In November's general election, Massachusetts voters will consider a ballot question that would allow homes to be built on lots as small as 5,000 square feet regardless of local ordinances.
Question 7 is opposed by groups like the Massachusetts Municipal Association, which maintains that control of zoning must remain with towns and cities.
Andrew Mikula, a senior housing fellow at the conservative Pioneer Institute, is chair of the Legalize Starter Homes campaign behind the ballot question. Much of its financial support has come from real estate interests, investment firms, and the commonwealth's realtors association. Mikula spoke with Berkshire Bureau Chief Josh Landes.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Mikula: Massachusetts is the hardest state in the country for young adults to buy a home.
The middle class is shrinking because the cost of housing has exploded since the Great Recession. So, we're trying to find a way to both build more homes and reduce the cost basis for building new homes. And land is very expensive in all over Massachusetts. And at a baseline, we believe that places that already have the infrastructure to support new single-family homes, you should be allowed to build a single-family home on a small lot in those places. Starter homes of the kind that are increasingly scarce these days.
Landes: One question that's imposed to me by local leaders in western Mass. is this concept of Boston solutions being imposed on rural parts of the Commonwealth that have a very different relationship with housing needs. What do you say to people who say this is a 'one size fits all' strategy that's better for Boston than it is for, say, Pittsfield?
Mikula: This is only a 'one size fits all' solution to the extent that individual towns don't go further, and many of them should.
I mean, we've seen the Unlocking Housing Production Commission in Massachusetts commission last year recommend eliminating minimum lot sizes entirely, except in areas that have environmental sensitivities.
And the second thing I'd say is this is very much a targeted solution to village-like areas across the state, many of which already have homes on lots this size. So, it's not going to necessarily affect just any place that has two-acre zoning right now. It's going to affect the places that have the infrastructure to support it are disproportionately, you know, good bones close to, you know, commercial areas close to job centers, places that are appropriate for this this type of development.
Landes: Looking into the folks backing this question, you see a lot of realtors backing Question 7, a lot of people with interest in private equity and what have you.
I think for a lot of people in the Commonwealth and perhaps in the nation right now, you're looking at an incredibly expensive housing market. You're looking at high rent, you're looking at a lot of things that I think some people may lay at the feet somewhat of those entities. If someone saw that on the OCPF form and was like, 'Well, I don't know how I feel about that,' what do you tell people who may have concerns about seeing that?
Mikula: This petition was drafted by myself and a bunch of think tank people, advocates, attorneys who work on housing issues, and then, several months later, after we went in a lot of different directions trying to raise money from nonprofits and wealthy individuals and national foundations that that do community work.
We got a lot of support from the real estate community because you know they're out there every day. They see the issues. They know how to how to solve some of these problems, and they understand the urgency. So I'm working day and night to expand our coalition, and I do anticipate getting some more funding from those national charitable foundations and high net worth individuals and many others in the coming weeks and months, but ultimately, this was a petition that was drafted by a bunch of housing experts who are aware of the decades long history of kind of academic studies of Massachusetts and why housing is so expensive here, and identified a solution that has worked in many other parts of the country and the world in places with expensive land.
Landes: Can you put this into a larger context for us, like nationwide or regionally, to give us a sense of how Massachusetts's current struggles with housing relate to, say, our neighbors out west in New York, or you know, across the Eastern Seaboard. Where do we fit into a larger conversation about housing, and what's the Question 7 of it all within that?
Mikula: At a broad level, there was a lot of demand shifts and cost increases in the first few years after COVID, some places adapted better to that than others eventually, and you see in places like from California to Florida to Texas, active home listings are up, rents are falling.
Massachusetts, it's not really the case, at least not at a broad enough level to really be impacted on people's wallets. I mean, we see active home listings are still down about 30% since before COVID. So it's a housing affordability problem and a housing availability problem across the board. We just don't have the the new supply coming online or the turnover in the market you would expect in a dynamic economy, and so the housing crisis here is worse than it is in almost every other state.
Question 7, I mean, we're trying to help address that with a broad-based incremental reform that matches you know or corrects for some of the regulatory barriers and the cost of land barriers that have made it really difficult to build relatively low-cost, low-maintenance housing in the last couple of decades — that are, and especially the last six years — that are suitable for young families downsizing seniors, first-time home buyers of all walks of life.
Landes: In your experience and research, is there a particular community or anecdote from fieldwork that stands out to you as a vivid example of the kind of situation that Question 7 is trying to address?
Mikula: We drafted the petition language to be as broadly applicable and as broadly impactful as possible, but there are a lot of places that have relatively large lot sizes in New England, in particular, even if they have relatively good infrastructure for serving you know more dense developments or small lot developments. I'll point out that in the western half of the country, the median lot size for a new single-family home in 2025 was 5,969 square feet, so we're asking for a little bit smaller than that to be allowable as a baseline in one of the most expensive and land-constrained parts of the country.
