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Greater Boston Housing Construction Plummets Nearly 50% as Affordability Crisis Deepens
New housing units in Greater Boston fell from 29,024 to 15,241 in a year, while just six communities have median single-family home prices under $500,000 and nearly half of renters are cost-burdened, according to a new Boston Indicators report.
Greater Boston added fewer than half as many new homes over the past year as it did the year before, according to a housing report card released this week by the think tank Boston Indicators, a sharp reversal that comes as affordability pressures continue to squeeze renters and would-be first-time buyers across the region.
The region added 15,241 net new housing units between July 2025 and July 2026, down from 29,024 during the previous 12 months. Boston Indicators attributed part of the earlier spike to large apartment projects that had stalled during the pandemic finally coming online, and last year's report card warned that permitting data pointed to a slowdown ahead. That slowdown has now arrived.
Luc Schuster, executive director of Boston Indicators, said recent state policy changes have helped at the margins but have not been enough to close the gap between supply and demand. "The challenge is prices have leveled off at a very high level," Schuster said.
The report card's numbers sketch a region where homeownership is increasingly out of reach. Only six Greater Boston communities had a median single-family home price below $500,000 this year â a figure that, adjusted for inflation, is down 42% over the past decade. In those comparatively low-priced communities, a household would need an income of about $181,000 to buy an entry-level home without spending more than 30% of its income on housing, under the report's assumptions. Just one in six renters in those communities earn that much.
At the other end of the market, four communities now have median single-family home values above $2 million. Cambridge joined Wellesley, Weston and Brookline in that group this year.
"For homeowners, high prices have meant increasing values of their homes," Schuster said. "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."
The strain is most acute for renters. Nearly half â 48% â of Greater Boston renters are considered cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on housing. About 24% are severely cost-burdened, paying more than half their income toward housing. Among renters earning between $35,000 and $75,000 a year, that severe burden rate has more than doubled over the past decade, according to the report.
The findings carry significant implications for the region's economy and for the workers who keep it running. With construction slowing and prices holding at elevated levels, the gap between those who own homes and those who rent them is widening, and the pipeline of new units that could ease pressure on rents is thinning.
The full report card was published this week by Boston Indicators, the research arm of the Boston Foundation.