Boston’s housing policies keep treating symptoms while ignoring the disease. Last month, the city proudly unveiled its Co-Purchasing Housing Pilot Program, offering $50,000 in zero-interest, deferred-payment loans to help lower-income households cover down payments and closing costs on multi-family homes. The idea is to allow multiple individuals to pool resources and purchase homes together. It sounds creative. It makes headlines. But it won’t solve Boston’s affordability crisis—because Boston keeps misdiagnosing the problem.

The city’s crisis isn’t due to insufficient demand. It’s due to insufficient supply. And no amount of creative financing or new subsidies will change that.

Since 2012, home price appreciation in the Boston metro has soared by 147 percent overall—and an astonishing 178 percent at the low end of the market—while wages have grown by less than 50 percent over the same period. The gap between what homes cost and what people earn has never been wider. The core issue is painfully simple: Boston hasn’t built enough housing to meet demand. The city faces an estimated shortage of over 40,000 homes—roughly 13 percent of its total housing stock. Trying to solve a supply shortage by pumping up demand is economic malpractice.

Boston’s new pilot program is the latest in a long line of insufficient efforts. According to Newsweek, the city itself expects only 12 to 15 buyers to participate. That’s barely a drop in the bucket. A handful of borrowers may benefit, but thousands will remain priced out.

Similarly, the city’s Boston Housing Strategy 2025 is more performance than policy—all show, with little substance. It bundles progressive dreams—transfer taxes on $2 million homes, government-run social housing—with token gestures like allowing accessory dwelling units that barely register in a city where land is already scarce and expensive. Proposals like green retrofits, affordable housing funds that convert market-rate into permanently affordable housing, and tossing a few dozen small parcels to affordable housing developers aren’t solutions—they’re political cover. None of it meaningfully increases supply.

Boston’s path forward is to adopt policies that enable the construction of broadly affordable housing, rather than doubling down on the futile pursuit of ever more expensive subsidies and one-off, non-scalable solutions. That requires one thing: unleashing market forces to build more homes.

The biggest obstacles are local zoning and land-use regulations. Much of Boston’s residential land remains locked into single-family zoning, artificially limiting the amount and type of housing that can be built. Excessive regulations, fees, and permitting delays further drive-up costs.

The solution is straightforward: legalize the conversion of existing single-family homes into duplexes, triplexes, and townhomes throughout the city. Based on construction costs and current prices, this approach could add roughly 750 new homes annually, at a median price of around $735,000—roughly 30% below Boston’s new single-family home construction prices.

Importantly, such a strategy would also promote filtering—the natural process by which newer, more expensive housing allows older housing to become more affordable over time, much like how the new and used car market works.

This approach isn’t just about adding supply; it’s about creating homeowners. Since 2010, 84 percent of Massachusetts newly built single-family attached homes with an average of 2.5 bedrooms were owner-occupied. In stark contrast, large apartment complexes—often built in costly transit-oriented development zones with an average of 1.3 bedrooms—have produced homeownership rates of just eight percent. If the goal is to build generational wealth through homeownership, as Boston’s mayor claims, the path forward couldn’t be clearer.

Boston should follow a proven “housing abundance” success sequence: allow by-right zoning, permit greater density, streamline land-use regulations and permitting, and reduce construction costs. Cities like Seattle, Houston, Anaheim, and Denver—documented in AEI Housing Center research—have already shown that these policies unlock meaningful increases in housing supply for working- and middle-class families who are increasingly shut out.

While Boston proper must act, the suburbs hold even greater potential. The Boston metro area has 177 separate zoning jurisdictions. State-level reforms that unlock the housing abundance success sequence could enable 38,000 additional housing units per year—far more than Boston alone could ever produce. States like California, Washington, Oregon, Texas, and Montana have already enacted successful pro-housing legislation, offering Massachusetts a clear roadmap.

Boston and Massachusetts face a choice: keep churning out small, self-congratulatory programs that generate headlines but deliver little relief—or pursue bold, structural reforms that unleash private enterprise to build abundant housing, making both affordability and homeownership widely attainable. The blueprint for housing abundance is clear. The only question is whether elected officials have the courage to follow it or want to keep tinkering on the edges.