Boston's housing shortage is the affordability crisis. Massachusetts needs at least 222,000 new homes by 2035 — roughly 40,000 of them income-restricted — and we are badly behind pace. That gap sets the price of everything: rents climbing faster than raises, bidding wars over ordinary houses, the friends who give up and move to Worcester, the teachers and nurses who commute for hours into the neighborhoods they serve. Every year we underbuild, the shortfall compounds and the city gets less possible for the people who make it work.

The biggest obstacle isn't demand or money — it's our own process. Boston's zoning is decades out of date. Height limits, setbacks, and parking minimums mean almost nothing we need can be built by right, so nearly every new home must survive a discretionary review stretching across years of hearings, redesigns, appeals, and sometimes litigation. That's where a small but highly organized group of neighbors can stop housing on grounds of scale, traffic, or parking — and often win. The delay gets priced into every unit that does get built, so the process itself makes housing more expensive. And because the neighborhoods best equipped to run that gauntlet are the most affluent, the burden of growth shifts to the Bostonians with the least power to refuse it.

That's why we're launching Boston Neighbors for More Neighbors. Boston N4MN is a new citywide grassroots organization built on a simple premise: most Bostonians want this city to meet its housing needs, and almost none of them are in the room when the decisions get made. We exist to change that — activating residents who want more homes of every kind built faster and closer to transit, more affordable housing preserved and expanded, and zoning that permits density by right instead of by lawsuit. Boston has no shortage of organized opposition to new housing. What's missing is an organized constituency for it.

920 Centre Street is the first development we're standing behind. It shows both what the process can produce, how an affluent community is organizing to kill a good project, and why this project is now ready for its next step. The proposal turns a long-vacant convent site in Jamaica Plain into 158 homes — 38 permanently affordable at 24% of the project, above the City's requirement and without a dollar of public subsidy — a mile from the Forest Hills Orange Line, with a new MBTA bus shelter and Blue Bike station and Passive House construction. Across three filings since 2023, it has been reshaped again and again in response to what the Arnold Arboretum, abutters, and neighbors asked for: pulled more than fifty feet back from Centre Street, its top floor stepped back beneath a green roof, roughly $2 million invested in mature trees and screening along the Arboretum boundary, and nearly all its parking placed underground. Three years and three filings in, this project has answered the questions put to it. It deserves a decision, not another year of delay.

Two ways to help — pick either. Sign the petition below and your name goes on the public record urging Mayor Wu, Councilor Weber, and the BPDA to approve 920 Centre Street. That alone matters, and it's all we're asking. If you want to do more than sign once, check the box to join the Boston N4MN list and we'll bring you the next opportunity — the next hearing that needs turnout, the next zoning fight, the next project that needs neighbors willing to show up and say yes.