Condos and Multi-Family Homes in Western Mass: Which Towns Have Them

A specific and very common disappointment: you decide you want something smaller than a house with a garden, you start looking in Western Massachusetts, and you discover there is essentially nothing to look at. That is not bad luck or bad timing. In most of these towns the building type you want was never built.

Across the region, 59.5% of all housing is a free-standing single-family house. In the median town it is 84.7%. And in 14 towns it is ninety-five percent or more, which in practice means the whole town.

The Region Splits Hard, And Not Where You Expect

Holyoke has the most mixed housing stock in the region: only 33.4% detached, with 11,359 units in something else. At the other end, Montgomery is 99.4% detached.

The towns with genuine variety are the old industrial centres, and the reason is entirely historical. Two-deckers and three-deckers were built to house mill workers within walking distance of the mill, densely and quickly, between roughly 1880 and 1920. Region-wide there are still 33,131 units in two-family buildings and 51,233 in buildings of five or more.

Almost none of it has been added to since. The hill towns never had mills, so they never had the building type, and what actually gets built here now is overwhelmingly detached houses. So the stock you can buy today is very close to the stock that existed in 1930, redistributed.

What This Table Cannot Tell You About Condominiums

Worth being exact, because it is the thing people come here looking for. A condominium is a form of ownership, not a form of building, and this census table counts buildings.

A condo in a converted two-family appears in the two-family column. A detached condo on a shared private road appears as detached. A rented flat and an owned flat in the same building are identical here. So this page will not give you a condominium count, because the source does not contain one, and any site that gives you a precise one off this table has invented it.

What the table does tell you, and what actually governs your search, is where the building stock that gets converted to condominiums exists at all. Conversions happen where there are multi-unit buildings and where there is enough transaction volume to make it worthwhile. Both conditions point at the same short list of towns.

Why This Matters More Than It Sounds

Three consequences follow from a housing stock that is ninety percent detached houses, and all three shape the market rather than just the search.

1. There is no downsizing option in most towns. Older owners who want to stay in their community but not in a four-bedroom house on two acres frequently cannot, because the smaller thing does not exist. So they stay, and the family house does not come to market. That is a real contributor to how little is for sale in the hill towns.
2. Renting is similarly constrained. Where there are no multi-unit buildings there is almost no rental market, which is why the renter counts in the cost-burden figures are so tiny in much of the region that the percentages beside them barely mean anything.
3. The two-family is the region's genuine opportunity. 33,131 units of it, concentrated in cities where prices are low because there is more housing than demand. Living in one half and letting the other is the most accessible route into ownership this region offers, and it is the reason those buildings exist in the first place.

Every Town

Sortable and filterable. Sort by the detached column ascending to find the towns where anything other than a house exists in useful numbers.

How To Search This Region If You Do Not Want A House

Start from the table rather than from a map. The towns at the low end of the detached column are your search area and there are not many of them. Widening the radius does not help in the way it normally would, because the next town out is usually more detached rather than less.

Then be open about the trade-off. The towns with the housing variety are the valley cities, and they are also where a car-free life is genuinely practical and where a given budget buys the most. The towns with the scenery have detached houses and nothing else. That is the actual choice this region presents, and it is clearer once you stop expecting both.