Greater Boston has many opportunity-rich suburbs scattered across the region with strong schools, commuter rail access, and small but lively commercial centers. These places offer exactly the mix of opportunity and amenities that many families look for. Yet living in them can be entirely out of reach. High home prices are an obvious challenge, but another barrier is even more straightforward. Many of these suburbs have low availability of rental housing. So, unless you’re in the market to purchase a home, moving there can be almost impossible.

Weston offers but one example. It sits less than 15 miles west of downtown Boston, with commuter rail trips from either of its two stations taking only about half an hour to reach North Station. It has among the very highest performing public school systems in Massachusetts (which is among the best performing states nationwide). And it is one of the wealthiest towns in the region.

But it has a long history of imposing large-lot, single-family zoning—less than one percent of its land is zoned to allow property owners to build multifamily housing as-of-right. Median single-family sale prices now exceed $2.6 million. Less than one in 10 homes in Weston (8.9 percent) are offered as rentals. And a large share of the limited rental housing that does exist in Weston is set aside for seniors, further limiting access. Of the town’s 124 income-restricted rental units, all but seven are age-restricted, according to Housing Navigator Massachusetts.

The town’s early zoning history shows how intentional this was. In 1912, local officials banned triple-deckers to avoid attracting what they described as “a class of tenants who add nothing to the revenues of the town, but who, on the contrary, become the cause of increased expense in all departments.” (For more rich detail on this history, see Alexander von Hoffman’s 2010 working paper To Preserve and Protect: Land Use Regulations in Weston, Massachusetts.)

A century later, the basic structure remains. Weston still lacks a sewer system that would support denser development, and it has just over 4,000 total homes. Somerville, with a similar land area, has more than 38,000.

Both of Weston’s census tracts qualify as “rental deserts,” meaning that fewer than 20 percent of homes are renter-occupied or available for rent. This definition of rental deserts was developed by researchers at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies in 2024 to describe places where rental options are extremely limited. Homes in these areas tend to be owner-occupied, and when single-family homes do enter the rental market, they command far higher prices than other types of rentals. Because access to ownership varies sharply by income and race, this structure hoards opportunity for already higher-income families and exacerbates segregation by race and class.

The scarcity of rentals in suburbs like Weston reflects the overall restrictiveness of the region’s housing production regulations and the resulting housing shortage. Multifamily housing is more likely to be renter-occupied than single-family dwellings, so when communities prohibit multifamily development, they implicitly suppress production of rental housing. Even modest increases in rental options would ease pressure across the region. If more multifamily homes were built in current rental deserts, the tenure mix would more closely resemble that of other areas in the region and more rentals would be available in communities with good schools, short commute times, and strong economic opportunity.

This brief adapts JCHS’s approach to analyze patterns of rental deserts in Greater Boston, through five key findings. Comparing these tracts to mixed-tenure neighborhoods shows clear differences. Rental deserts tend to have higher-income residents and far fewer residents who are Black, Hispanic, or AAPI. These disparities appear in the national work and in our region specifically, where differences in tenure across neighborhoods are even more pronounced than in many other metro areas. 

Rental deserts are spread across much of Greater Boston, especially in Developing and Maturing Suburbs.

Rental deserts are common in Greater Boston, and they’re sprinkled across the region. After excluding very small census tracts with fewer than 200 housing units, we estimate that in 2023, out of a little over 1,000 tracts regionwide, 272 counted as rental deserts. Almost all sit outside the inner core. Boston and most inner ring cities have a wide mix of housing types, while many suburbs offer few rentals.

It helps to view these patterns through the lens of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council’s Community Types, since the absence of rental housing carries different implications depending on local context. In remote or lightly developed places, limited rental stock is less surprising or disturbing. The concern grows, though, in communities where prices are high (reflecting high demand) and amenities are strong but where the housing stock remains almost entirely single-family. 

When we group municipalities by Community Type, clear differences emerge. Developing and Maturing Suburbs both have far lower rental shares than other parts of the region, but rental deserts are more troubling in Maturing Suburbs, which include places like Weston. Under MAPC’s typology, Maturing Suburbs are built-out communities with established infrastructure, older housing stock, walkable neighborhoods, transit access, and close proximity to jobs and institutions. Developing Suburbs, by contrast, sit farther from the urban core, and have begun growing more recently.

Because they are more likely to have sewer systems, sidewalks, and transit connections, Maturing Suburbs should be well positioned to support a broader mix of housing types. Yet most zone very little land for multifamily housing. Developing Suburbs face a different set of constraints. Many lack sewer systems and grew in a car-oriented pattern that makes denser development more challenging. Even so, the main obstacles are often policy choices rather than land shortages, since many sites in these communities could support multifamily redevelopment. See below for a full list of the share of units that are rentals in each of Greater Boston’s 147 municipalities.

Rental deserts are predominantly single-family.

The composition of housing types in each neighborhood is correlated with tenure and thus key to determining whether people can rent there at all. Overall, single-family homes are far more likely to be owner occupied, while denser housing types are far more likely to be rental. Nationally, about 86 percent of multifamily units were renter occupied in the mid-2010s, compared to only 17 percent of single-family homes, according to the Urban Institute. The same basic pattern holds in Greater Boston, but the differences are even sharper here. When we compare Greater Boston with the nation, multifamily housing is even more tightly linked to the availability of rental options.

