Research and Analysis
Research and analysis insight on the past, present, and future of Metro Boston
The MAPC Research Team creates new data resources and conducts original analysis to provide insight on the past, present, and future of Metro Boston.
We cultivate new datasets by mining administrative records, compiling on-line sources, or crowd-sourcing information from community partners. Our demographic and land use projections serve as the foundation for a wide variety of planning and policy activities; and our original research on demographic, economic, and housing trends helps planners and policymakers make informed decisions about the future of the region.
We also help MAPC to monitor progress toward the goals of MetroCommon 2050, through our Regional Indicators program.
Questions?
For additional information on research at MAPC, please contact:
Sarah Philbrick
Research Manager
[email protected]
Research Publications:
For easy access to the research reports, white papers, and regional indicators you are looking for, we have divided our research up by categories.
Click on the category buttons to go to that category sub-section.
The type that each research publication is - report, regional indicator, tool, white paper/blog post - will be indicated by the following icons:
How Each Type is Defined:
Economic Development
Visit the Economic Development webpage to learn more about MAPC's Economic Development work.
Publications Found Under Multiple Areas:
Research: Hidden and in Plain Sight—Impacts of E-Commerce in Massachusetts (Transportation and Economic Development)
MassBuilds (Housing and Economic Development)
Land, Economy, and Opportunity: Industrial Land Supply and Demand in Greater Boston
Published February 2023
This study of industrial land use in the Boston region provides insight into the issues faced by greater Boston's industrial businesses and workforce.
Environment
Visit the Environment webpage to learn more about MAPC's Environment work.
Water, Water, Everywhere: The Increasing Threat of of Stormwater Flooding in Greater Boston
Published May 2023
As part of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council’s (MAPC) hazard mitigation planning efforts, we entered into an unprecedented data sharing agreement with FEMA and the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) to access disaster claims records from the March 2010 storm. Due to federal privacy rules, the locational data of where the claims originated must remain confidential. These data, however, allowed a
first-of-its kind analysis of stormwater flooding in Eastern Massachusetts
The Impacts of Land Use and Pricing in Reducing Vehicle Miles Traveled and Transport Emissions in Massachusetts
Published January 2021
Using a pair of established land use and travel behavior models, MAPC has forecast growth in VMT by 2030 under various scenarios to estimate the relative impact of different land use patterns and pricing policies, alone and in combination with each other. Three land use scenarios represented different patterns of housing growth in the region, ranging from urban-focused to dispersed across many different types of communities.
Climate Vulnerability in Greater Boston
Published 2021
MAPC constructed a regional climate vulnerability index that shows which neighborhoods in Metro Boston are more vulnerable to climate hazards than others. This mapping tool – which combines sociodemographic, public health, housing, and workforce data with climate exposure data – can be used to help identify which populations should be centered in climate preparedness and resiliency work.
Research: Surging Seas, Rising Fiscal Stress: Exploring Municipal Fiscal Vulnerability to Climate Change
Published September 2020
In 2019, MAPC worked with Dr. Shi and her students to continue this research to several specific communities on the South Shore. The findings of that study again suggest that current fiscal, land use, and disaster policies incentivize coastal cities to keep building in vulnerable areas, to elevate and protect, and to promote high value growth on waterfronts rather than make an orderly retreat to less vulnerable areas.
Racial Disparities in the Proximity to Vehicle Air Pollution in the MAPC Region
Published May 2020
This report identifies key areas in the region where residents live close to large sources of vehicle pollution and quantifies the racial inequities that exist in pollution proximity. While this study does not directly quantify individual exposures of MAPC residents to air pollution, it provides a literal roadmap for identifying the populations most at risk and a benchmark against which future reductions in vehicle pollution can be measured.
Government
Visit the Government Affairs webpage to learn more about MAPC's Government Affairs work.
Research: The Diversity Deficit—Municipal Employees in Metro Boston
Published July 2020
This research brief uses self-reported demographic and occupational information compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau to assess the age, gender, and race/ethnicity demographics of municipal employees living in Metro Boston, a region encompassing 164 cities and towns. Due to data limitations, we cannot provide worker information for specific municipal governments, but we did supplement our regional-level census data with publicly available municipal workforce demographic statistics from individual cities and towns where possible.
Housing
Visit the Housing webpage to learn more about MAPC's Housing work.
Publications Found Under Multiple Areas:
Perfect Fit Parking: Improving the Way Developers and Planners Assess Parking Demand (Transportation and Housing)
Homes for Profit Phase 2: An Analysis of Corporate Ownership Networks
Published October 2025
MAPC’s 2023 Homes for Profit research investigates the role that speculative investment plays in the Commonwealth’s housing market. We found that between 2004 and 2018, one in five Massachusetts homes were purchased by an investor. In 2024, MAPC and our research collaborators at the Healthy Neighborhoods Research Consortium (HNRC) were awarded funding by the Urban Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to build upon our original research. This white paper provides a first look at Phase 2 of our Homes for Profit research, where we are working to identify property ownership networks obscured by multiple LLCs.
