Starter Home Question Would Modestly Boost Home Construction

Among this year's potential ballot questions is a proposal to override local restrictions on home construction. Colloquially called the "Starter Home" initiative, it would automatically allow single-family homes wherever there is adequate space, direct road access, and existing water and sewer service.

To make an informed decision on this ballot question, voters need to know the likely scale of change: would this ballot initiative create hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of new homes in the coming years?

As part of our commitment to analyzing all state ballot questions, we have developed an estimate of the likely impact using detailed information about municipal zoning codes along with contestable judgments about the likelihood that people will pursue construction opportunities. We find that:

• The starter home ballot question would generate roughly 750 new homes per year. That is our central estimate, but the analysis involves a lot of uncertainty, and our modeling suggests a plausible range from 350 to 1,200 per year.
• New construction at this scale would have a real but limited impact on overall production, increasing single-family home construction by roughly 15 percent and overall housing development by roughly 5 percent.
• Suburbs would see the biggest increase in home building, especially Boston-area suburbs that already have robust sewer infrastructure and lots that are large enough to split.
• While our estimate of likely home building is relatively restrained, the legal impact is quite large. Roughly 200,000 parcels statewide would have new construction options under this ballot initiative--including a small number of vacant lots and many large lots that could be readily subdivided.