The 2025 Greater Boston Housing Report Card is the 24th edition of The Boston Foundation’s annual look at housing supply, home prices and affordability in Greater Boston. This year, in addition to an in-depth examination of the latest data from the team at Boston Indicators, the report explores how the 177 cities and towns subject to the MBTA Communities Act are implementing zoning requirements designed to encourage greater housing development. In the Special Topic section, researchers from the Boston University Initiative on Cities look at three Boston suburbs––Lexington, Needham and Wellesley––and what their different approaches mean for MBTA Communities’ true housing impact.
- Prices have cooled but remain unaffordable. Home prices and rents have leveled off in 2025 but remain at historically high levels. The for-sale market has seen a modest uptick in activity, and while rental vacancy rates remain at historically low levels, they may be increasing in some neighborhoods around colleges and universities.
- New housing completions are up, but permits for future housing construction are down. Census Address Counts show Greater Boston added more than 70,000 homes since 2020, reflecting a meaningful increase in completions. But permits, which signal future housing construction, are way down. New permits as of July 2025 are running 44 percent below levels for the same period in 2021.
- Homeownership is slipping further out of reach. In 2021, a household earning about $98,000 could buy a home at the low end of the market. By 2025, the required income had climbed above $162,000. The share of renter households able to afford an entrylevel home has been cut in half in just four years, falling from about 30 percent in 2021 to just 15 percent today.
- Homelessness remains high even as state shelter caseloads have dropped sharply. The January 2025 point-in-time homelessness count showed only a modest decline from record highs in 2024, while the number of families in the Emergency Assistance shelter system was cut roughly in half by mid-2025 following new capacity caps, time limits, and eligibility restrictions. It is still unclear how many families found stable housing or relocated elsewhere, versus how many simply lost shelter without securing a permanent home.
A presentation of the 2025 Greater Boston Housing Report Card is available below and the full report is available here.