In Greater Boston’s rental deserts (tracts where fewer than 20 percent of homes are rentals), 86 percent of the housing stock is single-family homes, and only 6 percent of units come from buildings with 10 or more units. The statistics are similar for rental deserts nationwide. Mixed-tenure neighborhoods look very different, however: Single-family homes make up 43 percent of the stock, with the rest spread across 2–4-unit buildings (28 percent), mid-size multifamily, and larger apartment buildings. High-rental neighborhoods are dominated by larger multifamily buildings; just 8 percent of their stock is single-family, and more than half of all homes are in buildings with 20 or more units. On average, mixed-tenure neighborhoods in Greater Boston are even more heavily multifamily than their counterparts elsewhere in the country. 

Rental deserts are less economically diverse.

The kinds of homes available in a neighborhood also shape who can realistically live there. In places where only single-family construction is allowed as of right, the price of entry is usually too high for many low- and moderate-income households. Renting is often the more feasible option for families who cannot afford a down payment or do not qualify for a mortgage, and it is the only option for households that rely on rental vouchers. When rental homes are scarce, these families are effectively shut out.

The income patterns in this chart underscore this point. In rental deserts, 58 percent of households earn more than $125,000 a year. Only 18 percent fall below $60,000. Mixed-tenure neighborhoods look far more balanced: 43 percent of households are above $125,000, 28 percent are in the middle-income range, and 29 percent are below $60,000. High-rental neighborhoods show the reverse pattern of rental deserts; nearly half of households there (49 percent) earn under $60,000, and only 26 percent earn more than $125,000.

These differences highlight how the structure of a community’s housing stock channels opportunity. When a neighborhood offers mainly single-family homes and very few rentals, it ends up serving a much higher-income population than other parts of the region.

Rental deserts are less racially diverse.

Following the income patterns above, the racial makeup of rental deserts also differs sharply from other neighborhoods. Rental deserts are far less racially diverse than both mixed-tenure and high-rental areas, suggesting that limits on rental housing influence who can gain access to these communities.

In rental deserts, 83 percent of households are White, markedly higher than the regional average of 67 percent. That share drops to 62 percent in mixed-tenure neighborhoods and just 44 percent in high-rental areas. Black households make up only 2 percent of residents in rental deserts, compared with 10 percent in mixed-tenure neighborhoods and 14 percent in high-rental areas. The patterns for AAPI and Hispanic households follow the same direction: AAPI households represent 7 percent of residents in rental deserts, 10 percent in mixed-tenure neighborhoods, and 15 percent in high-rental areas. Hispanic households are 5 percent of rental-desert residents, 15 percent of mixed-tenure residents, and 28 percent of residents in high-rental neighborhoods.

These differences reflect more than personal choice or market dynamics. In much of suburban Greater Boston, zoning regulations have long restricted where multifamily housing can be built. By limiting the places where rental homes can exist at all, these rules reinforce racial and economic divides across the region’s communities.

Homeownership deserts are also a challenge for Greater Boston.

While this brief has focused on places with very few rentals, there is also an issue that exists at the other extreme. Some neighborhoods are overwhelmingly rental, with more than 80 percent of homes occupied by renters. MassINC’s 2025 Gateway Cities Housing Monitor, building on JCHS’s framework, refers to these areas as “ownership deserts.” Here the concern is different. First, neighborhoods with few ownership opportunities risk having less housing stability as a community.  Housing costs are more volatile for renters than for homeowners, since rent costs generally change more quickly than monthly housing costs for homeowners, which tend to be fixed in long-term mortgages. Second, homeowners benefit more directly from neighborhood improvements than do renters. Homeowners build equity when neighborhoods improve, since they own a place-based asset (i.e., a home) that appreciates when a neighborhood improves. Given these dynamics, very low prevalence of ownership in some communities can limit long-term economic mobility and make community investment harder to sustain.
The barriers to improving tenure mix differ sharply between rental deserts and ownership deserts. In rental deserts, the core problem is overregulation of supply. In many cases, easing supply-side rules, such as allowing more density or simplifying zoning and permitting, is enough to bring additional rental housing to market. Where density caps are lifted and the development process is predictable, private developers have clear incentives to build, which expands rental options without additional intervention. Early housing activity tied to MBTA Communities zoning offers some initial evidence of this dynamic.

In ownership deserts, improving tenure mix is more complicated and typically requires active market intervention or changes to existing programs. Two conditions need to be met. Developers must have incentives to produce homes intended for owner occupancy, and current residents must be able to access those ownership opportunities in ways that limit displacement in lower-income communities. The first challenge may call for targeted incentives to support owner-occupied development, while the second often requires demand-side tools such as affordable mortgage products or down payment assistance. Of the 1,004 census tracts we examined in Greater Boston, 104 meet our definition of ownership deserts.

A healthy neighborhood offers a diverse range of housing opportunities. It should have enough rental homes for households that need flexibility or cannot buy, and enough ownership opportunities for families seeking stability and a longer-term stake in the community (although, to be clear, many renters are deeply invested in their neighborhoods and remain rooted there for years). Looking at tenure patterns across Greater Boston shows how uneven that balance is. Many high-opportunity suburbs have few rental opportunities, while some urban neighborhoods offer virtually no ownership path. Understanding these contrasts helps clarify where regulatory reforms, market interventions, or both are needed so that all neighborhoods in Greater Boston can become more thriving and inclusive.