02.21.2025

NPR and the progressive freakout over Trump II | Healey administration to release pivotal housing report today | Globe hit job on teachers union critic | Pioneer: New housing tangled up in red tape |

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Too narrow a focus? The Healey administration’s efforts to tackle the housing crisis have been heavily weighted in favor of new apartment projects, with little mention of new home construction

The homeownership rate in Massachusetts? That’s nearly 62 percent.

And the single-family home is by far the preferred form of ownership, with sales of homes typically outpacing condos by a margin of more than two to one.

That’s even the case as new home prices in the Boston area surge into the seven-figure range, with construction of new single-family homes having bumped along now for decades at chronically low levels across Massachusetts.

Yet the Healey administration, in its drive to boost housing production, has focused almost solely on multifamily construction, especially rentals, sparking a backlash in some suburbs and towns.

That glaring mismatch between government policy and market demand has not gone unnoticed by developers and some housing advocates.

There is now growing anticipation about a potentially pivotal report to be released on Friday morning by a Healey administration task force on unlocking housing production.

Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash

All eyes will be on whether the report addresses the issue of declining home production - including the disappearance of the reasonably priced starter home that was a staple of new construction in the suburban boom days of the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

In particular, it will certainly be interesting to see whether the Commission on Unlocking Housing Production recommends requiring local officials to reduce lot sizes for new homes, given that one or two acre lots have been common now for decades.

Large lots all but guarantee expensive homes, and are a killer for overall housing production.

Last year, builders put up just 5,600 new single-family homes in Massachusetts.

That’s roughly a third of what was being produced two decades ago and a quarter of what builders were putting up back in the 1980s, federal building permit stats show.

“I think there is stuff in play and discussion happening around single-family homes,” Clark Ziegler, executive director of the Massachusetts Housing Partnership and a member of the unlocking production commission, told Contrarian Boston.

“I would argue zoning is still a huge impediment,” Ziegler said.

Unenlightening journalism: Host of NPR’s Here & Now attempts to get diehard Trump supporter to see the error of his ways

The idea behind the segment was to check in with a Trump voter from the Midwest on the president’s performance after his first month in office.

But Robin Young, the host of “Here & Now,” a joint production of Boston’s WBUR and NPR, seemed both genuinely surprised and audibly distressed about how thrilled Caleb Bowman of Lincoln, Neb. was with Trump’s steady stream of executive orders and the efforts of Elon Musk’s DOGE unit to cut government waste.

The interview soon degenerated into caricature, with the progressive journalist earnestly trying to help a deluded Trump supporter see reason.