Housing Shortage in Western Mass? Permits Fell 86% Since the 1987 Peak

In 1987, the towns of western Massachusetts permitted 5,789 new housing units. In 2025 they permitted 822. That is a fall of 86% from the peak, and it is not a dip: the region has not permitted even half its 1987 figure in any year since the early 1990s.

Nearly every housing argument here, prices, rents, the towns where nothing comes up for sale, runs through that gap. A region that once added a mid-sized town's worth of homes every year now adds a village's worth, and it has done so for long enough that the shortage is no longer an event but a condition.

The Shape, Read Left to Right

The 1980s boom is the mountain on the left: an average of 3,338 units a year across that decade, peaking in 1987, when nearly a third of the permitted units were in multifamily buildings, the condominium wave. The early-1990s collapse follows, the same downturn that cut Hampden County home values 17%, and the record never truly recovers from it. A modest 2000s plateau ends at 2008, and the years since sit on the floor: 791 units a year through the 2010s, 904 in the 2020s so far, with the quietest single year of the whole record, 634 units, in 2011.

What changed is argued about everywhere and settled nowhere: land that is expensive to permit and serve, construction costs that outran what finished houses sell for in a third of these towns, zoning, and a building trade that shrank with its market and never rebuilt. The record cannot pick among those causes. It can say the effect has held for over thirty years.

What This Does Not Mean

A permit is not a house: some permitted units are never built, and the series counts permission, not completion. The fall is also not evenly spread; which towns are actually building now shows a handful of valley towns carrying most of what little there is, and explains a reporting artifact in the headline number that makes some recent years look even lower than they were.

Nor does the peak year describe a golden age to restore: 1987's boom ended in the collapse that followed it, and much of its multifamily third was condominiums whose market vanished for a decade. What the record supports is the narrower sentence: at every point in the last three decades, this region has added housing at a fraction of the pace it once managed, and the consequences are on every other page of this site.