Data Open Doors: Measuring the Affordable Housing Gap in Massachusetts
Published June 2025
This report addresses the urgency of creating housing tailored to the needs of Massachusetts residents – now and in the future. Throughout, we assess what we need in light of who we are and what we have. We explore the “match” between households and housing, in other words, the degree to which our affordable housing inventory aligns with the needs of our low-income residents.
An Update on Housing Production's Affect on Public School Enrollment
Published February 2024
This is an updated report of "The Waning Influence Of Housing Production On Public School Enrollment," released in October 2017. We’ve updated school enrollment by school district through the 2019/2020 school year. As we did in 2017, we’ve filtered out multi-municipal regional districts from the analysis, including those with secondary-only regional schools. This limits the number of municipalities covered in the research to 231 out of 351, but ensures that municipal housing development trends and school enrollment are directly compared.
Homes for Profit: Speculation and Investment in Greater Boston
Published November 2023
This research that examines the prevalence, characteristics, and spatial patterns of residential property speculation in Greater Boston. Our research finds that low-income urban communities of color experience the highest rates of speculative investor activity. Investors are often able to buy properties at a discount using cash, and they are also more likely than non-investors to flip their properties and to make a significantly higher profit on flipped properties than non-investors
Building a Better RAFT: Improving Access to Emergency Rental Assistance in Massachusetts
Published May 2023
This report written in partnership between MAPC, Citizen's Housing and Planning Association (CHAPA), The Boston Foundation, and United Way of Massachusetts Bay, provides policy recommendations compiled by all four entities, focused on making access easier to resources for families and Community Based Organizations (CBOs) for the Residential Assistance for Families in Transition (RAFT) program.
White Paper: Framework for Residential Displacement Research at MAPC
Published March 2021
This white paper describes various frameworks and tools used in the residential displacement literature to define and measure displacement and displacement vulnerability and proposes a series of operational definitions for residential displacement, displacement vulnerability, and other concepts that may guide MAPC’s planning and analysis going forward.
MAPC Housing Submarkets
Published February 2021
A housing submarket is a collection of neighborhoods—some next to each other, some not—with similar housing stock and housing market characteristics. With this tool, you can learn more about the different submarkets in the Greater Boston area.
Evictions and COVID-19: The Responsibility of the Large Landlord
Published December 2020
A Research Brief from the Boston Area Research Initiative and the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. The Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI) and the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), in partnership with partners at the City of Boston’s Department of Neighborhood Development, have studied evictions in the City of Boston in 2015-16, and what we have found can inform local, state, and federal response to the current crisis.1
The COVID-19 Layoff Housing Gap (October 2020 Update)
Published October 2020
This research brief continued MAPC’s efforts to track COVID-19 unemployment and associated housing insecurity in Massachusetts. Since March 2020, MAPC had been tracking periodic reports on those who applied for, or received, unemployment assistance. Combining this data from state agencies and the U.S. Census Bureau, we estimated the number of households affected by unemployment, whether they would able to cover both rent and other basic expenses with their remaining income, and if not, what the monthly gap would be.
Research: Crowded In and Priced Out—Why It’s so Hard to Find a Family-Sized Unit in Greater Boston
Published January 2020
The evidence is clear that there are not enough affordable options for families with children: as detailed in the report, 46% of those households pay an excessive amount of their income for housing, and 9% are considered overcrowded. Troublingly, we also found that most family-sized units are not, in fact, housing families with children. Such families occupy just 39% of all the large units in the study area. Meanwhile, an equal share of large units is occupied by only one or two people.
MassBuilds
Frequently Updated Since 2017
MassBuilds is a data-driven application built to provide a single source to access real estate development data across Massachusetts. The development data encapsulates information about real estate construction phases in the future, present, and past tense, and allows urban planners to better understand how the region is actively developing.
Building for the Middle: Housing Greater Boston's Workforce
Published September 2016
This ULI Boston/New England report seeks to examine in greater detail the interaction between income and housing availability in the region, looking back to 1990 and forward to 2030. This report was created in conjunction with numerous partners. See the report for more information.
The Dimensions of Displacement Baseline Data for Managing Neighborhood Change in Somerville’s Green Line Corridor
Published February 2014
The Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) prepared this analysis in partnership with the City of Somerville, Somerville Community Corporation, Somerville Transportation Equity Partnership, Friends of the Community Path, and Massachusetts Smart Growth Alliance to illuminate the magnitude of displacement risk associated with the Green Line extension (GLX) in order to help focus action on the strategies with the best potential to mitigate that risk.
