- to 9-unit buildings from the affordable-housing mandate. The Boston Report outlined that city proposal earlier this week. Those local changes still require board, council and zoning review and are not part of the Boston Indicators report itself. Statewide, voters last week also rejected Question 7, a ballot measure that would have limited required lot sizes for some single-family homes.

Sources

• WBUR: 6 numbers to know from this year’s Greater Boston housing report card
• GBH News: Federal policy worsens Boston-area housing crisis, says report
• The Boston Foundation: Greater Boston Housing Report Card 2026