To help the state grow, Harvard could stop landbanking

The prolific Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser wrote in yesterday's Globe about how the success of Massachusetts is being held back by a housing shortage.

Of course, Harvard could help make progress in this area by building hundreds of new units of housing on its under-utilized property in Allston and Brighton. The BRA, Harvard, and Allston/Brighton residents have all agreed to this in principle, but getting Harvard to follow through has proved elusive (the 10 units to be built on the Brookline Machine site will nice, but 10 units is pretty paltry when compared with the scope of Harvard's landbank and the extent of the need for more housing).

To grow, the state needs 40B - The Boston Globe

If our economy is so dynamic, why aren’t more people moving here?

The simple answer is that we don’t build enough homes. There is essentially a one-to-one correspondence between the population growth of a region and the amount of new construction. Massachusetts’s cold climate matters, but the tendency of people to move to warmer climes also reflects the affordable housing that comes from unfettered construction in places like Houston and Phoenix.