Land Use
Visit the Community Planning webpage to learn more about MAPC's Land Use work.
Regional Growth Projections
Last Updated in 2023
To help the region and its communities plan for a changing and uncertain future, MAPC has prepared updated projections of population change, household growth, and housing demand for Metro Boston and its municipalities. The projections confirm that the aging and retirement of the Baby Boomers and the housing shortage will have profound implications for the region, and that our economic future depends on attracting more young workers and making our region a more affordable place to live.
Rethinking the Retail Strip: Transforming Old Uses to Meet New Needs
Published January 2022
MAPC’s analysis shows that the Greater Boston region has thousands of acres – more than 13.7 square miles, according to our research – of strip malls and similar commercial properties. Many of these are underutilized, underperforming, or obsolete. If the top 10 percent of sites in each municipality were retrofitted to new mixed-use development – an average of fewer than four sites per community – it could create 125,000 housing units while adding or maintaining thousands of square feet of commercial or flex space, generating an estimated $481 million increase in net tax revenue for the host municipalities.
MAPC Zoning Atlas
Published January 2021
This Zoning Atlas is accumulation of years of effort by many staff and partners. What for many years lived in Excel spreadsheets, collected from disparate sources, we have moved to the web. It is the 101 Greater Boston municipalities for which we have collected and calculated zoning comparable zoning information.
MAPC Local Priorities Final Memo
Published May 2019
This research examined 47 master plans, or equivalent plans, from municipalities throughout the region and cataloged the priorities those plans set forth. The plans reviewed were from a well distributed variety of geographies and community types.
Public Health
Visit the Public Health webpage to learn more about MAPC's Public Health work.
Massachusetts Food Systems Map
Published: February 2022
Developed with funding from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health Mass in Motion Program (MiM), this map tool compiles frequently-requested datasets for food and public health planning efforts in Massachusetts. Its interactive features allow users to select data of interest across customized geographies to facilitate community-level, spatial understandings of food access conditions across Massachusetts.
Access the Tool
Read the Planning 101 blog post New Tool: Massachusetts Food Systems Map
Transportation
Visit the Transportation webpage to learn more about MAPC's Transportation work.
Publications Found Under Multiple Areas:
The Impacts of Land Use and Pricing in Reducing Vehicle Miles Traveled and Transport Emissions in Massachusetts (Environment and Transportation)
Perfect Fit Parking: Improving the Way Developers and Planners Assess Parking Demand
Phase 4 Update: July 2023
MAPC has expanded our Perfect Fit Parking research to include municipalities west of Boston, adding another contribution to an increasingly robust dataset that highlights how most communities have built more residential off-street parking than is needed or utilized. By achieving the perfect fit, we can: Reduce housing costs; encourage more sustainable transportation; alleviate congestion and reduce greenhouse gas emissions; and free up land area for more housing units, open space, and other community-focused uses.
First Miles: Examining 18 Months of Dockless Bikeshare in Metro Boston
Published November 2021
By providing new insight on micro-mobility and key bike connections, this report also demonstrates the importance of guaranteeing that public agencies have access to data from new mobility and sharing economy systems. Had Lime followed the example of ride-hailing or short-term rental companies, very little, if any, of the information in this report would be available for analysis.
Research: Hidden and in Plain Sight—Impacts of E-Commerce in Massachusetts
Published February 2021
This report concentrates primarily on the transportation and land use effects of increasing online shopping, highlighting key trends both nationally and in Massachusetts. We suggest directions for further research, and we put forward potential policies that could help communities sustainably manage the growth in warehousing and distribution centers and its associated delivery traffic.
Share-of-Choices: Further Evidence of the Ride-Hailing Effect in Metro Boston and Massachusetts
Published May 2018
On May 1, 2018 Massachusetts regulators released a first-ever statewide picture of annual ride hailing activity, through a data set detailing the total number of trips by municipality and average trip length for the state. Mandated by recent state laws and regulations, this data set delivers novel insight into the magnitude of which new on-demand mobility services such as Uber and Lyft are transforming the transportation system in Massachusetts.
Regional Indicators
MetroCommon x 2050 Indicators
Last Updated 2022
Indicators broken out by the different focus areas of MetroCommon 2050.
State of Equity: Indicators Overview
Last Updated 2017
In 2011 MAPC released The State of Equity in Metro Boston, an inventory of cross- sectoral indicators that measured inequity in the region. Those indicators informed the creation of MAPC’s State of Equity Policy Agenda in 2014. MAPC’s 2017 update to the State of Equity indicators report was published in February 2017.
MAPC Regional Indicators
Published 2016
Metro Boston Regional Indicators was a project that measured the region’s progress in achieving the goals of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council’s previous (prior to MetroCommon 2050) long-range regional plan: MetroFuture: Making a Greater Boston Region.