Housing

Give every Massachusetts community a way to grow upward. That can mean adding a floor above a shop, creating apartments over existing buildings, or building taller residential blocks near jobs and transportation. Match the scale to local infrastructure and expand water, sewer, utilities, public space, and transportation capacity alongside new homes. Open appropriate public land through competitive leases, sales, and partnerships so more people can live in places they want to call home.

Make a high quality of life possible in more places across the Commonwealth. Use autonomous vehicles, future Boring-style vehicle tunnels, and regional mobility to bring homes in smaller cities, suburbs, and rural towns within easier reach of jobs, healthcare, education, and one another. Home pickup can make communities beyond fixed transit lines more accessible. Expand people's choices about where to live without requiring them to give up opportunity or spend more of their lives commuting.

Coordinate new housing with transportation that can actually serve it. Start with compact neighborhoods around existing town centers and available infrastructure, while keeping everyday shops, services, and gathering places close to home. Demonstrate dependable door-to-door service, accessible vehicles, travel times, and affordable fares before relying on new mobility to support larger housing commitments. Autonomy should spread access and opportunity; its proposed benefits still need to be delivered and measured.

Create preapproved building designs that communities can adopt so successful projects can be repeated across Massachusetts. Coordinate state reviews through a Housing Production Office and propose a 120-day decision standard for complete, qualifying applications. Establish the necessary legal authority and give builders clear requirements and predictable timelines. Reward towns when homes are occupied.

Reinvent Main Street USA in every town in Massachusetts. Bring people back to live downtown in apartments and homes above ground-floor retail and commercial space. Fill the street with cafes, shops, small offices, workshops, groceries, and places to gather. Reuse vacant storefronts, upper floors, and suitable parking lots so everyday needs are within an easy walk.

Build downtowns where people want to spend time. Pair new homes with trees, comfortable sidewalks, public squares, shared workspaces, and room for music, food, and local events. Connect town centers to one another through autonomous travel, while keeping the places people use every day close to home. Test improvements with residents and local businesses, then repeat what works in other communities.

Help every town identify what it can become exceptionally good at, then align housing, infrastructure, workforce development, and business recruitment around that strength. Communities should compete to attract residents and bigger businesses while helping their region grow. Andover, Lawrence, and Chelmsford should all want Lowell's housing industry to succeed because its jobs, suppliers, and opportunities would benefit the entire Merrimack Valley. Other towns can develop complementary specialties. Methuen could explore parking garages, charging, maintenance, and service facilities for future autonomous vehicle fleets from companies such as Tesla or Waymo, serving Lowell and Boston. Each town should have a clear answer to why people would choose to live there, why businesses would invest there, and how its success helps the region. These are opportunities to pursue with prospective operators, subject to the approvals needed for service.

Start with the basics: people need safe, comfortable homes they can afford, in places where they can build a good life. Work backward from that need instead of accepting today's rules, costs, and construction methods as fixed. Question each assumption, test alternatives, and scale what delivers better homes at lower prices.

Treat housing rules like zero-based budgeting: start from zero. Scrap the existing zoning framework and rebuild it from first principles, instead of carrying the old restrictions forward and making exceptions around the edges. Require every restriction to justify its place against the homes people need, the cost it adds, and the public benefit it delivers. Write a new, plain-language framework for apartments, homes above shops, accessory homes, and new neighborhoods, with a clear path from an application to a completed home.

Adopt objective standards and predictable decisions for projects that meet the new rules, instead of reopening the same debate one building at a time. Bring residents into setting the plan, then follow it. Pair the rewrite with water, sewer, schools, streets, and public spaces; retain building-safety and environmental protections. Pursue the legislative and local approvals needed to replace the old rules, and judge success by homes completed, approval time, and the price people actually pay.

Build a statewide factory-built housing ecosystem, with UMass Lowell’s BuildSmart Housing Innovation TechHub as one foundation. Connect builders, manufacturers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and tradespeople across Massachusetts. Give them shared equipment and demonstration sites to develop better materials, robotics, modular construction, and repeatable designs, then turn those breakthroughs into factories delivering homes people can afford. 10

Convert empty offices into homes as another practical experiment. Test suitable buildings for workable floor plans, daylight, ventilation, utilities, and renovation costs. Start with a small set of conversions, publish the results, and scale the approaches that create good homes at a lower total price. Keep the proposed 5,000 conversion homes by 2030 as a measurable target rather than assuming every office can be converted economically.

Make the final purchase price the test of success. Publish land, site work, utilities, construction, financing, fees, and developer margin, alongside any public subsidy or resale restriction. Compare completed homes with equivalent 2026 local homes in constant dollars. The goal is a home a household can buy for half the price.