MASSACHUSETTS' MISSING MIDDLE
Housing is more expensive and less accessible than ever. The reason? It's illegal — and often not financially viable — to build the housing that could solve our housing crisis.
If you live in an apartment in cities like Somerville, Boston, or Worcester, odds are you live in housing that would be illegal to build today. Massachusetts' most vibrant cities and towns became havens for the middle class because they provided spaces for them to live. But today, in most Massachusetts neighborhoods, it is illegal to build the triple-deckers, small apartment buildings, and even rowhouses that have historically housed the middle class. We’ve zoned and regulated our way into a binary. Developers either build big single-family houses or huge apartment buildings. Everything in between has been quietly erased.
That's a problem. There's no silver bullet to housing supply and affordability in Massachusetts. But the values that made our housing stock great in the past—choice and accessibility—can provide a template for a path forward. The Missing Middle Coalition is advocating for a return to the principles that made our cities and towns some of the most livable in the nation: legalizing and supporting the types of housing that people want and can afford.
OUR HISTORY OF URBAN DYNAMISM
Higher-density housing is what built Massachusetts' cities.
Across Massachusetts, missing middle housing organically sprang up as town and city centers grew in dense, walkable patterns before World War II. Builders viewed multifamily projects as marketable, and buyers viewed them as accessible. After the war, however, things shifted. New, car-centric land use patterns shifted development away from urban centers. The new communities that sprung up effectively banned multifamily housing with exclusionary housing policies that dictated what could, or could not, be built. In most of the Commonwealth, alternative housing forms became unprofitable, not to mention illegal. As a result, the residential construction market came to focus on two extremes: single-family homes and large-scale apartment complexes.
The strange outcome of this process was that Massachusetts had rendered illegal many of the forms of housing that had created our most vibrant communities. One of the most famous examples is the “triple-decker,” New England’s homegrown answer to small-scale multifamily housing. The triple-decker, featuring three levels of mid-sized apartments, is quintessentially missing middle, being denser than a single-family residence but not rising to the level of a large apartment complex. In Greater Boston alone, 15,000 triple-deckers were built between 1880 and 1930, largely by the region’s growing immigrant and working classes. The triple-decker provided maximum optionality: families could live in one unit, house relatives in the second, and rent out the third. Triple-deckers offered a path to homeownership, income-generating potential, and multigenerational family living.
As with much exclusionary housing policy, the effort to crack down on the triple-decker was influenced by tensions over race and class. Affordability was coded as undesirable, and desirability was often defined in terms of racial and class homogeneity. Thus the triple-decker was targeted as part of the wave of anti-immigrant sentiment at the turn of the 20th century. Housing reformers enacted land use policies aimed at creating more homogeneous and ordered neighborhoods. That is, a society free of the “three-decker menace” and the immigrant, working-class people who lived in them. The downfall of the triple-decker initially occurred through code changes, then through outright bans.
Some policies were articulated in neutral language couched in the language of "health, safety, welfare, and morals." The 1912 Town Tenement Act, for example, targeted the triple-decker by expressly permitting Massachusetts towns to ban wood-frame structures with cooking operations above the second floor, claiming the houses were fire hazards. Others, however, were more explicit. The 1918 National City Planning Conference explicitly endorsed using exclusionary zoning to avoid mingling people of different races “who do not want to mingle.” By the 1930s, construction of triple-deckers in Massachusetts had all but stopped. And by the 1950s and 60s, many existing triple-deckers were razed in “urban renewal” efforts to construct highways in place of working-class neighborhoods. The net result? Most of Massachusetts' missing middle housing is nearly a century old.
So, why did this type of housing go missing in Massachusetts?
The downfall of Massachusetts' most famous form of missing middle housing illustrates a broader point: its disappearance is the result of policy choices. The upshot? Those policy choices can be challenged and even changed.
WE'RE MISSING
THE
MIDDLE
As the story of the triple-decker illustrates, a range of housing policies have contributed to the decline of the missing middle, ranging from health and safety codes to credit practices. But the most important of these has been zoning. By setting out what kinds of buildings can be put in an area, governments make it illegal to build others. As a result, in the process of zoning most land in Massachusetts as single-family residential, governments made it illegal to build multifamily housing without a special and costly variance. These zoning rules have also imposed minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking minimums, coverage ratios, setback minimums, and a host of other arcane building restrictions which have made it infeasible to build missing middle housing.
To see how discordant zoning has been with our housing traditions, look no further than the City of Somerville. In 2016, a study by Somerville’s city planners found that nearly every lot in the city — all but 80 — was nonconforming. Put another way, all but 80 lots in Somerville would be illegal to build today. Instead, our state has focused on single-family homes that are expensive, inefficient, and not able to meet surging demand for housing. Massachusetts needs to build 220,000 new homes by 2035. To make that possible, we need to change the laws that have hamstrung our housing, reduced its affordability, and diminished your choice.
Because of restrictive municipal zoning codes, most missing middle housing is illegal to build today.
The first step:
legalize the housing that built this state.
We can build an affordable, abundant Massachusetts by legalizing homes for everyone. This means homes that work on your budget and in your city. Duplexes, triple deckers, and other missing middle housing are the historical backbone of our state. Rather than settling for exclusionary housing policies of the 1960s, let’s get back to what we do best.
FINANCING THE MIDDLE NOT JUST THE PROFITABLE
Although removing legal barriers is necessary, it is rarely sufficient. For example, the MBTA Communities Act — the Commonwealth’s largest zoning reform in a generation — has, in many jurisdictions, not led to the construction of any new affordable housing. And upzoning in Cambridge has produced a fierce backlash as many high-density projects prioritize high-end units. As an official in the Boston Mayor’s Office for Housing told us, changing our approach to zoning is vital, but it won’t solve the underlying market problems. Developers “just don’t see missing middle housing as attractive, even when communities are supportive, because ‘affordable’ is thought to be the opposite of ‘profitable.’” Over time, policy failures have begotten market failures.
When it comes to the missing middle, one market failure is especially pronounced: a lack of public or private financing. Missing middle projects often fall into a gray zone between public financing and private credit. Most public financing targets large-scale housing initiatives that will build a lot of units. Smaller-scale projects, by contrast, are generally ineligible for federal tax credits or state subsidies. And local governments are reluctant to help; as one state senator described it, most localities have hoarded revenues under the Community Preservation Act rather than expending them on affordable housing projects. Private credit often doesn’t help, either. Building new housing in Massachusetts is expensive; so, too, is refitting existing housing stock. The average cost to bring a unit to market often exceeds revenues: by one estimate, each unit in Greater Boston costs $80,000 more to build than it will generate in “affordable” rent. Lenders know this, and won’t extend credit for projects they view as unprofitable.
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In Massachusetts, however, legalizing housing is often not enough.
The next step:
fill in the financing gap.
Fortunately, gap financing is a proven solution for constructing missing middle housing in Massachusetts and beyond. The Massachusetts Workforce Housing Initiative has already demonstrated the power of using state-backed capital to unlock housing construction. By providing up to $100,000 in subsidized financing per unit for developments targeting those earning 61–120% of area median income, the program has supported the creation of over 4,000 units across the Commonwealth since 2016. Michigan has followed a similar playbook with its new Missing Middle Housing Program, committing over $100 million in grants to help developers build small-scale homes affordable to middle-income families. Those funds will support the construction of at least 1,000 new missing-middle homes across the state in the next few years. The upshot from both is clear: with a small intervention to fix a market failure, the state can make a huge difference in the construction of new and accessible housing options.
